TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 160 (September 2023)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: September 2023

SCIENCE FICTION

Money in the Bank
John Kessel and Bruce Sterling

Eve’s Prayer
Victor Forna

The Hole in the Garden
Gene Doucette

Death by Water
Maria Haskins

FANTASY

Instructions for the Broken Hearted
Jordan Kurella

Simmered in Their Wealth Like the Richest of Sauces
Jo Miles

Remains
N.R. Lambert

His Thing
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu

EXCERPTS

Womb City
Tlotlo Tsamaase

NONFICTION

Book Review: Forged by Blood by Ehigbor Okosun
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Unspeakable Horror 3 edited by Vince A. Liaguno
Arley Sorg

Book Review: Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia by Jason Pargin
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

John Kessel and Bruce Sterling

Jo Miles

Gene Doucette

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu

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 Warmtail / Adobe Stock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: September 2023

John Joseph Adams | 223 words

Welcome to issue 160 of Lightspeed Magazine!

If you’re ready for a little fun, don’t miss “Money in the Bank,” an adventure-packed story of aliens and cryptobros from SF giants John Kessel and Bruce Sterling. In “The Hole in the Garden,” Gene Doucette has written a heart-tugging piece that anyone parenting in the era of climate change will appreciate. We’re rounding out the SF side of the literary equation with two flash pieces: “Eve’s Prayer” by Victor Forna and “Death by Water” by Maria Haskins.

Jo Miles brings us a tale of dragons and knights in new fantasy story “Simmered in Their Wealth Like the Richest of Sauces.” Yvette Lisa Ndlovu writes about magic and a very difficult marriage in “His Thing.” If you want to cook up a cure for your broken heart, Jordan Kurella has penned just the recipe—or maybe it’s a flash story!—in his piece “Instructions for the Broken Hearted.” We wrap up our fantasy flash with “Remains” by N.R. Lambert.

Of course our nonfiction team has put together spotlight interviews with our writers and a trio of terrific book reviews. If you’re an ebook subscriber, you’ll enjoy an excerpt from Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase.

Thanks for joining us on another journey through fantasy and science fiction!

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.

Money in the Bank

John Kessel and Bruce Sterling | 9841 words

“I lined up a new gig for you,” said the Glovemaster. “All you have to do is protect one special guy.”

I sat in my trailer with my Bluetooth headphones on and my laptop perched on an Amazon box. I wore a boonie hat with a militia logo, Oakley mirrorshades, a shoulder-holster, and a miracle-fabric tactical T-shirt. I was every inch Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Osborne of the Delta Force.

“I won’t do any bodyguard work out of town,” I told the screen. “If I abandon my wife, she’ll file for divorce.”

“Your wife is your excuse for everything,” said the Glovemaster. On my Zoom screen, he presented as the evil animated glove creature from the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine. IRL, the Glovemaster was a high-school hacker kid from Jersey born forty years after the Beatles broke up.

I knew who he was because he still lived with his parents, who didn’t know a damn thing about computer security. But the kid understood blockchain technology and he knew how to scam.

And I needed his money. Not dollars—never, ever, crappy government fiat money controlled by the banksters. I needed hard, proven, decentralized Internet money. This was my guarantee of financial freedom, so that someday I could keep all my promises to Jacqui.

“Never let your woman tie you down, bro,” growled the Glovemaster. “You get your cold-wallet storage. Get your bugout bag. Get your handguns. Then you launch into action.”

He was telling me this from his parents’ basement in Trenton. But the dude had made me rich once. It wasn’t his fault that I’d misplaced my cartoon ape.

For Jacqui’s sake I’d convinced the crypto world that I was a heavily-armed J6 militia veteran. “Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Osborne” was a two-fisted Afghan vet with five tours under his belt, an enforcer and kneecapper, the last man in the world you would ever want to cross.

It had taken me three years of boning up on Second Amendment gun show talk and mall-ninja cyberwar jargon to build my tough-guy rep in crypto-land. But I was motivated. Because when a soldier finally comes home from overseas and sees the girl next door again—well, you may not understand this, but I just had to have some of that. I just had to—because that was who I really was.

And Jacqui was sweet about it. A decent church wedding, a house, and a baby, that was all she asked from me. I made my vows to her in the sight of God and man. Those were my core values.

The rest—that was just my necessary hustle in a troubled and treacherous world. I understood crypto. I knew plenty about air-gapping, public keys, block rewards, Know-Your-Customer rules, and all the good ways to ignore them. But still no white picket fence for my Jacqui. Not for any price an honest man could pay.

“Let’s talk about your new client,” said the big blue cartoon glove. “He’s a Bitcoin one-percenter. He could buy a Trump Tower with his leftover Ethereum. If crypto is here to change the world, then the Mealybug is the change.”

“So, the Mealybug is your favorite whale now, eh?”

“Yes, he is. I’m on the Mealybug’s secret Discord. You know who turned me on to that? Pavel Marco himself!”

The Glovemaster always hacker-bragged about his connections—but he could make it rain, too. “All right,” I said, “your esteemed financial backer there, your oligarch with the yacht—what’s his problem?”

“He’s been doxxed.”

“That’s too bad.”

Better him than me, though. The real Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Osborne had been killed by a car-bomb in Iraq back in 2013. Not my name, not my rank, not my serial number.

“His enemies found out who the Mealybug is, and where he is, and where he came from, and why he got that name. So he’s got trolls and stalkers all over him now. He’s on the run, he needs professional help. Lucky for him, I know a real operator—you.”

I shrugged, and adjusted my holster. “Nothing new about a shakedown racket.”

“Every whale makes enemies,” said the glove. “Those no-coiners, they all hate success.”

“So, what kind of enemies does a Mealybug have? Russian spies, Jewish bankers? The Illuminati?”

“Could be all three.”

“Is he American? Maybe betrayed by some fed informant, feminazis, deep-staters, cultural Marxists?” Ex-Delta Force Wayne Osborne always had a ready list of threat-actors.

“That’s for you to find out, Colonel. You’re the ideal man for this job. How about a three-day weekend in Las Vegas?”

“Then it’s the Mob,” I concluded. “The Cosa Nostra. Your Mealybug’s a high-roller.”

“I’m not saying what he is or what he isn’t. I’m saying he’s my favorite whale. Do you live anywhere near the U.S. Mountain timezone?”

“I’m not saying that I do or I don’t. What does this job pay me?”

“A true whale doesn’t have to pay. I can tell you the exact date and time of his next big market move in Ethereum. When you surf in the wake of a big whale—market up, market down, makes no difference. You’ll make out like a bandit either way, and best of all, there’s no paper trail.”

This hot tip was supposed to impress me, but I’d been burned on Ethereum market moves so many times that I couldn’t buy the dip—I had no dip left.

The Glovemaster sketched out the situation for me. In Vegas, the Mealybug was cowering in some penthouse. He was so scared that he never moved in the daylight. Only active after dark, terrified of paparazzi, stalkers, security cameras, bad guys who might curb-stomp him, put his feet in cement, dump him into what was left of Lake Meade.

This yarn sounded like paranoid Howard Hughes bullshit, and it suddenly struck me that I didn’t believe in the Mealybug. Sure, I believed in whales. I totally believed in Bitcoin. But when it came to a billionaire so scared he would throw Bitcoin at strangers, I just wasn’t buying the pitch.

Still, if I didn’t believe in the Mealybug, I believed even less in his so-called “enemies.”

“Show me the color of his money.”

• • • •

Jacqui and me, and the house . . . our story was epic. Epic failure.

We’d flown so high together, once. At market peak, I was ready to sign the dotted line for a 4500-square-foot house in a gated development. But I lost the down payment in a big Dogecoin dip. I stayed out of Dogecoin after that, no matter what Elon Musk said. No Tesla for me, either. Now Jacqui lived with me in a trailer park where I had to chain the hood on my pickup so the neighbors wouldn’t steal my catalytic converter.

Also, the pickup was iffy about running. I used a bike.

The Mealybug’s first payoff arrived in an Amazon Prime package at my favorite anonymous mail drop. The box was full of mush, half wax and half golden flakes, like cornflakes of precious metal gnawed off an asteroid. The coinage a hive of ants might use if ants were astronauts.

I cycled over to Duke’s Pawnshop, Duke being the guy in possession of some awesome techie gear I’d bought when I was prosperous. I showed him a spoonful of the goo from the package. Duke used his x-ray fluorescence machine on it. It rated out at 22 Karat. I redeemed my favorite Internet-of-Things 5G router and took it back to the trailer.

Jacqui caught me there with the rest of the loot, because there are no secrets in a trailer. She was wearing cut offs and a tank top and carrying a bag of canned goods.

She saw my 5G router. “I thought you sold that. How did you get it back?”

Then she saw the Prime package. “You’re ordering from Amazon again! Did you get me something?”

I showed her the golden mush. She wrinkled her nose. “What in the sacred name of Jesus?”

“This is gold, honey,” I told her. “I figure four ounces, which at today’s spot price would be about two Ether.”

“You said Bitcoin was much sounder than Ether.”

“It is. This is just a retainer. I’ve got to go to Vegas right away. To consult with a big-time coin guy.”

That brought a furrow to her brow. “You’re going to cheat on me. You’re going to Vegas so you can cheat on me.”

“Baby, why do you say that? I want you to have everything you want, every single thing I promised! When you’re happy, I’m happy.”

“We’re totally in debt! We live in a tin box! What if we get sick? We have no health insurance.”

“Baby, that’s true, we’re hard up now, but what if we hit it rich again? This is real gold! We struck gold, okay? It’s not stupid government fiat that’s owned by our deep-state oppressors. Even in the Bible, gold is wealth, and I can get us more, too.”

“Sure. You’re gonna find gold in Las Vegas.”

Her scorn stung me. “Jacqui, precious, come with me! Why not? Let’s go together. To Vegas! There are nice hotels, the food’s great. It’s a number one American holiday destination.”

She was still so darkly suspicious—a terrible thing to see, because, before I’d swept Jacqui off her feet, she’d never looked like that. She wasn’t even thirty and had worry lines in her face.

“I guess I’ll have to come. To keep you out of girl-trouble.”

“It’s Vegas! It’s nice!” I pulled her onto my lap. “Also, I can get you some cocaine.”

• • • •

While Jacqui and I were on the plane to Vegas—wearing some Democrat plague masks, a big drag—I skimmed the basics about mealybugs on Google.

It turned out that my client was named after a soft-bodied scale insect. A slow-moving arthropod, with weak legs, mostly covered with a white, waxy, cotton-like exudation.

Mealybugs cling to the softest, wettest parts of plants, wedging themselves in leaf folds, stem crotches, or other tight locations. They suck juice out of the plant veins and distill it into a honeydew. In exchange for the golden dew, certain ants choose to protect the mealybug.

The Mealybug was so rich he could afford to hire the likes of Pavel Marco, the toughest blackhat mercenary out of Mogadishu. But it seemed that old-school Pavel couldn’t keep up with the latest developments in cyberwar. The Mealybug was nervous about his new horde of online enemies. So the Glovemaster had recommended me.

I pinged a few satoshi into the Mealybug’s Bitcoin account, so he’d know that I was a player, and that I was around and alert. When we reached the Vegas hotel, I invented more noise to demonstrate my protective services.

Government-approved “private detectives” and “private security services”—they have their exams and licenses, and all that crap. That’s gatekeeping meant to distract the sheeple from the power of peer-to-peer, decentralized, distributed knowledge. I didn’t need a stinkin’ badge. Crypto is a private banking system, and I was a private bank guard—that was easy.

Also—and this was the best part—I didn’t have to really protect the Mealybug. The odds were ninety-nine out of a hundred that his enemies were all imaginary. My client was some gold-bug wedged into the top-floor of a Vegas casino, chewing on his own froth. How could anybody hurt him way up there? Vegas casinos are super-secure buildings. They’re run by American mobsters who have seen every kind of crook on Planet Earth.

I cooked up some fake TikTok video snippets of a bodyguard on patrol—mean streets of Vegas, bulletproof vest, Heckler & Koch MP5. Open-source video clips. “Fake news” to make me look good. In this case, lots of Vegas thriller stuff, like from Oceans 11. I’d watched about a million thriller flicks while I was bored to death on duty as a telecommunications sergeant at an Army base in Kuwait.

I leaked those videos in Twitter DMs. Not to boast about my hacker chops here, but whenever “Colonel Osborne” looked on the prowl, hard and heavy-duty, people were plenty scared of him. To stay on my good side, the bros passed me lots of useful hints about the coin biz. Market positions running up and collapsing. Ground-floor recommendations about the next big thing in non-fungible tokens.

I placed a few bets on the “Bathtub Babes” NFT series. Then my own bathtub babe came out of our steamy bathroom wrapped in hotel-branded Turkish towels. She turned on the hotel TV, which had an erotic cable feed fit to make the Chinese, Russians, and Arabs eager to pick up Vegas showgirls.

“Oh my goodness! None of this for you, bad boy! Let’s go out and play.”

“Can’t go out, babe. I have work to do.”

“Well then, until you’re done, I’ll check out my Opensea wallet. Let’s see how my art is doing.” She put her Macbook on the hotel table, opposite from my PC.

Jacqui liked to buy art in the big NFT gallery markets, where she always lost money. She only bought art that was pretty, as opposed to the genuinely profitable NFT artworks, which were ugly squiggles, or crude 8-bit cartoons, or mutant monkeys.

Still, her can-do attitude was so endearing, especially after all we’d been through.

I worried. We were in Vegas, which felt good, but soon we’d be stuck back in our trailer, and then what? To Jacqui, I was never Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Osborne of the Delta Force. I was her husband, the big kid next door, Mike Luftschager.

Back to that poorhouse, back to scowls and scoldings. I couldn’t let Wayne Osborne lose her.

I left the screen, rummaged in my suitcase until I found the Altoids box, popped it open, and scooped a good helping of coke onto the suite’s glass-topped coffee table. I opened the deck of Aviators that came with the room and used the ace of spades to draw the coke into lines, rolled up a twenty, and held it out to her. “You first, sweetie.”

She stood there for a moment, then relented. “You do still love me, don’t you.”

“Let’s live a little, for once. We deserve it. Why can’t we be happy, have fun? Let’s go have fun.”

She snorted a line. Her eyes brightened. “Now you.”

There was an edge to her voice, and I didn’t need to push that. I did a line.

Suddenly I felt a change of attitude. Sure, the odds were steep, but hadn’t I worked hard for success? If I got a lucky break, why fret about that, and fear the worst like some loser? Were rich crypto speculators cowards?

Just the Mealybug, it seemed.

Jacqui went downstairs with me and we hit the slots. We didn’t lose all that much, and thanks to the coke we forgot to eat. While she lay on the hotel bed, drowsily flipping through celebrity Instagrams, I managed my website for Colonel Osborne—“Black Diamond Security.” I’d modeled my site on the website for Pavel Marco, spooky and enigmatic, because tough minded men-of-action with international connections played it close to the vest. Everything token-gated.

Jacqui had passed out, phone in hand, but Vegas was still alive and rollicking, because, night-time in Vegas. Due to the coke, I felt a restless urge to “case the joint” over at the Mealybug’s tower hotel. I put on a cheap straw hat and a plague mask, because Vegas has a shitload of smart security cams.

I gazed up at the glowing purple walls of the almighty Imperial Palace, where the Mealybug had a suite paid for by “Hemiptera Hemimetabolous,” some Greek millionaire. Down on the street were clusters of Midwest tourist hicks looking much dumber and drunker than me.

I decided to try the lobby.

Crossing the street, I was almost run down by a Volkswagen Beetle. I hopped from the dusty gutter as it sped past my bootheels.

Silently. No Volkswagen engine noise.

Then another Beetle, red, one of those humpy old-fashioned shapes favored by Adolf Hitler, sliding along blind and silent, only this one was circling the Imperial Palace in the opposite direction.

Thirty seconds later, two more—big red bugs meeting quiet as spiders at a Vegas traffic light, then turning opposite directions.

Another beetle waited under the hotel portico, discreet, lurking. Nothing human got in or out of it. The hotel valets, who should have been all over it, ignored it.

I sidled over, bent down, and cupped my hands against the dark window. No driver in there—not even a steering wheel.

“May I help you, sir?” said a valet, and if I was a big bruiser, he was bigger.

“One of these robot cars almost hit me.”

“Self-driving units, sir, over from the Tesla Factory in Reno. Experimental models. Sometimes eight, sometimes ten. Maybe more. I’d watch my step, sir.”

I made myself scarce, then pulled my Android burner phone. No location tracking. I called the Imperial Palace operator, got a polite and too-talkative chatbot. The talking bot had never heard of any Imperial guest called Hemimetabolous—it just blandly denied reality.

I sent the Glovemaster an URGENT!!! text message. While I waited I cased the hotel’s garbage bins—an old hacker trick, especially good for buildings where they beat you up if you try to sneak in. Under the long rubber lid, I found lots of throwaway casino-kitchen garbage, some thick waxy froth, and some long empty husks.

The Glovemaster called me up at the number I had just sent.

“Colonel, I said I would get you a job in Vegas. I didn’t say you could drag me into some mafia scene. The Mealybug’s hotel has to be mobbed up. Why do you want to get past their security?”

“Glovemaster, do you want your whale alive, or do you want him rendered for blubber? I’m on patrol outside his hotel right now. There are freakin’ car-bombs rolling around down here. Iraq-style Improvised Explosive Devices. There’s enough firepower down here to blow your Mealybug to smithereens and burn every living thing in this building.”

“You’re on the level?”

“Sure as my name is Wayne Osborne.”

“I don’t wanna do this,” mourned Glovemaster, “but I guess I’d better.”

At three-fifteen AM a black chopper lofted from the top of the Imperial Palace. The high-rollers appreciate a helipad. Arab Princes. Deep State guys. Members of the Trump clan. I’d done my good deed for the day. Maybe the best deed of my career, if the rich whale was feeling generous.

Back to our hotel.

People go to Vegas to get divorced, but Jacqui was out of her divorcing mood. My nerves were shot from pulling a freak-out late-nighter, but while I stayed in bed, she rose bright and chipper and went out to “do Vegas.”

When she returned I was showered and having a room-service breakfast—darn good breakfast too, a stack of Belgian waffles, two scrambled eggs, and a generous rasher of applewood-smoked bacon, all of that chow for under twenty bucks US fiat.

“I love Vegas, Mike,” she said, dropping laden shopping bags.

“Remember, sweetie—call me Wayne when I’m working.”

“Doesn’t look like you’re working.”

I decided it was better if I didn’t respond to that.

“Maybe we could start over right here,” Jacqui said, “and never go back to that cheesebox in Boulder.”

“A lot of people start over in Vegas. It’s an adventure.”

She flopped down on the bed and leaned her head on her hand. “People are so friendly here. I met such a nice old lady, she says I could be an exotic dancer. She used to be an exotic dancer, before she did casino security. Maybe I could be an exotic dancer, too, make a lot of money, help pay for things. She says I have the looks for it.”

Jacqui wasn’t the Vegas showgirl type, because she looked girl-next-door, but if she was talking about the fun she’d had, then I didn’t have to talk about what Wayne Osborne had been doing all night. Because I wasn’t gonna mention that, and that was gonna look suspicious.

“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” I said.

Jacqui laughed at that, the way she used to laugh. Then I felt so much better that I thought, maybe she’s right. Maybe Vegas life is the right life for us. I don’t have to be Wayne Osborne. I could get a quiet casino security job and spend all night watching a bank of video monitors, just like I’d spent years in uniform hunched over screens in Kuwait.

Then I thought, I’ll get fat and old that way, and my heart will break, and I’ll die.

• • • •

We flew back to the trailer park, Jacqui beefing every step of the way. “I know Vegas is an ungodly town,” she said. “I know it’s full of hookers and drugs and gambling. But they know they’re a sin town and they know why they’re sinning. That’s why they’re more honest in Vegas than all these other towns in America.”

Also, we had run out of cocaine.

I had to do a post-assignment debriefing with Glovemaster, who was even more fretful than Jacqui. “I thought the Mealybug was just nervous,” said the blue glove on the laptop screen. “I didn’t know that he had real exterminators. In Vegas, they’re fumigating the Imperial Hotel.”

“Yeah, I saw that on the news there. They say it’s bedbugs. Big local scandal.”

“How much trouble is he in, the Mealybug?”

“Plenty of trouble, but it’s cool. I rescued him. His enemies have no idea who I am.”

“They know who I am! They know I sprung the Mealybug from that trap in Vegas. They know that I know where the Mealybug has gone.”

“They doxxed your whale—are they doxxing you, too, Glovemaster? Is this video call secure?”

“How should I know? Find out who they are and get rid of them, Colonel! Get them off my back.”

“I might do that, if the money’s right. Where is the Mealybug?”

“He’s in Miami,” the Glovemaster muttered. “You should go there right away.”

“Okay,” I said, because I needed the money, but maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Maybe I should have talked the Glovemaster out of his loyalty to the Mealybug. A lot of coinbros will worship some cryptocoin whale, but that devotion never goes both ways. When the followers become useless, they can come to harm.

• • • •

After surviving fear and loathing in Las Vegas, I knew that Miami was likely to be worse—but then came some Amazon boxes. Bigger boxes, arriving at my dead drop.

This time, it looked like some human being had meddled with the golden flakes. They’d smelted them into coin-like slugs, some kind of manufacturing value-add.

Down at the pawnshop, Duke had a good look through his jeweler’s loupe. “I knew a Jewish guy once who showed me these. Souvenirs from a raid on Islamic terrorists. This is smuggler’s gold. Out of the ‘hawala’ scene, like from Sudan, Bombay, Dubai.”

“Can you melt it down for me, so it looks like normal gold?”

“Are you crazy? American gold bugs go nuts for this! This is gold that is off the grid. Shit-hits-the-fan gold. Total-world-armageddon gold.”

I’d never seen Duke so goldbuggy, so I swapped him four of the creepy nuggets and redeemed everything I’d ever pawned to him. I took the remainder in fiat cash. Some bills turned out to be counterfeit, but that wasn’t Duke’s fault, because fiat is bullshit.

There was no room in our trailer for all the cool stuff we’d bought during the brief Dogecoin peak. With all our brutal bad luck since then, I’d forgotten those weeks when we were almost millionaires.

I’d pawned my electronics mostly, like my Dogecoin mining rigs, but also all of Jacqui’s kitchen appliances. Now we could barely move—we had to sidle sideways through our high-stacked house goods—but she was happy enough to weep tears of joy.

“Gosh, Vegas was such a luck-charm for us! We should fly back there right away!”

“I have to go to Miami. Bitcoin doesn’t grow on trees, babe. They have to mine it.”

“Can I come, too? Green candles! Line goes up!”

She was so cute when she spoke coinbro.

• • • •

At Miami Airport all the taxi drivers tried to chisel us, but I was hip to their penny-ante hustle and I rented a Jeep Wrangler. I even paid for it with Bitcoin, first time I’d ever been able to do that, and it was an account that Glovemaster had stolen and lent to me, which made it even sweeter.

Once we were lodged in our classy Miami Beach hotel—a honeymoon hotel, because I was out of Jacqui’s doghouse and I wanted to stay that way—I flipped open the laptop. In poured a new heap of encrypted Protonmail from Glovemaster, who’d been getting steadily more agitated during the time it took us to get to Florida.

Tourists always look like fishbait in Miami, so I told Jacqui to doll up so she could pass for a good-looking local. I wouldn’t claim that Miami women have their own dress code, but they sure as hell don’t dress like normal girls.

Also, Floridians never mess around with masks or social distancing, so Jacqui could socialize all she wanted. Jacqui was outgoing, she was a charmer, she was good at weddings, church services, and Republican Party meetings.

As for me, back to the hard work. You know: “I wish I had a bass boat and a Z-28/but I guess that stuff’ll have to wait” which was from our song, me and Jacqui’s. My lifetime favorite, “Money in the Bank” from the 1993 album Solid Ground by the great John Anderson, a true American songwriter-poet. John Anderson never tells lies about life. Not to interrupt my story here, but that good ole boy is the real deal.

I hummed this anthem as I paged through Glovemaster’s freaked-out emails. Sure enough, my too-daring teen boy had stirred up a wasp’s nest. He had always loved to rob the hick fundies and the QAnon types—easy marks for a high-SAT high schooler—but the American capital of electronic crime is not Trenton, New Jersey.

It’s Boca Raton, Florida.

Not a lot of people know that Boca is a buzzing colony of multi-generational crime families, scamming people worldwide with fake emails and phone calls. Those American confidence racketeers, some of them date way back to the 1920s. There’s even an old black-and-white Marx Brothers movie Cocoanuts, where everybody is ripping off everybody else for fake real-estate—that would totally be them in Boca, except much, much less funny.

Glovemaster, gloved hand in hand with the high-rolling Mealybug, had got himself on the wrong side of these chicken-fried con men. Just blundered into the stinging midst of them, somehow, like a drunk kid party-crashing a Florida swamp full of mosquitos.

They were counter attacking him with multiple fraud schemes—posing as the FBI (a particular con-man favorite), as IRS agents eager to audit him, as Russian intelligence. Sometimes with death threats, sometimes as alluring girls in trouble pleading for his help . . . Glovemaster was getting a whirlwind of too-clever bullshit in his Twitter direct messages, in his Discord chats, all over.

They were stalking him and they were gonna skin him, too, but they wanted to skin the Mealybug much, much more. Because the Mealybug was fatter, slower, and tastier.

I paged through these fantastic threats—it amazed me that hundreds of wildly different spam ambush messages could be written by maybe just five dudes in Boca. More than boiler-room con-men, they were creative writers.

One particularly freaky message stopped me cold.

To Whom This Does Concern:

You abuse the crypto money, so you are reading this. This is your situation. You have created your new playing field. You have flattened everything. You started new means of money and power. You have fenced off the outside, while anything goes inside.

You’ve had your first weeds to grow there. Many, many weeds. Now you have some invader species. This is your warning and demand for action.

The plague has come from very afar. This invader looks small and modest. It hides in nooks and crannies, and it is too slippery. So far, there is only one, but it will soon never be the only one. We know this type to lay eggs everywhere with amazing speed. First, they weaken your world’s defenses, feeding on the weak. First, in small then in large vast numbers. Month after month and year after year you see your sad world blighted before your eyes. If you do not trust this message, you will never know the evil source of all your withering.

We represent an alliance of victims who have survived repeated infestations of these parasites. We repelled them because, unlike you, we did not make it easy to organize wealth and power in the way of your sick and devouring world is. The bleak future of your planet is a pole-to-pole infestation of these creatures, where your biomass becomes the raw material of their interstellar digital economy.

Keep reading faithful. These are our demands from you. First, give us all your social identities and passwords. Second, immediately send us the theme privates to all Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets you are using . . .

I’d never seen any online pitch this weird, and I’d seen plenty. Then I realized this must be written by some GPT-4 offshoot, except whatever they had primed this AI with, it wasn’t English.

I contacted Glovemaster directly.

He didn’t give a damn about Artificial Intelligences writing weird spam. “Are you in Miami with the Mealybug?”

“Yeah. I’m gonna arrange a personal meeting.”

“Look, Colonel, I got you this job because a guy with five tours in Afghanistan is never gonna back down. But every friend that the Mealybug had—we’re all scattering. The Mealybug had three-hundred-K followers on Twitter alone, but they’re going dark. They’re pretending they never had anything to do with him. Me too, Colonel. I’m outta here. I gotta book a flight. In another name. Thank God you sold me those fake passports.”

“Don’t overdo it with those,” I told him, because forged US passports from Pakistan might pass muster in Pakistan, but nowhere else—except maybe with teenagers in New Jersey.

“I can’t let them get me. I’m thinking Dubai.”

“Dubai makes sense. Good place to start over, I hear.”

“I just dunno who to trust right now,” said the Glovemaster, trusting me, “but the good thing is, we can still trust in cryptographic mathematics, right? We can rely on the internet and the blockchain and computational power. Blockchain works anywhere in the world.”

“Blockchain really exists. The source code is visible and transparent.”

“The whole world will be completely transformed by blockchain,” the Glovemaster pleaded.

“I’m totally with that program,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, the old world is already gone.”

“‘We’re All Gonna Make It.’ We just need to stay on the good side of a few special people. To respect their ideological commitment to self-sovereign identity.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Call me Mister Diamond Hands.”

“We’re going to the Moon,” he told me.

Then the Glovemaster folded his blue gloved fingers and I never heard from him again. Not a gesture. Not a whisper. Not a funeral for him, even.

• • • •

Jacqui came back with her shopping bags, a little tipsy, but in a good way. “Wow, Miami is so terrific! I wanna live here! You won’t believe the classy women I’ve met!”

“It was good fun, huh?” I’d been hitting a hip-flask of Venezuelan rum to deal with the bad vibes from the Glovemaster’s paranoia.

“They’re a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Just like grandma’s quilting bee—all the girls are nice, everybody’s an equal, everybody gets to chat as much they like. And, the way we all get rich together is to boost the floor price of Wicked WASP ProFile Pics! They’re NFT art, like, cool token cartoons of really mean White Anglo-Saxon chicks. Miami chicks think they’re hilarious. Especially when they really are WASP chicks in Miami. ‘Cause there are lots of them here.”

“I’m pretty sure that you’re a WASP yourself, Jacqui.”

“Wow, that makes it even more perfect! Do you think half an eth was too much for my new ProFile Pic?”

That stopped me. “I didn’t know you still had any ether.”

“I used the coin you gave me for our wedding.”

So I had left the wife alone for maybe five hours, and she plunged into a Florida sorority with an entrance fee of about two grand in fiat. Her wedding dowry was supposed to be our last-ditch bug-out money if the IRS ever came to shoot us.

I felt like grabbing her by her suntanned neck and tossing her off our eighth-floor Miami balcony with its beach view. But that was the Venezuelan rum doing my thinking for me. I should know better than have anything to do with Venezuela, that stinking socialist sump. I was in Miami, the capital of Bitcoin, chasing the payoff that would save us.

A husband protects his wife. He doesn’t blow a major business deal just because she’s acting like a woman. To keep my wits sharp, I did some of the coke that Jacqui broke out. Miami was crammed with Colombian marching-powder, so of course she’d copped some from a new girlfriend. Also, in Miami the coke was great.

I was rubbing my gums when my cell phone doinged with a text:

Hemimetabolous will meet with you. Be at the fountain at the foot of Sixteenth Street and Collins. A limo will be there in thirty minutes.

“What’s that?” Jacqui asked.

“I’ve got to work. It’s business.”

She blinked. “A couple of the WASP girls invited me to a Historic Homes of Miami Tour. I might go out with them.”

“Sure.”

Sixteenth Street was only four blocks from our hotel. I strolled down Collins in the early evening. As I walked, I calculated the angles on my client and sponsor, Mr. Mealybug Hemimetabolous. I’d been researching him online.

Everybody thinks they’re anonymous on the blockchain. They’re only as anonymous as “34xp4vRoCGJym3xR7yCVPFHo” is anonymous. Especially those early guys, the Crypto OGs, they were wild and careless. And Mr. Mealybug, he’d been an Ethereum founder, from that very first Initial Coin Offering.

He was a crypto world-beater, the Mealybug. His blockchain programs in Ethereum did not look like anybody else’s. Solidity, Dart, Delphi, Go, Java, Python, Ruby, Rust—he never used any Ethereum-supported languages. Instead, his programs looked like raw machine-language gibberish that were just somehow—connected, with Ethereum dapps like a sharp beak plunged into a vein.

With the coke to boost me, I lurked by the fountain on 16th, feeling a little paranoid but, mostly, sharp-witted and aggressive. I had it figured that the Mealybug was not a coinbro at all. Never a real fintech guy. Those guys build the blockchain systems and then buy and hold on. They don’t write back-doors that can puncture a blockchain and silently drain its resources.

It smelled like covert cyberwar. Especially the “Norks,” because the North Koreans have perpetrated sixty percent of all the heists in crypto history.

So then, what was his life story, the mysterious Mr. Hemimatabolous? Why is he scurrying from Vegas to Miami? Why hire Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Osborne of Black Diamond Security to protect him? Why not just go to his spymasters in North Korea, the ones who gave him the super-weird zero-day backdoor software?

Because he’s a double-crossing rip-off artist, that’s why. He’s not loyal to North Korea. He’s a cyberwar operator on the run. Also, he’s losing his friends right and left, because the North Koreans are vindictive bastards. When they send you death threats they’re not real great at English. They sound like Commies from Mars.

I was working this new theory about the Mealybug when the limo showed up, an enormous black Mercedes SUV. I heard the back door unlatch and I climbed inside. No one was driving. The car crossed over South Beach to the mainland and drove near Camp Biscayne. The tall buildings drifted away and the landscape got tropical.

So, why Vegas? Because Vegas was discreet and he was hiding there, but he got found out. Why Miami? Because Miami is a wide-open gateway to the Caribbean and Central America. His pursuers are at his heels. He’s searching the planet for fresh nooks and crannies.

The limo slowed and pulled up to the gate of a historically-protected property from the first Miami real-estate boom. A handsome compound with tall palms behind high pink stucco walls with broken glass on top. Brass plaques at the gate with the names of offshored shell companies.

I was afraid of that mansion—but also, I wanted to own it. Quiet billionaire property. Servants and attendants. You could send goons to attack the U.S. Senate from a place like that and nobody would dare to arrest you. “Personal self-sovereignty.” “Private Protection Service Strategies.”

I was hustling a double-crossing billionaire who was terrified of the North Koreans. But I’d already saved his life once. “Be fearful when others are greedy, be greedy when others are fearful”—that’s what Warren Buffett says. The Mealybug was fearful. Maybe I could be the greedy winner, for once.

One fast smash-and-grab raid, in Caribbean pirate-style. “Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Osborne of the Delta Force” grabs the keys to the gold-bug castle. Wayne Osborne shuts down his websites and email, he “pulls the rug,” and there’s nobody there anymore. Then me and Jacqui are Mr. and Mrs. Michael J. Luftschager. Not just a happy couple with the white picket fence, we’re oligarchs in a palace. Our kids are born rich.

The silent gates swung open. The car rolled toward a 1920s era mansion, pastel stucco with mullioned windows. By modern mega-mansion standards, it was cute and little-girlish even, like the lair of a silent-film actress. Madame had spent decades grooming her date palms, orchids, croquet ground, fountains, koi pond, magnolias, and mangoes. A lovely old garden, but all of these plants looked kinda peaked, like they were somehow drained.

I rang the doorbell, one of those video-equipped smart-house security units. The front door opened, revealing an empty foyer. Two guard dogs loped up from the depths of the house. Silent, well-trained dogs, the kind that can rip the arteries out of your legs.

Warily I followed the silent dogs to an interior parlor, a rich-girl’s dainty piano room re-wired as a monitored guard shack. There sat the Mealybug’s bodyguard and factotum. None other than the infamous Pavel Marco.

Although he looked wrinkled and sick, I recognized him. I had met him once, at an embassy affair in Kuwait, and he’d made a huge impression on me. When I’d first come to admire him, he was a swaggering Global War on Terror buccaneer. An elite for-hire Blackwater Secret Squirrel type, more suave than any Bond villain, an olive-skinned millionaire hustler with thick silver hair swept back from his forehead, bespoke suit and tie, creased trousers, Italian shoes. Not American—Americans weren’t cool enough. A Greek Cypriot, because in the Middle East the Cypriots were plausibly deniable by everybody.

“Aren’t you Dr. Pavel Marco?” I asked.

He looked a little surprised. “I haven’t used that name in quite a while.”

“I met you when you worked for the Saudis in Kuwait City. You wouldn’t remember me—I was just a bean-sprout back then.”

“And you are?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Osborne, Delta Force.”

“I do remember you. You were at Fallujah.”

“That’s right. ‘Vigilant Resolve,’ 2004.”

“You look quite different now.”

“I got a desk job. Civilian life. Crypto finance tech.”

“Very well. The Mealybug has hired you, so I have to direct you. This is our strategic situation. They know about this house, because they doxxed it. They know about the yacht, they doxxed that too. Also they know about the Progeny in the gardens. Because of the Progeny, they will attack, so we have to conduct the Mealybug from the house to the yacht.”

“Progeny?”

“The larvae. We may lose some of them. There are more in the yacht.”

“Larvae?”

“The offspring. The larvae in Vegas were poisoned after we fled the beetles.”

“You mean the cars.”

“I mean the predatory insects from another world. When we move her, we can’t let her be seen.”

Her? “Why not?”

“Because she’s an insect,” he said, exasperated, as if I were a three-year old.

“Wait. The Mealybug is a bug?”

Pavel Marco studied me. “You didn’t know,” he said, wondering. “Exactly how ignorant are you?”

“I knew enough to identify those car bombs in Vegas.”

Marco’s spotted hands trembled, from palsy, or anger, or both. “You don’t seem as bright as most computer hackers, soldier. But given this crisis, I guess you’ll have to do.”

“I’m here to help. The Mealybug, how big is it? Maybe we can move it in one of your Doberman’s cages.”

“‘Her,’ not ‘it!’” Marco snapped. “The Mealybug is a precious creature, a princess from another planet! You can’t just ship her like a bale of hundred-dollar bills.”

“Yeah. Right, sorry.”

“Don’t be misled by the Internet propaganda! This extraterrestrial coalition trying to exterminate her—once they’ve killed her, do you think they’ll leave our planet? Never! They are the occupation forces! Destroying our freedom, regulating everything, forcing us to conform to senseless rules of conduct made far away . . . they’ll enslave us! Just because we were hospitable to her—just because she was our precious, honored guest!”

Was this dementia? “I’ve never met the Mealybug. Can I? Now? I mean, if you please?”

Marco stood, gripping the arm of the padded office chair. At that embassy years ago, among a crowd of Arab Princes, French diplomats, Kurds, Syrians, Iranian Shi’ites—everybody making the War on Terror impossible to win—he’d been a chic, self-possessed operator, a ladies’ man with two Lebanese belly-dancers smoking kif in the back of his Rolls-Royce.

Now, as we tottered toward a back room, he grumbled about his Gulf War Syndrome. He had every symptom and then some: chronic fatigue, memory loss, diarrhea, palsy, blinding headaches, debilitating muscle pains. To sit still, stare at screens, and push buttons, that was all that was left to him. We ventured into madame’s pink-tinted boudoir—with the two big guard-dogs sniffing along.

And there she was.

The Dobermans seemed to adore the Mealybug, or at least they admired what she was eating, from a big ceramic trough. A kind of flower-planter, loaded with five-star hotel fruit plates dumped under her beak like ten Carmen Miranda headdresses: pineapple chunks, kiwi, sliced coconut, canistel, chocolate persimmon, jackfruit, mamey, sapote, tiny little purple plantains, all of this bounty fermenting in the trough with a minor cloud of fruit flies.

She didn’t mind the fruit flies, being akin to them. She was lozenge-shaped, flower-like, with waxy, pink-tinted petals all over her. Her mouth slurped steadily, like a teen-girl over a too-thick milkshake, and she had round lidless shoe-button eyes, six of them, coyly hidden under wax flakes like bangs.

She was warm-blooded. Hotter than human blood-heat, even, hot and smelly—a good smell, like fresh-baked bread. Not as big as a human woman, but good-sized, bigger than the Dobermans. I got the impression that her six limbs, which were demurely folded under her, were not like bugs’ arms, they were like girls’ arms, sleek and tender-skinned, with bones inside, and nicely-kept embroidery-needle fingers.

I felt absolutely no sense of repulsion. I felt awe.

“How long have you been with her?” I asked Pavel.

“I wasn’t the first to protect her, but I was the first to survive. We got wind of those meteors out of the desert—chunks of raw gold falling out the sky in the Rub’ al Khali.” He lifted his doddering head. “I had lost the War on Terror. But with her, I couldn’t lose. Always the winner, with her. And never two days alike, with her! Every day an adventure! She’s so beautiful.”

A big beautiful many-limbed bug slurping up rotting fruit at a trough. If you’d told me that I’d buy that, I would have laughed at you. But that’s not how I felt. Just being near her gave me a sense of peace, like all the striving I had been doing, my whole life, was wasted energy. That was over now. I didn’t have to be smart all the time just to survive.

“You feel it too, don’t you,” Pavel said. “She plays the crypto game better than any human, enough to pile a stack of imaginary coins up to the stars. But who needs money when you have her?”

“And they’re coming to kill her,” I said. “We can’t let that happen.”

• • • •

A door chime sounded. Pavel pulled a Beretta M9 sidearm, looked reluctantly at the powerful, elegant weapon in his palsied hand, and put the gun back in his armpit. I left him with the Mealybug and hurried to the security screen room.

Outside the mansion’s front door stood three elegant, well-to-do white women. A blonde, a redhead—and Jacqui.

“Hello in there?” Jacqui said, leaning to the speaker so her face loomed in the camera. “We’re here for the Historic Homes of Miami Tour? Your gate was open. May we come in?”

I couldn’t find the speaker button to reply to her. This didn’t seem to bother Jacqui’s WASP friends. They ignored the locked house, plucked up some fallen Florida palmetto leaves—like canoe paddles, with teeth on both sides—and commenced to thrash the garden foliage. There were cocoons in the trees. The Mealybug’s children, stuck in tropical bushes like Mexican pinatas.

Pavel Marco appeared behind me. “This is it,” he said, “the assault.” He pulled open a drawer and got out a Mercedes key fob. “Get the SUV out of the garage. I’ll get the Mealybug.”

I hesitated. I couldn’t leave Jacqui out there. Instead of finding the garage I went out to rescue her. I caught up to her as she stood staring at her women friends. Except they weren’t women anymore.

The women—the wasp-things—were grabbing the shattered larvae. Their jaws unhinged and they went mad with frenzied glee, devouring the Mealybug’s babies. The pulp of the larvae dripped from their maws to their cute frocks.

“Whoa!” Jacqui said. “Those are Lily Pulitzer dress sets! We just bought those!”

“We need to leave. Right now.”

“What happened to my friends?”

“They’re not your friends. They’re extraterrestrial exterminators.”

“What are they eating?”

“The Mealybug’s babies.”

“Wow! That’s so creepy! Let’s get out of here.”

“I have to save the Mealybug,” I said, clutching the key fob. “There’s a car in the garage. I need to get it.”

“Gimme that,” Jacqui said, grabbing the fob from my hand. “I’ll get the car. You get the Mealybug.”

She seemed energized in a way I had not seen before. More WASP women arrived at the gate.

I dashed back into the house. In the boudoir, Pavel was communing with the Mealybug, who held his shriveled hands with two of her six arms, her gray eyes shining.

“We must reach the yacht,” Pavel said. “I used to be able to lift her.”

“That’s all right. From now on I’ll do it.”

The Mealybug turned her alien face toward a nearby desktop screen. Text appeared on it. “Will there be food?” the screen recited aloud. The synthesized voice was a startling contralto.

“Much food aboard the yacht, your highness,” Pavel promised.

She emitted a spiracled moan, hopped off her pedestal, and moved toward me. I got my arms below her and lifted her off the floor. She weighed about as much as a large poodle. She wrapped her top forelimbs around my neck. My cheek brushed the carapace of waxy exudate that covered her back. She smelled like heaven.

She folded up her other limbs and settled into my arms, her multi-eyed head resting on my shoulder. I didn’t waste time: out of the room, down the hall, out the front door.

Jacqui was there behind the wheel of the Mercedes, motor running.

“The hatch!” I called.

The hatchback opened. I gently laid the Mealybug into a little throne back there, a specialized socket tailor-made just for her, where she could watch over the back seat and tell the driver what to do.

Pavel made a brave effort to man the front passenger seat, with his gun in hand, but he was crippled with pain and weariness. I had to shove him into the back seat like a collapsing bag of groceries. As I came around the side the wasp women staggered forward, bloated with prey, questing fingernails grown to hollow black stingers. I climbed in and slammed the door; the wasps scraped and scratched at the car’s glossy finish.

Jacqui floored it, the wheels spat gravel, and the wasp women went airborne.

Out on the boulevard we swerved into the night traffic.

“To the marina,” gasped Pavel. “Island Gardens. Quickly.”

“Pavel, this is my wife Jacqui,” I said. I got out my GPS. “Here—follow this.”

The Mealybug’s contralto voice came from the dashboard sound system. “Mind the speed limit.”

• • • •

At the Island Gardens Marina, six chic Bahama supercruisers shone under cool vapor-lighting, multipurpose vehicles for the multinational Miami elite.

Suppose you’re rich, you’ve got enemies. Well, you climb aboard one of those floating mansions and next day you’re over the blue horizon, surrounded by your paid staff, no warrants at the door, no cops, no snoops, no North Koreans, no Boca Raton scammer mafia—just the protectors on your payroll, and your precious self.

The Mealybug’s gleaming white sixty-meter yacht was staffed 24/7, with a well-trained international crew of discreet Filipinos and Indians. We got the princess on board and into her owner’s suite. Pavel Marco spoke with the captain about our destination: El Salvador.

The mate led me and Jacqui to a private cabin. Satin pillows on the bed, a sofa and big TV, polished wooden highlights, a wide window with a view of the lights of the nighttime marina and the dark ocean beyond. “Better than any house, eh?” I said. “As soon as we cast off, we’re safe. Out in international waters, we’re finally self-sovereign.”

Jacqui did not sit. “I’m not going, Mike.”

“What? Why not?”

“Well, because I’m an American. I’ve never been out of the country. I don’t even have a passport.”

“That’s okay. I don’t have mine either. There are work-arounds for that.”

She looked at me, her eyes large. “Ever since Vegas I’ve been thinking. Mike, you try too hard. Since the day we got married, you’ve been trying too hard. All this Colonel Wayne Osborne stuff. Because of me. I spend money and I look good and that’s about it.”

“I love you like that!”

“You didn’t love me when I told you I spent our IRS safe money. We’re not happy. I spend as much time trying to be the girl next door for you as you do trying to be a tough guy. We don’t do anything together except for drugs, TV, or sex. It’s going nowhere.”

“But look where we are right now! Look at this place! We’re hooked up with a billionaire, a one percenter, the biggest crypto whale you’ve ever seen—”

“—who’s a bug from outer space.”

“Nobody has to know that.”

“Bigger bugs are trying to eat him.”

“Her.”

“Her, okay.”

“You just need to see her, spend some time with her.”

“Like this Pavel guy? He can’t even see me. He’s falling apart.”

“That’s his Gulf War Syndrome. I knew him back in Kuwait.”

“I’ve got better ideas, Mike. I met this classy older lady, Vanessa, through the WASP club. She knows powerful people, and she likes me!”

“Is she another insect?”

“Not this one. She’s very religious.”

I hadn’t been in a church since our wedding day, but Jacqui liked church and had lots of connections there.

“Don’t worry,” Jacqui soothed me. “I’ll keep the secret about your Mealybug. I know your crypto secrets are important to you. You deserve to be together for as long as you can.”

“But what will you do, baby?”

She smiled her best girl-next-door smile. “Me? I’m gonna become an influencer. I’m halfway there already, actually. I influenced the shit out of you.”

• • • •

That’s how I lost Jacqui.

I’d lost my computer, too, back at the Miami hotel room, security-locked and encrypted. I borrowed a no-name PC from one of the yacht crew and, since I wasn’t a newbie idiot, I pulled a 128-gigabyte USB key off my keychain. I plugged it in, I held my breath—and up it came, a secure TAILS operating system, cold storage for my crypto holdings, all the social media for Colonel Wayne Osborne. Thanks to my operational backup, I had escaped a crypto bro’s worst nightmare. I was still in business.

On the way to El Salvador, I sat down to compose an email to Jacqui, some argument to make her see what she was missing out on. But as I wrote it, I got to thinking: what kind of life was I offering her? This girl who’d never asked me for anything except to honor my marriage vows and keep my promises. She didn’t marry some heavy international operator in the crypto scene. Jacqui had married Mike Luftschager.

As I sat there tapping at my borrowed laptop, I realized that if there was one truly useless character in my situation, it was Mike Luftschager. Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Osborne might make a go of this adventure, if he was ruthless, disciplined, loyal, and never set a foot wrong. Mike Luftschager, that minnow among whales? He’d be deader than the Glovemaster in half the time.

Jacqui didn’t need that email.

• • • •

The Mealybug’s fabulous yacht took a trip through the Panama Canal, where it changed its name and colors with a brand-new Panamanian registration. Pavel Marco said this would throw off the scent, and soon enough we were in El Salvador, on the fintech scene, the first nation-state to accept Bitcoin as legal tender.

We moved into the brand new complex next to the volcano-powered Bitcoin mines. The Mealybug seemed pleased about her new lair, but the shock of this novelty was too much for Marco—after his long illness, he went into sudden decline. He died in a marvelous place, though—like a chunk of Dubai glittering at the base of Conchagua. Huge tin barns full of round-the-clock computation, a government-private partnership like structures dropped off a starship.

I was there when Pavel gave up the ghost—still at his laptop, with all his secure passwords and wallets sitting wide-open. A handy development, because those new resources helped me manage the hustle of secretly burying a dead white spy in a Third World country.

With Pavel Marco gone, someone had to take on the role of the Mealybug’s protector and global financial agent. The best guy for that job was not Mike Luftschager, or Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Osborne, either. The ideal protector for the Mealybug was the famous and fearsome Pavel Marco. So for her sake, I ditched the useless Mike Luftschager. I rugpulled Wayne Osborne. I became Pavel Marco.

My soul felt settled by this. I had to die inside a little—when a man abandons sworn oaths and core values, that happens to him. But I saw with incisive sharpness how my career would flourish. The truth was simple: the future was not about me and my corny personal convictions. It was about creating a world safe for the Mealybug and her values.

Those laser-eyed dudes behind the El Salvador government, they were clued-in about that. Hard headed libertarian visionaries from a sovereign nation. No one-world control freaks. No bureaucrats and bank gangsters.

Pavel Marco could blaze new trails in that world. Who would miss Mike Luftschager? Well, Jacqui might, for a little while . . . but in Miami, the Bitcoin capital, she had found new purpose. I spied on her, off and on, as best I could. That “classy older lady” she’d made friends with in Miami turned out to be a socialite Republican Party operative. As NFT art collectors went, she seemed very active.

Jacqui started with the NFT collections, but pretty soon she was into election truthing, and then immigration policies. Her charm came to the fore: she got her teeth done, and the blonde hair of a Fox News anchorwoman. Like she’d predicted, she became an influencer: first the little podcasts, then the big YouTube shows, and finally the Build the Wall Movement, where she and her WASP friends fought to protect the world from alien invaders. Those alien invasion memes were a big hit with the QAnon people. They adored Jacqui.

So I was proud of her, but she wasn’t the girl I had married. At the sight of her yakking politics on camera, I went kinda numb below the belt. Also, she would have gotten the Mealybug killed, so she just wasn’t someone I could have anything to do with. It happens. Sad.

That’s why I arranged this talk with you. The Mealybug may not be a social insect, but she does need allies. For her cause. You know my story now, and judging by your proven interest, you’re a woman I can trust to help get the word out.

Believe me: although crypto has been through a whole lot of ups and downs, we are Very Early Days, still.

When she’s not laying her eggs in the jungle, the Mealybug keeps busy: DeFi apps and protocol, a whole ecosystem. The Huxley Blockchain? That’s her. The Brave New World Coder Club, also hers. She’s yield farming. She’s growing the TVL so we can capitalize. I can’t even count the pseudonymous profiles she’s created, a voluntary association of invented people, all contributing code to her Huxley ecosystem, creating apps and wallets, governance platforms, aggregators, and stablecoins.

It’s all happening right in front of our eyes. The future of wealth, right here, right now. It’s just that the normies can’t see it.

So thanks again for coming down to see me here in the compound. I don’t get around like I used to—my health’s not what it was. There’s this need for absolute security; bandits and predators all over the place. Her enemies aren’t sleeping. Neither am I, much, lately—I’m on watch every hour of the day. But I’ve put aside the drugs and the booze—I don’t need those false highs. Not with my laser-focus on my new sense of purpose—and that can be yours, too!

Every day an adventure!

©2023 by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Bruce Sterling is the author of many novels, including Islands in the Net, Heavy Weather, Distraction, Holy Fire, The Zenith Angle, The Caryatids, and, with William Gibson, The Difference Engine. He is the winner of three Locus Awards, two Hugos, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is also the editor of the seminal cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades. Much of his short fiction, which has appeared in magazines such as F&SF and Omni, was recently collected in Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling.

John Kessel’s most recent novels are Pride and Prometheus and The Moon and the Other. His fiction has received the Theodore Sturgeon, Locus, James Tiptree Jr./Otherwise, and Shirley Jackson awards, and twice received the Nebula award. The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel, was published by Subterranean Press in 2022. Kessel taught literature and writing at North Carolina State University, where he helped found the MFA program in creative writing, and he is the co-founder of the Sycamore Hill Writer’s Workshop. He lives with his wife, the novelist Therese Anne Fowler, in Raleigh.

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

Eve’s Prayer

Victor Forna | 674 words

Lord, I am here; I have taken off my helmet. Peyeala’s air is breathable, clean, better than anything on Earth. Its double-star system has not burned my flesh. Its gravity, three times ours, has not crushed my bones. Its ambient lighting hurt my eyes, but my retinae have adapted and can withstand it now. All enhancements made to me have proven successful.

All is well.

Lord, see my screen; perfection in graphs, perfection in numbers; even the data says hope has been found here, amongst the stars . . .

O Divine Master, yet I ask You to fill me with Your wisdom and understanding—should I press this button, send forth this beacon, and let them know they can survive the journey to, and on, Peyeala’s hallowed grounds?

I am undecided; help my heart.

Lord, and have mercy on me.

My sin is the sin of ungratefulness.

You demand us to overflow with thanksgiving. They made me what I am. Made me more than an ape. With the push of this button, I can repay them tenfold, yet I cannot bring my fingers to do this act of thanksgiving.

Have mercy . . .

But Lord, know my heart.

On Earth, between studies and body enhancement surgeries, I never had time to think on my own, and all was good. Yet, in my solitary and depressing journey through the light-years, from star to star to star, my mind learnt to wander in itself; I contemplated matters I never knew I could, and arrived at altars of questions against my very existence . . . and to question my existence was to question my mission, and to question my mission was to question their hope. After letting their world implode in political wars, after letting their environment degrade beyond restoration because of soul-greed and wickedness—how dare they seek new worlds in the heavens? How dare they hope for a second chance?

These were just questions to me: nothing that could hinder the mission.

I was still on their side.

Until I landed on Peyeala . . .

I felt a rage inside myself on seeing the plots around me, the untarnished gloria; a rage that could not have been of You, Lord. Could it? I looked at the firmament and saw the bluest sky, blue as a child’s forgiveness. I saw nameless trees running for endless acres in freedom, oblivious of the aliens who might come and cut them down. I turned to the east and I heard a river flowing in search of its untouched sea. What creatures roamed here, these yellow woodlands, and were they even aware they could be murdered for the very parts that made up their beings? The smells around me were a merge of citrus and freshly dug soil, and sweet, sweet innocence.

Peyeala-55 they had named this planet in their blasphemous narcissism, their arrogance: daring to label, to touch, all the things they should not. Who gave them ownership of the cosmos? How can the finite and flawed dream to own the boundless and the perfect? Why did they not maintain their own side of the universe, our own side of the universe?

And, now, I must be the mother of their sacrilege.

Lord, I am Eve before Your forbidden fruit again.

This button.

What is the right thing to do, O God Almighty?

Humans are more than the pain they so often give, I know. As catastrophic as they can be, there is a beauty to them that still haunts my mind. How they fall in love. How they hope. How they create. How they laugh. With all the ill I know they may bring here, there is still a small part of my soul that believes humans have learnt better, believes humans deserve and will treat their second chance better. There is no serpent tempting me in this strange Eden, but for these thoughts in my mind.

Help me make the right choice, O Lord; in Your mighty name, I pray.

Amen.

©2023 by Victor Forna.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Victor Forna is a Sierra Leonean writer based in his country’s capital, Freetown. He currently works as an environmentalist. His short fiction and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in homes such as Lolwe, Fantasy Magazine, PodCastle, and elsewhere. He is an alumnus of the 2022 AKO Caine Prize Writing Workshop. You can find him on Twitter @vforna12.

The Hole in the Garden

Gene Doucette | 4353 words

“She waited up for you.”

Bhara’s voice gave Pyrish a start. He should have known she was there, in the doorway, as she was whenever he returned late. Which was . . . every night now. Since the latest incident, all he’d had time to do was change his clothing and convey a word or two of kindness to Celi, and then it was back to the Facility with him.

That word or two of kindness was usually conveyed to a sleeping child.

“I’m sorry,” Pyrish said. “For the time.”

He passed Bhara to get to the liquor cabinet in the living pod, and went straight for the bog-aged Daranian whisky. The bottle was a gift from the chancellery from back when Pyrish was installed and was meant to be opened either for an exceptional situation or not at all.

He unsealed the bottle and filled a glass meant for sweeter drinks.

“I’m not the one owed an apology,” Bhara said, watching him sully the most expensive thing in the house without comment.

Bhara was Celi’s third caretaker. She was kind and patient with children, firm with adults, and left Pyrish with a vague sense that she would absolutely kill a man with an axe if that became necessary. It was the last one that made her the perfect companion for his headstrong daughter.

“I think you are,” he said. “I know I’ve been away more often than usual.”

“. . . Will it be done soon?” she asked, with some hesitation. “The additional work, I mean. I have . . . we’ve all heard the noises.”

“Soon, yes,” Pyrish said.

He tried the whisky. Exceedingly rare and very old, it was the sort of bottle about which was written paeans espousing its singular virtue. He found it smoky and smooth and good, but it was also still just whisky. No matter the praise it was never going to amount to more.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Bhara said. She yawned gently. “Are you out before sunrise again?”

“Possibly.”

“Then I will possibly see you. Good night.”

She left him alone with his thoughts and his whisky. He had plenty of both, and would have been content remaining in the half-light of the living pod to ruminate over them at length. But Celi was waiting.

Her light was on and she was wide awake and sitting up in bed, despite the hour, reading a mathematical textbook that had no place in a seven-year-old’s room, save perhaps to level an uneven table.

Celi had always possessed a bespoke precocity that left most people confused regarding where the child ended and the adult began. She was simultaneously wise beyond her years and alarmingly naïve, depending on the subject at hand, and it was impossible to know when to expect wisdom or naïveté. Figuring out how to navigate this was important because Celi hated when adults spoke about things she didn’t understand but also hated being treated like a seven-year-old, and was willing to subject anyone who didn’t strike the right balance between those two extremes to withering degrees of sarcasm. This was why she was on her third caretaker.

“You should be asleep,” he said.

“Daddy!”

Pyrish leaned in for hugs and kisses, taking the book from her hands as he did so.

“You also shouldn’t be reading algebra books after bedtime,” he added. “What happened to all your storybooks?”

“They’re silly; I like yours better. And math is neat.” Her eyes fell to the glass of whisky still in his hand. “Ew.”

“Ew yourself. Now lie down so I can tuck you in.”

“Noooooo I’m not tired.”

“How can you not be tired?”

“I’m not. Are you tired?”

Pyrish had never felt more tired in his entire life. “No,” he said. “But I’m not a little girl with school in the morning.”

She crossed her arms, which signaled that this was not going to be an argument Pyrish would be winning. “I want a story.”

“Celi . . .”

“Stor-rry! Stor-rry!”

This used to be their bedtime ritual. Pyrish had a small collection of stories to choose from, either made up entirely or repurposed from half-remembered tales from his own childhood, and he used to tell her one every night before bed. But it had been some time since Celi had insisted on one; he’d assumed she had outgrown them.

“All right, all right,” he said. “What do you want to hear? The Princess and the Talking Sunset? The Whispering Mug?”

“A new one!”

He sighed. You don’t understand how long this day has been, he thought, and how long the next is going to be. But she didn’t need to know these things.

“Fine,” he said. “One story.”

“Yaaay.”

“But I’m keeping my stinky drink.”

“Ew.”

“Now, let’s see . . .”

He stopped to gather his thoughts, which only meant lunging around in his head for something with a beginning, middle, and end that would entertain a seven-year-old and hopefully not take too long to tell.

“All right,” he said. “I have it.”

He sipped his whisky and cleared his throat and began.

“Let’s call this one The Hole in the Garden. Not so long ago and not so far away there lived a man named Gangle . . .”

• • • •

Gangle had a small home with a small yard, and in that small yard he kept a garden, which was his favorite thing to do. He grew all sorts of flowers: from white bumblebrights and yellow cormins to blue bonners and purple fickles. If it flowered, Gangle wanted to grow it.

Gangle’s fondness for gardening was how he came to notice a peculiarity that might have otherwise gone unobserved. It seemed that one day, for no obvious reason, all of his flowers began to tilt in a wrong direction.

[plants turn to face the sun, daddy. everybody knows that.]

[do you want me to tell the story or not?]

[. . .]

What was wrong about this direction was that it was not toward the sun.

[okay?]

[fine.]

But it was toward the same thing. Only there was no thing there. The flowers on the left side of the yard tilted rightward, and the right-side plants slanted leftward. The ones in the front of the yard turned to the back and the ones in the back leaned toward the front. If they were facing a sun, it wasn’t the one in the sky; it was one somewhere in the middle of Gangle’s yard.

Only there was no sun in Gangle’s yard, as it was entirely too small to accommodate an entire sun.

The issue only worsened over time. In another week all of the grass in the yard had committed to the same random coordinate, all except for the grass at the epicenter, which died entirely, leaving behind a perfect thumbnail-sized brown circle.

Then one night Gangle heard a terrible, terrible cry from the garden. He told himself it was just a howlet snatching up a bodger in the yard, as howlets sometimes do . . .

[. . . are you all right?]

[I don’t like stories where bodgers die. bodgers are cute.]

[how do you feel about razers?]

[okay, razers.]

. . . told himself it was just a howlet snatching up a razer in the yard, as howlets sometimes do, and so he went to bed.

The next morning, he found razer fur in a neat circle around the epicenter. The rest of the razer was gone. A howlet could have done that, he supposed, but it looked like the circle with nothing in it had eaten the bodger.

[razer!]

. . . had eaten the razer.

Gangle decided to conduct some experiments. First, he found a nice round rock and placed it near the circle. And then he waited. Nothing happened to the rock for the rest of the day, but the next day the rock was gone.

He found a second rock and put it much closer to the ring, right on top of the razer fur.

He waited again. This time, the rock moved, gently at first before rolling steadily toward the epicenter.

Then the rock disappeared.

Was it magic? Gangle had lived his entire life in a world where there was no such thing as magic, and felt strongly that if that fact were to change, the change would come in a more compelling form than disintegrating rocks, skinned razers, and confused plants. Therefore, he did not think it was magic.

However, he was unable to imagine an alternative explanation.

Possessed as he was of a mind that—while short on advanced scientific knowledge—had a basic grasp of the scientific method, Gangle decided to conduct further experiments.

His next test was to poke the epicenter with a long twig. He considered this to be a modest risk as compared to the rock test because he would be holding onto the other end of the stick, and so he took the precaution of wearing a rubber glove on his hand. This would protect him if whatever was eating rocks and razers was electrical in nature, he reasoned. He didn’t think it was but he also couldn’t rule it out.

What happened next was . . . nothing. At first. Gangle ran the tip of the stick through the middle and out the other side. The twig was neither devoured nor stripped of its outer layer or otherwise damaged.

Gangle pulled the stick back and tried again, only more slowly. This time, when the tip of the twig came close to the ring of dead grass, Gangle felt an ever-so-slight rightward tug. Loosening his grip, he allowed the twig to get pulled in that direction until it ran into . . . Gangle had no word for what it ran into. Something small but irrevocable. Something that atomized the twig at the intersection point, with the destruction causing a slight tremble down the length of the wood.

[atomized?]

[destroyed. ate.]

With some time and effort, he was able to relocate the precise point at which the twig met its doom, aimed the new tip at that point, and pushed forward until the only part of the twig remaining was what was in Gangle’s hand.

Gangle tried it again with another twig and achieved the same result. Then he went inside and spent the rest of the day conducting research.

Once he’d finished his research he arrived at a conclusion that was a very good conclusion, except that it was obviously impossible. However, it was slightly less impossible than the notion that this was a magical event and so he decided it must be correct.

That conclusion was this: He had a tiny quantum singularity in his garden.

[did you make that up?]

[did I make what up?]

[quantum singularity.]

[no.]

[that sounds like something you made up.]

[I didn’t make it up.]

[okay.]

Gangle knew he had to tell somebody about this problem but wasn’t sure who. There were well-established channels available for reporting things like downed trees and dead animals, but there was no municipal department in charge of rogue singularities. Still, he felt certain someone in City Hall would know what to do, and so he went there to ask. This did not go well.

The first person he spoke to didn’t know what a quantum singularity was. She transferred him to her supervisor who also didn’t know what a quantum singularity was but was certain if Gangle had one it was definitely a zoning violation. Gangle asked him to identify what law the private ownership of a quantum singularity was breaking, and after the better part of an afternoon’s worth of searching, the man agreed that there was no such law on the books. He then added that there should be, and vowed to ensure one would be there in the future.

Once that was settled, Gangle returned to the question of what he should do about the singularity. The official sent him to the waste disposal department. They were not helpful.

Gangle concluded that City Hall was not where to go to find someone who knew what to do about a singularity in a garden. He would try the university instead.

After a little work, he managed to find a physics professor named Cole. She did know what a singularity was, but also asserted—with great conviction—that he couldn’t possibly have one in his yard.

“Micro singularities are possible,” she explained, “but they are unstable. It would blink out of existence in a fraction of a second.”

“What if they were not?” Gangle asked. “What if we were wrong about that? What if there is one in my garden?”

Cole laughed. “Then we will all be in great trouble because the only thing a stable singularity can do is grow into a black hole. This would ultimately consume the planet, for black holes will always eat.”

[ohhhhh.]

[what is it?]

[singularities are black holes. I’ve heard of black holes.]

Not laughing at all, Gangle asked, “How long do you think we have? Before that happens?”

“There is no telling, because nobody has ever created a micro singularity that lasted long enough to measure such a thing, nor would anyone want to do so. But it is an interesting question, and now I would like to know the answer to this as well. I will do the calculations. Come back in a month and I will tell you.”

“Does this mean you believe me?” he asked hopefully.

“Absolutely not, but it is an interesting thought experiment.”

In the month that followed the singularity did indeed grow, if only a little. More of the grass was dying around the epicenter, there was now a visible depression in the middle, and when Gangle stood nearby he could feel a gentle sideways tug. Also—and this may have been a coincidence—it seemed as if there was a marked increase in the number of missing pets in the neighborhood.

Gangle tried new experiments.

He put a clock on the ground next to the singularity to see if it ran more slowly. He saw no change, but the clock only counted down to seconds, whereas any difference would probably have to be measured in microseconds. He declared this test inconclusive.

He poured fine-grained sand over the epicenter to see if that helped pinpoint the singularity, thinking it reasonable to expect a few of the grains to enter into a tiny orbit. This was a qualified success, because while he failed to add a satellite to the miniature black hole he did see a spark of light from when some of the grains touched the singularity’s event horizon.

He took a large metal can and put it over the singularity. This was in part for the benefit of the neighborhood pets who had not yet gone missing and in part because he wanted to see what would happen to the can. What happened was: The can began to dent slightly. It made loud noises when the dents formed, at all hours, so he removed the can after a few days rather than see the experiment to its conclusion.

At the end of the month, as Gangle prepared to travel back to the university to once again try convincing Professor Cole that he really did have a singularity in his garden, she showed up at his front door, along with a man Gangle did not know.

After apologizing for the unannounced visit, Cole introduced the man as an industrialist named Xybax.

“I finished my calculations two weeks ago,” Cole said, in what sounded like an explanation for the two of them being there, but which was not. “This is only a rough estimate, because I lack adequate numbers on initial conditions, but assuming the singularity was just created we have anywhere between seven and a hundred years.”

“That is indeed a rough estimate,” Gangle said.

“I know. Which is why I reached out to Industrialist Xybax for advice on a more exact estimate.”

“I have a supercollider,” Xybax said, which meant very little to Gangle. “With it I have studied micro singularities.”

“And did you?” Gangle asked. “Get a better number?”

“We did not,” Xybax said. “But then I asked Cole why she wanted one and she told me about you. I agreed with her; micro singularities are rare and unstable and it’s impossible for you to have one in your garden.”

“However,” Cole added, “we believe you do have one.”

Xybax continued. “Since we thought it such a curious question—and since Cole insisted you were in possession of an otherwise sensible demeanor—we decided to conduct an aerial survey. What we learned was that your yard is too massive.”

“Does this prove that I am correct?” Gangle asked.

“It might,” Cole said.

“May we see your garden?” Xybax asked.

Gangle brought them to the garden. As a solitary person, Gangle had always looked forward to the day in which he could bring around important people to have a look at his flowers, as he was quite proud of them. But they weren’t interested in his flowers.

[aww. they should tell him his flowers are nice.]

“What lovely flowers you have,” Cole said, on her way to the singularity.

[thank youuuu.]

After conducting a number of tests to further confirm that, indeed, Gangle had a tiny black hole in his yard, Xybax said, quite unexpectedly, “I would like to purchase your singularity.”

This was an odd thing to say. In approaching Professor Cole—and City Hall before her—Gangle had hoped for a resolution that involved making the singularity go away, i.e., dissolving it somehow. Selling it had never been a consideration.

“I don’t understand,” Gangle said. “Do you mean to purchase my garden as well? And my home?”

“We will extract it from the yard,” Xybax said, “but we have to act quickly before it grows so massive as to make it impossible to move.”

“But you are going to destroy it, yes? My understanding of singularities is not as great as Professor Cole’s but I feel certain keeping one around is dangerous. As she said, black holes will always eat.”

“It cannot be destroyed,” Cole said.

“We mean to study it,” Xybax said. “For you see, it should be impossible; that it is not makes it something worthy of study. And my facility has all the means to conduct such an investigation.”

“And then you will . . . not destroy, but get rid of it? Before it grows too large? You could put it on a rocket and launch it into space, while it is still small enough to fit on a rocket.”

“Yes,” Xybax said. “This is a very good idea. Thank you. We will do exactly that.”

The singularity was removed the following day, as was very nearly the entire garden and most of the soil. Xybax’s team lifted the space surrounding the singularity from the yard and dropped it into a large magnetic containment field that was a section of a supercollider a week earlier. Then they left.

Gangle was well-compensated; so well, he moved to a better house with a larger yard. Then he went to work on a new garden.

And he waited for news. He assumed there would eventually be an announcement of a rocket being sent into space carrying a dangerous payload of some sort. Rockets sent into outer space were uncommon and typically newsworthy, and furthermore impossible to keep a secret.

Yet there was no news. And so, after many months, Gangle contacted Xybax about his concerns. Rather than answer those concerns, the industrialist invited Gangle to come for a visit.

Gangle arrived at Xybax Corporation’s main facility the following morning, where he was met at the door by none other than Xybax himself. He brought Gangle directly into a massive room featuring—to Gangle’s horror—a much larger version of his garden singularity.

“Is it not beautiful?” Xybax asked.

Gangle thought it was not in fact beautiful at all.

“I don’t understand,” Gangle said. “Are you feeding it?”

“Controlled growth. We’re monitoring it carefully.”

“Will you still be able to send it away on a rocket?”

Xybax laughed. “No, why would we ever do that? Gangle, you do not appreciate what we have here. Imagine a future that runs on an inexhaustible supply of clean energy! Energy that’s actually a net positive for the environment!”

“I don’t understand.”

“We are feeding it a strict diet of trash; enormous truckloads of garbage from all over the world. Next month we start work on the stockpiles of nuclear waste. Your singularity is getting rid of all of it for us.”

“But how is this an energy source?”

“With a very clever engine that turns the gravitational power into an electrical source. Professor Cole designed it herself. In time, the entire power grid will be supported by what goes on in this room. And that is just the beginning. Once we have built it out the entire planet’s energy can come from right here! This is a very exciting time!”

Gangle thought Xybax was perhaps insane, as this was far too much enthusiasm for someone talking about an object that could devour the planet. Either that, or Gangle was missing something.

“Professor Cole said it was impossible to destroy the singularity,” he said.

“Yes, this is so.”

“And you have no intention of launching it into space.”

“It is already too late to do such a foolish thing. It is too massive now. No rocket on the planet has sufficient thrust to achieve escape velocity with that aboard.”

“And it can only grow, is this not correct? It cannot shrink.”

“Actually, it can,” Xybax said. “But only in the vacuum of space, absent fuel, and over a vast period of time. So yes, for the purposes of our current circumstance, it can only grow.”

“Then will it not eventually consume us all?” Gangle asked. “Or have I overlooked an alternative?”

Xybax smiled. “It will not be a problem for us. Nor for our children, our children’s children, or our children’s children’s children. Our children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children may have some difficulty but of course by then it will hardly matter.”

“Why is that?”

Xybax put his hand on Gangle’s shoulder and turned him to face the singularity. “Look at it, Gangle. You are focusing on its destructive potential, but that is not what I see at all! I see a utopian future built on the harnessing of this great force. Surely, in that future they will figure out how to resolve a problem that to us, right now, appears impossible to solve. Have faith in the cleverness of our descendants, Gangle.”

[. . .]

[. . . why did you stop?]

[I’m not sure of the ending for this one.]

[stories have happy endings, daddy.]

[Do they? always?]

[daaaaaddy]

[all right.]

Gangle returned home, concerned but also confident that a man as smart as Xybax must surely have superior insight into matters such as this.

And in the years that followed, Xybax’s idealized vision did indeed come true: the planet was cleaner, energy was cheap and plentiful, and everyone was happy.

The end.

• • • •

“No, no, no,” Celi said. “That’s not the right ending at all.”

“What ending were you hoping for?”

“Gangle should have convinced Xybax that he was wrong and to get rid of the singularity like he was supposed to.”

“But it was too late for that,” Pyrish said. “Xybax said it was already too large to send away.”

“Then change that part of the story!”

“Then it would be a different story, wouldn’t it?”

Celi frowned. “But-but-but then what happened? Will their children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children be all right?”

Pyrish smiled. “I’ll tell their story another time. Now you need to get some sleep.”

“Fine.”

He tucked her in, kissed her forehead and turned off the light.

“Daddy?” Celi said, when he was at the door. “They will be okay, right?”

“Who will?”

“Their children’s children, you know. You don’t have to tell me the whole story. I just want to know.”

“Yes. A great many years in the future, the descendants of Xybax and Gangle work out a way to shrink the singularity so that it will never grow uncontrollably and destroy the planet. And everyone was fine.”

“Okay. Good night, daddy.”

“Good night, Celi.”

Pyrish drifted back into the living pod and refilled his glass of whisky. Then he sat in the dark and stared at the lights of the city in the distance. They had a good view of the downtown from their little home on the hill, a view that included the massive central Facility building.

The launch pad on the far end of the city usually offered a lightshow of rockets at this time of night too—one every few minutes—but those had mostly stopped. They hadn’t run out of rockets; just people who could afford them.

Pyrish sighed. He was expected back at the Facility in a few hours, and it would be better if he arrived sober. Not that it would matter all that much if he was; it wouldn’t change anything. But there was a matter of keeping up appearances, not causing a panic and so forth.

He kept drinking.

There was a great rumble in the distance. It came from the Facility, which had been making alarming noises for months now. Pyrish was one of the only people left who knew why.

The Source had breached containment. Like all the other times this had happened, there was still a chance they’d be able to get it back under control before it reached the absolute point of no return. But they would only be buying themselves a few weeks, because all they had left was short-term solutions and they would eventually run out of those too.

Black holes will always eat. And there was nothing Pyrish could do to change that.

©2023 by Gene Doucette.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gene Doucette is the author of over twenty sci-fi/fantasy titles, including the Sorrow Falls series (The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens), the Immortal series, Fixer and Fixer Redux, the Tandemstar books, and The Apocalypse Seven. His latest novel, Graffiti on the Wall of the Universe (Sorrow Falls Book Three) is out now. Gene lives in Cambridge MA.

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

Death by Water

Maria Haskins | 1385 words

After the world ended, Marie boarded the last functional vessel at the port and set out from Vancouver, heading across the strait toward the cloud-shrouded spine of Vancouver Island and the open ocean beyond. A sheer blue sky covered the stars as her ship left the city, and the sun shone on the barren mountains and the ruined streets. Nothing moved except the wind, stirring the dust; and the last crows and rats, scurrying to feed on the dead.

As far as she could see, there were no other vessels on the water. No solar-powered skimmers carrying people up the coast, no spaceships swooping down from the orbital stations, no self-piloted cargo-carriers either, but as she sailed past the rocks at Point Grey, a seal bobbed up and looked at her, its face so human she might have thought it spoke her name as she passed. But even if it had spoken, what could a seal tell her that she didn’t know already?

Marie did not have to navigate or handle the sails or rudder. The vessel’s destination was pre-set, and it already knew where it was going and how to get there.

She peered back at the city through her tinted UV-visor, saw the clouds gathering over the inlet, and smelled both ruin and rain on the breeze. As the crumbling city receded into the past behind her, the clouds and the mist, the fog and the pain folded over the jagged skyline like wet paper until there was nothing left to see.

Marie looked down at the seal frolicking in the ship’s wake. Its movements were agile and swift in the waves while her own limbs and thoughts were weighty and cumbersome, too heavy to lift or move.

• • • •

The first week after Marie set out, her hair fell out. She didn’t mind. Mostly she was relieved as the strands of grey and blonde slipped through her fingers like yarn, like silk, like unbundled neuro-fibers, like meadow grass and straw. She let it all fall into the water and watched it sink below the waves, swaying like seaweed as it took on the hue of the ocean waters.

The wind raked its briny fingers across her bare scalp and its touch made her heart beat faster.

• • • •

During the second week aboard, Marie’s skin sloughed off. The top layer first as if she’d suffered a sunburn except it didn’t itch or hurt. She rubbed her arms and legs, her chest and neck and face, watching as the papery shreds of her epidermis drifted down into the darkening sea below. After that she peeled off the deeper layers, pulling the wet, glistening dermis and hypodermis off in strips and swaths, revealing flesh and veins and nerves beneath.

As she let the last of it fall into the depths, she saw the seal far below, its sleek body still keeping pace with the ship.

• • • •

Marie changed, and the world changed too. Creatures teemed around the hull and prow—whales and dolphins, fish and octopus, otters and cormorants. Yet the longer she watched them, the less they resembled the creatures she knew. Maybe the animals had evolved since the world ended. Maybe they had taken to this new, ravaged world in a way humans had not been able to do. Or maybe, without anyone else there to tell her what she was supposed to see, she saw them true for the first time.

Even the ship itself was changing. Some days, the wooden deck rang hollow like metal and alloys under her feet, while the rough, braided tack turned to slippery tubes and wires in her hands. Other days, the shape of the vessel itself morphed into something other than a boat. Something sharper, faster. A knife, cleaving both darkness and light.

Marie no longer knew with any certainty where she was headed. Neither could she remember passing any of the expected landmarks on the route. There had been no islands in the strait, no jagged shore of Vancouver Island to skirt around, nothing at all except an ever-deepening sea and a sky that seemed to come ever closer, the blue membrane above and the blue surface beneath thinning into lustrous indigo and black.

The only constant was the seal watching her from the water. Leaning over the railing, Marie looked back and wondered what it saw.

• • • •

Once Marie’s hair and skin were gone, her flesh was next. It fell away in a shudder when she woke up in her bunk one night. Fat and sinew, muscle and veins; she shrugged it all off and left it behind.

She was naught but bones now, and standing on deck, the air passed freely through her ribs, whistling through her pelvis and skull. Marie knew what she ought to feel, but the only thing she truly felt was unburdened.

• • • •

One morning, the sky above the ship shed the last of its indigo, revealing the depths beyond where stars and planets, moons and comets, souls and spirits, serpents and dragons moved restlessly through the vacuum. That same morning, the sea lost its colour, and in the translucent waters every creature was visible as clearly as if it were encased in crystal and glass.

Marie gazed into the sky and into the sea and found she could no longer tell them apart. Up and down had lost all meaning. Sea, sky; above, below . . . it all flowed together into one immeasurable depth where the lights in the darkness were both ruinous and beautiful.

In the ocean-sky, below-above, the seal looked at her with its large, bright eyes and this time it spoke her name.

I am not what you think I am, Marie, the seal said, and as it spoke, it became something else, something she could not see clearly because she could not understand it yet. Only the eyes, round and large, deep and bright, remained the same. You are not what you think you are either, the seal continued, and Marie knew it spoke the truth.

She looked back at the beginning of her journey, pulling in her memories like pulling on a fishing line, and the shape of the past twisted in her grip, taking on a different shape and hue.

Once upon a time, there had been a mission, a cargo, a future she was supposed to save. A destination, beyond the confines of this star. Marie could remember that the mission, the cargo, the future, the destination had once seemed important to her, but she no longer remembered why.

Looking into the dark mirrored surface of the void that surrounded her, Marie did not see the soft sheen of her bones. Instead, she saw a body reclining in a seat. She saw no face, just an opaque, frost-rimed helmet visor, and below that, a full-cover suit, padded and zipped tight, connected to tubes and wires, neural fibers and sensor arrays.

Marie knew that everything she had been, everything she had discarded—hair and skin and flesh; her bones picked clean in whispers—was still inside that suit, and she also knew none of it was hers anymore.

Come, the seal said, looking at Marie from the water’s surface even though there was no water.

Marie’s bones whispered softly in the wind, and she felt herself change again. Her bones and joints loosened and fell away. The weight of the ruined world, the burden of the mission she had been sent out to achieve, the heaviness of the maps and the coordinates, the cargo, the future, none of it meant anything anymore.

Without it, and without her bones, she was light—both ruinous and beautiful—and in the depths surrounding her, she saw that the seal had been joined by others like it. They were many, and their bright eyes gazed at her, the true shape of their bodies hidden in void and shadow.

Marie did not remember letting go, but behind her, the ship was already tumbling away through the dark, taking her old body with it. No matter. She didn’t need it here.

The seals looked at her as she rose and fell towards them, and in a flash of sheer and utter joy, she wondered what they would tell her that she didn’t already know.

©2023 by Maria Haskins.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Haskins is a Swedish-Canadian writer and reviewer of speculative fiction. She debuted as a writer in her native Sweden, and currently lives just outside Vancouver with a husband, two children, several birds, a snake, and a very large black dog. Her latest short story collection, Wolves & Girls, is out now from Brain Jar Press. Maria’s work has appeared in her 2021 short story collection Six Dreams About the Train, and also in The Best Horror of the Year Volume 13, Black Static, Interzone, The Deadlands, Fireside, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Flash Fiction Online, Strange Horizons, Cast of Wonders, PseudoPod, Escape Pod, Podcastle, Diabolical Plots, Kaleidotrope, and elsewhere. Find out more on her website mariahaskins.com.

Instructions for the Broken Hearted

Jordan Kurella | 1098 words

You Will Need:

– a Heart in a jar
– a Knife (sharp)
– a Tarp

Prep:

Lay down tarp on clean surface. Place prybar and knife within reach. Place self on tarp.

Instructions:

Think of your most recent ex. Now, take the knife in your dominant hand. The right one, as this is the right time to do what needs to be done. You often second guess your decisions, like letting your ex move in at all. You two had a good time, for a while, until they left and blocked your number three days after they ripped your heart out.

They were standing in the doorway, putting on their mittens and hat, the van already packed. They had just said, “I can’t win with you anymore.” And you said, “You ripped my heart out. You said you hated me.” You’d said the same thing dozens of times, but this time, they took it like an instruction. This time, their fist went right through your ribcage and their mittened fingers wrapped around your heart. They pulled it out, glanced at it a moment, then tossed it, beating and bloody, at your toes for the last time.

On the floor, the stain remains.

In your dreams, they’re writing songs about you now. About how fragile your heart was, how fragile you are. How they held you up; how they were the stronger one. They used to call themselves the Cornerstone of the Relationship.

You always said, “But there’s only one cornerstone, isn’t there? Wouldn’t it be better to be pillars? Then there could be two of us.”

They said, “I know what I said.”

Now, bring the jar closer to you. It will need to be next to you for what is to come. The heart is still in there, covered in the wooly bits from their mittens when they grabbed it. It’s going to itch when you put it back in. It’s necessary to understand that some things are poison . . . and that some people are even worse.

Your heart has an accurate memory—like this one covered in the evidence of how they last saw you, over their shoulder, giving you the side eye as you crouched down to pick up your heart as the winter wind whistled through the hole in your chest.

The hole has been closing over time. That hasn’t stopped the questions. “Why haven’t you been coming out?” “Why do you seem so hollow?” “Why do you look so placid?”

You didn’t have the heart to answer them, literally or metaphorically. But when your best friend came over and saw your heart in the jar on the kitchen counter, she said you had to get this taken care of ASAP. She brought over sage and salt and did her whole witch thing that did nothing for you except make your nose itch for a week.

It was one more unemployed morning in a year of unemployed mornings that you realized that loneliness begets loneliness. You were staring at your heart slowly beating in its jar, hating it, resenting it, when something your best friend said came back to you.

“You know, we can keep hiding from our own bad energy, or we can take it in ourselves and own it. Manifest it into something else. Or we can, just, die mad, I guess.”

So now, on the tarp, with the knife in your hand—the right one—cut through the healing skin. This is going to hurt, but it’s important to feel something beyond the guilt of false accusations. Cut the skin open in four flaps. When you open it, take a moment to feel the summer air, feel it rushing into the hole in your chest.

When the moment is over, open the jar.

Retrieve the heart and move it gently past the shattered ribs and into your chest. Right into the cavity your ex so brutally tore it from. Place it there, with its scars and its memories and its hurt. This heart has a memory of not only how others hurt it but how you hurt it, too. How you tried to protect it, isolate it. How others did the same.

And now—when you put it in your chest—how you welcomed it home.

A heart given freely is a fragile thing, malleable, changing. Yours grew tougher, grew layers. Picked up silt and dirt from the floor. Codas and refrains of conversation. The pattern from your ex’s shoe as they stomped on it, over and over. You still get bits of their favorite songs stuck in your head as you make your way about the apartment, watering plants, cleaning the counters.

The songs you just can’t shake. But sometimes there are good memories, too.

Those hurt more.

Them standing in the kitchen, heating up marinara sauce. “Is it supposed to be that red?” that’s your voice talking. “It’s from a jar,” they’re saying back. “It’s made from the blood of my enemies.”

The good with the bad. All of it will be put back.

You’ve lived your life soulless for too long.

You feel a dull ache: an ache of how you want someone’s lips on yours, how you want someone’s fingers laced with yours, how you want a brush of someone’s hand on your arm or their fingers running through your hair. These are things you want, that you’ve wanted for so long. It’s time.

It is time.

You’re able to breathe again, for the first time in years. Your heartbeat strikes you with such yearning for the first time in a year. Loneliness made you into a callus, and that’s okay.

That’s okay.

The body knows what it needs. Feel it now, as the ribs fold over to protect the heart. To protect you. Wrap the skin around your bones, worry it closed with your stitching fingers so that you don’t get cold. Now you can hold yourself, hold yourself tight. Taste the sobs on your breath, the shuddering of your body shaking with each wrenching memory.

Now breathe.

You are whole again.

This is permanent; you are permanent. You are a best friend, a needed person—someone people miss when they’re not around. A sibling, a neighbor, a friendly face.

You are more than a mark on the tarp and a stain on the floor and an imprint in your ex’s memory. You’re the reason they write breakup songs. The reason you are crying right now. But most importantly: you are the reason another person smiles at all.

©2023 by Jordan Kurella.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jordan Kurella is a trans and disabled author who has lived all over the world (including Moscow and Manhattan). In his past lives, he was a photographer, radio DJ, and social worker. His work has been nominated for the Nebula Award, long listed for the British Science Fantasy Award, and taught at Iowa State University. He is the author of the novella, I Never Liked You Anyway (Lethe Press), and the short story collection, “When I Was Lost” (Trepidatio). His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Jordan lives in Ohio with his perfect service dog and perfectly serviceable cat.

Simmered in Their Wealth Like the Richest of Sauces

Jo Miles | 1568 words

Listen, my vicious darlings, for this world is strange and full of promise, and when you awake, there is much you’ll need to know. Long ages after humans last encountered a real, waking dragon, there was a man called Dennis Knight.

He was no knight, my precious treasures. The name itself was vanity. But he was what passes for a prince in this age: a wealthy man, ruler of a strange and far-flung kingdom, he wielded his gold as a weapon more brutal than any sword, as princes have always done (and I should know). Like most princes, his wealth did not make him happy, yet he sought happiness through gathering more wealth.

People say that even before he met me, Dennis Knight fancied himself an adventurer like knights of old. He traveled to distant lands, killed great beasts not for their meat, but for trophies. He possessed astonishing armor that let him dive deep beneath the sea, unearthing sunken ships and claiming their hoards. I am told he sought even to conquer the moon. Dennis Knight had bested so many so-called challenges, rendered simple by his wealth, that he grew discontent. My little sparks, he was bored, and that’s when he began studying dragons.

Over the ages, humans have turned dragons into myths, and those myths made dragons into monsters. Stories told of dragons burning villages, dragons capturing and consuming innocent damsels, dragons mindless and cruel. Slander, all! But one thing they remembered truly: of course, they remembered our hoards.

And despite the vastness of his wealth, more than he could ever hope to use, it was dragon-hoards that obsessed Dennis Knight. His money procured him every journal, every tome, every crumbling map. Donations, a mere pittance to him, ensured the ear of any scholar he wished. When he located a dragon lair, buried by memory and time, he wished to unearth it himself.

And that, my bright-winged babes, is how he woke me up.

I woke to tremors in the solid rock around me. It did not put me in a kindly mood after my long sleep—too long! I’d sought slumber while I waited out an age of pestilence and misery offering our kind no sustenance, but I sensed at once that I had slept long past that age’s end. I could not guess how the world had changed in that time, but the great roaring machines clawing a new entrance to my cave suggested it had changed greatly. In those first waking moments, it seemed changed beyond recognition (though I soon learned that only the surface of things was unfamiliar; their essence was the same).

I uncoiled myself from my comfortable golden hoard and stretched my wings wide, stoking my flames, ready to punish whatever knight had disturbed me. And that is when I scented Dennis Knight.

When you smell greed for the first time, my ravishing pups, you will know it. Even though you’ve never scented it before, you’ll recognize it in your scales, your sinews, your bones. A greedy man makes a tasty morsel, and a greedy man with wealth is the most scrumptious of all.

(This is important, my shining gems: wealth does not alleviate greed in humans, but only feeds it, like drinking poison and calling it medicine. Their hoards are minted from the sweat and blood of those who have too little already, and we merely take from the already-rich that which they never deserved—and which is safer in our care. Humans rarely thank us for freeing them of greed-sick lords and their toxic treasures, but they ought to.)

I planted myself between my hoard and this pallid, arrogant human.

“Why have you woken me?” I knew the answer, but it’s customary to ask.

The fool gawked up at me, too hoard-sick to fear me as he should. “Incredible! I never thought . . . Alive, after so long! How could it . . . Oh, we’ll figure that out later. Charles, call the contractor, tell them we need, I don’t know, nets! Strong nets, and more tranquilizers.”

Charles—a squire, it seemed, so meek I hadn’t noticed him—took two steps backward. His respect was admirable. “Mister Knight, sir . . .”

“Knight?” Steam seeped from my nostrils as I laughed. “If you are a knight, then your age has far lowered its standards.”

“It talks! This is even better than I dreamed.”

Charles craned his neck up at me, and his voice sank lower. “. . . I think we should run now, sir.”

“Nonsense.” The greed rose off Knight in waves, almost overpowering my good sense with hunger. Almost. He aimed a strange metal device at me, and I knew quite well the look of a prince brandishing a weapon. “If you can talk, you can understand me, right? So behave, or I’ll blow your brains out.”

An empty threat, for his greed wanted me alive. The reverse was not true.

“Maybe the army is better equipped . . .” Charles tried again.

“You should listen to your squire.” I slithered forward on my front claws, my belly dragging satisfyingly over my pile of gold, until my head was level with theirs. “You can stay or go, squire. My interest is in your prince.”

Up close, Knight’s scent was heady, more potent than any morsel I’d smelled before. Had hunger sharpened my senses, or time dulled my memory? Or was this new age that much richer with greed than those past?

Might there be an unparalleled feast waiting for me outside?

I opened my jaws, debating how best to enjoy Dennis Knight.

His weapon clicked, a sound so subtle that I did not immediately connect it to the sting: a dart, caught in the leathery spread of my wing.

I should have eaten him then, and quickly, but this strange new weapon alarmed me. Was it poison? A spell? The skin around the dart felt numb. I spread my wings and leapt skyward, fleeing while I could. I would satisfy my hunger, and soon, but not yet.

I recovered soon enough from the dart’s poison and set about exploring this world. I discovered much, far too much to share in one story. Later, my patient nippers, I will teach you how to survive in this new age: how to evade their cruel new weapons, when to hide and when to fight. I’ll show you what castles look like now: not the gleaming towers of glass you might be drawn to, where innocent damsels and peasants serve; nor the apparent fortresses, those vast ugly constructs where serfs now toil to exhaustion indoors instead of under the sun; but the gleaming-white mansions where the princes sleep.

And there are so many princes here, my ravenous loves! Men and women smothered in greed, simmering in their wealth like the richest of sauces. The greed of humans had grown a thousand-fold while I slept, a million-fold, with no dragons to keep them in check.

It was simple to track Dennis Knight’s scent to his castle, though it was far from my lair, over mountains and plains and across a broad ocean. I found his factory-fortresses, too, by following his squires. Knight ruled his peasants from afar, passing down orders and never dirtying himself with a visit. (Princes never change, though the gap between them and their peasants yawns wider than ever.) I bided my time, patient despite my stomach’s growling. I waited for my chance to seize the sweetest morsels.

That moment came when Knight held a party to celebrate his new-won riches—my treasures, stolen. It was beyond bold to flaunt his theft, but as I have told you, he was hoard-sick, and greed made him foolish. He had his mercenary knights out attempting to capture me, but still had no fear of me, certainly not in his own castle.

Dragons know well how to destroy castles. This one wasn’t even made of stone.

I peeled off the roof, savoring the rising smell of so many princes packed together, marinating in each other’s greed. A blast of flame quick-roasted most, preserving them for later, though I took care to limit my feasting to the princes, and let the servants go. The mercenaries guarding the castle fled rather than protect their prince.

And Dennis Knight, that thieving false knight? He tried to plead, but I did not spare time to listen and taunt him; I ate him in two quick bites. I was hungry, and besides, it’s poor manners to play with your food.

And thus I found a new lair for you, my long-awaited eggs. I’ve nestled you in my reclaimed hoard, swollen now with the additions of Dennis Knight’s jewels and fine artwork. More knights and princes will no doubt come, drawn by tales of danger and adventure. They will try to capture us or kill us, inspired by the knights of old. But do not be afraid, my slumbering nestlings! I am awake now, full-bellied and strong, and I’ll keep you safe in this castle until you’re ready to hatch into this world.

And what a world! Such an overflow of greed awaits us. Humanity is rotten with it, and who better to cull the greed-sick from their ranks?

Grow strong within your eggs, my devastating dears. Nurse your hunger, and when you emerge, we will feast.

©2023 by Jo Miles.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jo Miles writes optimistic science fiction and fantasy. Their work includes the space opera novel Warped State, as well as short stories in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Analog, and more. Jo lives in Maryland, where they help nonprofits use the internet to save the world, but mostly serve the whims of their two cats. You can find them online at jomiles.com.

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

Remains

N.R. Lambert | 778 words

When it happens, you’re unprepared. Everyone is. You were never as safe as you believed. Normal ends here, in this moment. But you don’t know it at first. At first, you run.

Run.

Don’t look down, don’t look up. Just go go go until you stumble, stop, collide.

A hand grasps yours in a dark stairwell. You never know their face, but you cling to each other in that long breath between lives, because it is so much worse behind you (don’t look up), and because it is so much worse ahead (don’t look down).

This is how you survive.

Look ahead, straight ahead.

Thrust into the glaring light, your hand empty. All around you, a polyphony of sirens; screaming.

Don’t stop. Just go. Go. Go. Go.

Look straight—

• • • •

Ahead of you, a child dragging a long, plastic packing strip behind her. It is the only sound on a bridge heavy with leaving—the city’s first funeral march. So many people have never been so quiet, but in death . . .

In death in death in death.

Don’t look up at the swath of ghosts cutting across that blue, blue sky toward Brooklyn.

Don’t look down at the soot and paper and people drifting at your feet.

Look ahead, straight ahead.

A deserted parkway at rush hour, golden sun setting (it was such a beautiful day).

You’re startled when the birds still sing at dusk. At the pale moth gently whispering against your temple before it disappears into the dark. These, and all the innocences that follow, crack you open again and again and again.

Somehow, there is always something left to splinter.

This is how you survive.

• • • •

The first night you don’t sleep. You stare bleary eyed and bloodshot at whichever shellacked anchor dryly delivers the news.

The second night you flit and fall between what is outside and what is in your head—endless sirens, forever drawing closer, but never arriving.

On the third night, you dream of writing out a grocery list—tomatoes pasta bread cheese butter lettuce grapes salt—in careful, slow cursive. Numb till you wake.

After that, the dreams are of the lost places, frozen just as the dust drifted down from impact. Or as the top floors folded in and down, then out and down, and then just down and down and down.

You dream of the missing there, where they should be. Then there are just the spaces they left behind.

Then nothing at all.

• • • •

The jagged bones of the fallen claw at the sky. Skirting the remains, you pass them with dull eyes, an open crematory that smolders for weeks after. There is no rain. A mercy at first, and then a curse.

Hope flutters and fades against buildings and fences. No one has the heart to take them down, so they remain until the city absorbs them too.

• • • •

There is the one night, slinking behind you for miles before it finally strikes. Easy prey, you topple into your bleakest hour so swiftly you almost dive. But at the last second, you clutch at that slick black hole with bleeding nails. You want to let go, but without really understanding why, you choose to cling to that spot, howling in frustration and burning in a dark that sings to you.

Come morning, you climb.

This is how you survive.

• • • •

You count back to the last days of normal while you still remember. A week ago a month ago a year ago. The last time. The last time. You count and count and count and promise yourself you won’t forget the taste of before, until of course you do. You have to, this is how you survive.

• • • •

The first time you laugh it’s an assault, short and sharp, stabbing out from somewhere deep inside you. But you chase the feeling; follow it with too many borrowed cigarettes, too much cheap booze.

You wake slowly, adrift in the life you made for yourself while the rest of you was gone. The face you wear, only familiar around the edges, is reflected in the eyes of other survivors. There are parts of you that won’t start up again and pieces you can’t find, pieces buried out of necessity (don’t look down), buried so the rest of you could go on (don’t look up). But what is lost, is lost forever (look straight ahead). Just go. Go. Go. Go.

Rebuilding is forever incomplete, not just in the city.

This is how you survive. You count the days forward now.

And at night, when you sleep, you dream of the sea, instead of the sirens.

©2023 by N.R. Lambert.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

N.R. Lambert (she/her) is a speculative fiction author from New York City. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in several publications and anthologies, including Vastarien, The Modern Deity’s Guide to Surviving Humanity, and Don’t Turn Out the Lights. She’s also written articles and essays for TIME, LIFE, and Entertainment Weekly. She was a 2019 U.S. National Park Service Artist-in-Residence at Fire Island National Seashore. In addition to her work as a writer, pop culture author, and freelance copywriter, she teaches creative writing workshops at conferences, libraries, and the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Library and Information Science at Queens College. Learn more at NRLambert.com.

His Thing

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu | 4629 words

The house was on the same street as a bakery whose only offering was penis-shaped waffles. Rufaro didn’t like American houses very much. They looked paper thin like doll houses that would lift off into the clouds if a strong wind came by. American houses didn’t have gates, walls, or fences, an architectural oversight that Rufaro didn’t quite understand. Haelish, Massachusetts was somewhere between Salem and Boston and an ocean away from Bulawayo. She knew immediately that she didn’t like this small town whose name sounded like hell in her mouth.

Her new husband unlocked the front door, its metallic squeal a prison cell door slamming shut.

“Welcome home,” Brian said.

Rufaro plastered a smile on her face like the women at the kitchen party taught her. The kitchen party was a day before her white wedding. Brian had already paid her lobola in full. Her bride prize being paid in crisp US dollars had been the talk of the neighborhood for weeks. Brian hadn’t even tried to bargain down for her. Rufaro was supposed to be happy, to shove her worth into every single woman’s face like a shiny medal, but she felt like a broiler chicken with a hefty price tag on a grocery shelf. It didn’t matter how much had been paid for her, she was still going to be eaten. At the kitchen party, she was surrounded by tetes in colorful doeks brandishing tightly wrapped gifts and advice about how to be a good wife. While they ate queen cakes and scones, and popped pink balloons, she’d practiced the ear-to-ear grin with all her teeth, putting every Colgate ad and working clown to shame. The trick was to be elastic. When a smile never reached the eyes a woman had to put her entire face in it grinch-style. She stretched her face until her cheeks tore. Her mama taught her how to wipe away the blood with makeup wipes and cover the rip in her face with Fenty Beauty full coverage concealer.

“Uwache burugwa remurume wako uchidetemba kuti his soldier won’t work for anyone else but you,” Tete Moreblessing said winking and making a hand washing gesture with her hands to show off how to enchant her husband’s underwear. The women around her erupted into knowing giggles. This started off the round of marital coaching meant to arm Rufaro for the battle ahead.

“Always feed your husband. The stomach is their weakness,” Tete Alice said to a round of enthusiastic nods from the other women. “Mix your monthly blood with the beef stew and serve it up with sadza nice and good. He will never hit you.”

“If he cheats on you,” Tete Thandiwe said pointing out the window at a garden lizard running across the yard and climbing on the wall. “Cut the dzvinyu’s tail. Bake the pieces into the vetkoeks. He will never stray from his home like a dzvinyu doesn’t stray from the walls.”

“The most important thing is to figure out what his thing is and figure it out fast,” mama said.

“His thing?” Rufaro asked.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” mama said not offering more. “We give you these recipes but you must adapt them, add your own spice. Each man is different. Each man has his thing.”

• • • •

Think of me as a vacuum. I clean up. I suck all the shadows that make children afraid of the dark, I exorcize the tikoloshi under the bed. I feed on all the filth that humans excrete.

Think of me as an air purifier. There is more than oxygen in the air, there are energies that make this world sick. I remove them.

Think of me as a black hole swallowing and collapsing all the bad things.

Call me obsidian. Call me coal. I am the color of a freshly tarred road, charred timber, and the deep black of space. Energy, or as I like to call it venom, is yummy. Grief is gourmet, a three-course meal deserving a Michelin star. Jealousy is a salty, savory snack like a plate of matemba or packet of groundnuts bought from an old lady at the musika. Anger and hatred burn when they go down, exploding with flavor. The most delicious is fear with a side of hatred. It’s cold, creamy, and so so sweet. A lovely dessert after a fine meal. There are so many tasty venoms in this house I could almost cry from the rich buffet, if I were capable of crying that is.

• • • •

The front door opened to a long, dark corridor that reminded Rufaro of the countless ZESA power cuts back home and how her family couldn’t afford candles so they just sat in the dark telling each other scary nganos. Rufaro’s favorite was about the ghost bus in Gwanda. The story goes some buses are driven by the dead. Ngozi move like vultures always circling places where horrific accidents occurred. The dead picked up a man whose car had broken down on the main road, took him for a ride on a ghost ZUPCO for seven years. The ghost bus raced to Harare and back, sometimes it took a detour to Bulawayo. Sometimes the bus crossed the border like a malaitsha to South Africa and Bostwana. When the ghosts got bored, they kicked him out of the bus and left him naked in a sango somewhere far from home. The man could never find his way out of the woods.

A light flickered on and off overhead. Her suitcases, the only thing she’d brought from home, disappeared into a closet. She felt around for the walls and let them guide her toward a musty lounge with a sticky coffee table. Flies buzzed around a glass with clumpy yellow milk.

“Sorry I don’t do much cleaning,” Brian said, embarrassed. “I guess that’s why you are here, to help me out.”

Brian gave her a tour of the house. They descended down to the basement to a boiler gurgling. A porcelain hello kitty figurine waved slowly at Rufaro from the second step. This was Rufaro’s first time in a basement, another American architectural marvel.

“Here’s the laundry machine,” Brian said. The washing machine’s circular glass door was like an eye following her across the room. Rufaro stretched her smile to its limit, the gash in her face widening like an open mouth ready to bite.

Next, he showed her the kitchen. Even though the overpowering smell of Lysol wafted through the air, the kitchen was incredibly dirty. He promised to fix it up to make her more comfortable.

“Your mother said you like reading,” Brian said, gesturing to the empty bookcase in the lounge. “You can fill it up with whatever you want.”

The gesture meant to be sweet and thoughtful filled her with rage. She’d started reading books in grade six when the mobile library bus came to her school on Fridays. The bus was an initiative by the Bulawayo public library to get books to children in government schools without libraries. She and her best friend Pinky would wait ravenously all week for the bus to pull into her school to pick up another installment of Sweet Valley High. She’d checked out a new book on the day her parents told her she wouldn’t be returning to school.

“We can’t afford the school fees anymore,” baba had said.

“But Sindiso and Sam are still going,” Rufaro wailed.

“Your brothers need an education,” baba had said. “There is no use in wasting money we don’t have sending a girl to school. Don’t worry you will just get married.” The unspoken part was that her father thought she’d received just enough education to help her future children with reading, writing, and maths homework. What more did a girl need to learn?

Rufaro refused to take off her school uniform, she even went to bed in it, squeezing her eyes shut and praying that somehow the uniform would turn into a key that would allow her through the school’s gates. She marched to the school in her uniform. The headmaster was standing at the entrance with a list of students with outstanding term fees. He turned away each of them at the gate. The headmaster would not let Rufaro in so she plopped herself down on the ground and sat cross legged in silence at the entrance. Embarrassed, the headmaster called her parents to come get their child. Rufaro would not move even when the clouds darkened, and rain drenched her green uniform. Baba and her brothers had to drag her away, kicking and screaming. That night mama burned her uniform, each thread melting to ash. Mama locked her inside the house for a year until school was like a dead relative no one talked about anymore, a ghost that lived in the floorboards.

• • • •

So far Brian seemed nice enough. Rufaro didn’t really know that much about him. His face was a perfect symmetry that begged to be rearranged. She wished she could add a mole to his cheeks, a scar to his forehead, or a crook to his nose. He was unbearable to look at, like when someone drenched themselves in an expensive perfume, the scent turning from sweet to an overwhelming assault. For their first meal together, Brian ordered penis-shaped waffles for her from Mr. Weenies Bakery down the street. The cream-filled waffle was light and fluffy, the chocolate syrup drizzled down her chin. Brian licked his lips while he watched her eat.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Rufaro asked. Brian’s dinner plate remained empty.

“I’m feasting my eyes,” he said.

The story of how they met was the furthest thing from a meet cute. Two weeks after Rufaro turned twenty, Brian, who’d made a life for himself kudiaspora as an engineer, decided it was time for a wife. He travelled back to his hometown, Bulawayo, in search of one. What family would turn away a green card for their daughter in these times when bread and butter had disappeared from dinner tables? Eager mothers paraded their daughters before the returnee. He’d politely turned each of them away.

Brian’s parents lived across the road from Rufaro’s family. Rufaro sat kudiaspora by the verandah reading a book. When school was taken from her she’d turned to worlds inside her books to fill the gaps. Of course, the aloof girl reading a thick book caught Brian’s attention. He’d hopped the fence, marched to the verandah and asked. “How would you like to live in America?”

• • • •

The first night in the house the walls moved, sliding toward each other as if they meant to crush her where she stood. Rufaro ran to the front door to escape and found that when she swung the door open, an invisible barrier pushed her back into the house. She banged against this barrier until her knuckles bled, a hollow thud echoing back at her.

“Why can’t I leave?” she asked Brian when he came back home.

“Why would you want to leave?” He said. “Your life is here with me.”

The next day, when Brian left for work, Rufaro called her mama on WhatsApp.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she said.

“You’ve found his thing,” mama said. “When we recite our vows, they are a spell binding us to that person forever, binding us to their thing.”

Mama told her that every husband had a thing. Some men liked to suck on their wives’ nipples, fattening themselves on breastmilk until the women were drained husks walking who hungered so much they ate their own children. Some men shapeshifted into ravenous beasts at night, crunching bones and mauling faces. Mama told her a ngano that many believed to be an old wives’ tale but doesn’t every ngano have a nugget of truth? Mama told her of Simbimbino, a young boy who watched his father dig a hole in the middle of their maize field and push his wife in. Upon hitting rock bottom, the wife transformed into a pig. The husband salivated at the pink of her plump flesh and left to gather firewood to make a bonfire that night for a feast. That was his thing, you see. While he was gone, there amongst the endless rows of green maize stalks, at the bottom of a dark hole she sang to her son. Upon hearing his mother’s voice in the body of a pig, Simbimbino threw a ladder down to get her out before his father could come back and eat her.

So you see, mama said ending the ngano, being trapped inside the house wasn’t the worst thing.

• • • •

When the walls settled down the next day, a new room appeared. It was a nursery. The room’s walls were covered in Barbie pink wallpaper. A pram rocked back and forth in the corner. In the center of the room was a cradle where lay a wooden doll shaped-like a palm-sized scarecrow. The wooden doll was dressed in a blue onesie with the name Simbimbino embroidered on the front. The wooden doll had human eyes. Big brown eyes that would have been adorable on a chubby toddler. The big human eyes watched Rufaro enter the room.

“Mama,” it said.

Simbimbino let out a piercing cry that Rufaro could only describe as a crow. Some primordial instinct told her to pick up the thing.

“Thula thula, thula sana,” Rufaro sang the first lullaby that came to mind. “Don’t cry, Simbimbino.”

The doll latched onto her left boob and suckled. Rufaro and the doll locked eyes as its sharp teeth grazed her flesh.

• • • •

When Brian wasn’t looking, Rufaro’s lips were downturned as if two weights had latched onto the corners of her mouth and were anchored to her feet. Dark shadows swirled around her, a cyclone wrecking everything in its path. The shadows were everything she’d ever felt that hurt. The heartbreak of growing up in a country that was a pot of boiling water, slowly meant to singe her out of her mind. The unmooring of leaving home so young. A marriage that stripped bits of her each time. The burden of having to send money back home to the same family that had put her in this position by taking away any tools she could use to be someone else. Rufaro was haunted by who she could have been. I named the shadows around her venom, pulling them inside me until they became nothing.

• • • •

Brian showed her how to order books from Barnes and Noble and have them shipped to their address. The first book she bought for her shelf was You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi. The girl with gold braids on the cover caught her attention. Rufaro liked romance novels because women got happy endings in them. When she read of Feyi and her messy best friend Joy, she got off on their freedom. She thought of her own best friend Pinky. Pinky’s family were outcasts, mapostori whose beliefs were so fluid they blurred the lines between indigenous spirituality and Christianity. They wore white robes, shaved their heads, and bathed in holy water. They refused to worship under a church, preferring to hear sermons preached on top of a mountain, under a rock, on top of a tree, anywhere but a building. Fed up with mapostori congregations taking up space in public parks and the sides of major roads, the government offered to build them a temple. The mapostori not only refused but took offense at the offer. Spirit cannot be contained by walls and needs to be out in the open air.

A madzibaba in red garments always showed up weekly to Pinky’s house to lead an all-night prayer at an open fire in their yard. The madzibaba threw holy water around the house from a cleansing bowl and asked the family to say their wishes into the air. During full moons, Pinky would place tea leaves inside a jar and leave it out in her yard and retrieve it the next day.

“Moon tea,” she’d say brewing the leaves, inhaling the steam with a satisfied sigh. “We are most powerful during a full moon.”

The moon tea was a reddish-brown color and tasted like regular Freshpak rooibos when Rufaro tried it but Pinky insisted it would unlock this and that energy.

Pinky told Rufaro about how her family was given special rocks by their madzibaba that they all dropped into the holy water. The rocks warded off evil.

• • • •

Every day Rufaro sat by the window watching the cars go by while she stitched the gash in her face with a crotchet needle and fed the insatiable doll. Simbimbino wouldn’t let go, it was always feeding. The daily face mending gave her something to pass time. She always imagined mama’s voice shouting, “fix your face.” Band-Aids and makeup had long proven to be ineffective against the bleeding. The more she smiled, the bigger the gash grew. She accepted the gash as a part of her face now, like a nose or eyebrow or maybe a big blackhead on the forehead.

Rufaro started growing things to pass the time. Mint, parsley, and sage at first. Then bigger houseplants like snake plants and pink string of hearts. Every day she tended to her flowers and quickly saw blooms. She experimented with all the outlandish gardening tips and tricks she found in online forums. One woman online said she added earthworms to the soil in her planters and it did wonders. Rufaro ordered two hundred and fifty live worms with Brian’s credit card. When they arrived, she picked up a fistful of the dark soil and watched the little brown worms wiggle between her fingers. She liked the worms more than her husband. Her books, her plants, and her worms were the only thing that belonged to her in this house.

Rufaro hated cleaning the house. Whenever she cleared a stain on the kitchen counter, another would materialize in its place. Grease and dust multiplied like tumors as if cleaning fed them. She was exhausted from the endless scrubbing. Her hands hardened and blistered in just a few months. The house was just as flimsy as she’d surmised when she first saw it, a house of cards with cracks in every crevice that needed her calloused hands to hold it up. The house trembled like an earthquake whenever Rufaro wasn’t laboring as if her sweat nourished and soothed the house. When she went up the stairs to rest, the stairs writhed like a worm burrowing through the ground. Instead of taking her to her bedroom, the stairs shifted toward the basement door. In the basement, the washing machine churned laundry between two giant laundry baskets the size of swimming pools. When she folded the clothes, the pile extended all the way to the ceiling.

• • • •

Unlike the other women who went to Rufaro’s kitchen party bearing neatly wrapped gifts, Pinky came with me—a polished black dombo the size of a fist. She dropped me in Rufaro’s hands.

“It absorbs bad energy around you,” Pinky said. “Brings clarity. Helps you to know who you truly are.”

“I know who I am,” Rufaro said.

Pinky cocked her head curiously. “Do you?”

“How exactly does this black rock absorb bad energy?” Rufaro said, rolling her eyes. She examined me skeptically. She thought I was shiny and pretty and nothing more than that.

“You’re supposed to get me gifts I can use when I’m married like pots and pans and manapukeni, not madombo,” Rufaro said.

“A friend doesn’t gift you pots and pans,” Pinky said. “She gives you protection.”

• • • •

Frustrated, one day, she grabbed a dining chair and smashed the window screaming, “Let me out!” The window shattered, the shards shooting at her like tiny missiles. The spray would have looked like rainfall to anyone watching.

When Brian returned, he bandaged her like he was handling an egg.

“The more you try to escape,” Brian said, “the more it will hurt.” He spoke to Rufaro as if she were a child who’d stuck her hand down a termite mound and gotten stung.

“Why me?” Rufaro asked. “Out of all the girls, you chose me.”

“Unenharo,” Brian said, his eyes glimmering. “That stubbornness, that stone cold resolve. I want to break it.”

• • • •

Rufaro didn’t unpack me from her luggage until two months into her stay. I was wrapped in a zambiya at the bottom of her bag. She took me out with care, thinking of her friend.

“You’re supposed to protect me huh,” she said. Rufaro talked to me the way she talked to Pinky. Not only did the house prevent her from leaving, now whenever she tried to call Pinky, her friend’s voice was the bray of a vuvuzela. Rufaro couldn’t make out any of the words. The house was jamming her calls to Pinky.

“I think Feyi should have fucked the dad earlier,” Rufaro said, explaining the plot of the romance novel to me ever since the house cut her off from her friend. “The son ended up being trash anyways.” Even though I couldn’t respond, I liked our gossip sessions and I couldn’t wait to hear what happened in the next chapter. I imagined what it would be like to be inside the book, what the character’s venoms would taste like. Rufaro imagined herself in the book too. Rufaro craved choice, youth, and a pair of wings. I gobbled up all her envy, rage, and sadness but this time it made me ache like eating too many sweets. Feeding on Rufaro’s venoms wasn’t satisfying anymore. I needed something more substantial, a real meal. I began to wonder if I could get to the source of her venoms, what would it taste like?

• • • •

“It’s a full moon tonight,” she said, wincing at the doll still attached to her breast. “Pinky always told me that we’re most powerful during a full moon.” Rufaro watched the sun go down, counting the minutes until Brian returned. “The women at the kitchen party said I can adapt the recipes they gave me.”

Rufaro moved to the kitchen, grabbing a cutting board and knife. The knife was blunt. She longed for the traveling knife sharpening men back home. The knife sharpeners roamed neighborhoods like ice cream men, instead of selling ice cream they sharpened knives and sealed pots. They rode on their little bicycles, the flaming torches for sealing pots strapped to their backs. They whistled and sang the little jingle, “namapoto namapoto namapotoooooooooo!” Women would emerge from their houses holding pots with holes in them in one hand and blunt knives in the other, blades glistening in the afternoon sun. Rufaro grabbed the sharpener Brian got for her from Walmart and sharpened the blade with freedom on her mind.

She placed the cast iron skillet on the stove. “At the kitchen party, the women said using the tail of a dzvinyu makes a husband not stray from home.” Is there another recipe to get rid of him? Rufaro would not dare say the thought aloud lest the house was listening. She knew the house wasn’t her friend, it wasn’t on her side, it couldn’t be trusted.

At the dinner table, Rufaro grabbed the stainless steel chef’s knife, the sharp point aiming for Brian’s throat. The house revolted against Rufaro’s attack to protect its master. The floors shifted and spun. Rufaro was flung out of the dining room before the blade could reach his throat and found herself in the kitchen, chained to the sink.

“Did you really think you could beat me in my domain,” Brian said, following her into the kitchen. “I’m the man of this house.” He stood in front of her, his furnace breath against her skin. “I’ve been good to you. I’m a nice guy. This is how you repay my kindness.”

“You think trapping me here is a kindness,” Rufaro said.

Brian walked towards the fridge chuckling. “My father told me you shouldn’t be too nice to a woman, I should have listened to him. You had freedom before, books that I bought you, TV to watch. Now I’m going to keep you chained to that sink.”

• • • •

Rufaro lost count of the days she spent chained to the sink. Brian would come into the kitchen for a glass of water. His gulps unbearably loud, the water dripping down his chin as he watched her out of the corner of his eye. He was waiting for an apology that wouldn’t come.

“Have you given up yet?” he said. “This can all be over. You’re making this harder on yourself.”

A single tear rolled down Rufaro’s face and disappeared into the gash on her cheeks.

“I made you mahewu, it’s been sitting in the fridge for weeks,” Rufaro said. “It will go bad if you don’t drink it soon.”

He smirked. “You know my favorite drink.” he said. “Is that your way of apologizing?” She nodded.

He took the jar of mahewu out of the fridge and gulped it down. Rufaro smirked.

Suddenly, the tiled floor underneath his feet turned into a mud pit.

“I added a special ingredient to the mahewu,” Rufaro said, the gash in her face stretching into a smirk. “Worms.” Brian tried to move, to free himself but he was trapped in the mud.

“Stuck in the mud,” Rufaro sang the little jingle children sing when they played stuck in the mud. “Somebody has to be it, that’s you!” Rufaro pointed at Brian flailing in the mud. “If you put a lizard tail in your husband’s food, he won’t stray. But I figured out that if you put worms, you can make him sink into the ground like the worm he is.”

“Get me out of here, Rufaro!” Brian screamed. “You won’t get away with this!”

“In this story, I refuse to be the pig at the bottom of the pit,” Rufaro said, reaching into her pocket with her one free hand and taking out the rock.

• • • •

Rufaro takes me out of her pocket with her free hand. “I didn’t believe in magic before when Pinky told me about it,” Rufaro said. “Now I do. Pinky told me this dombo can absorb bad energy. Perhaps I should test it out.” Something stirred in me that I couldn’t quite understand. I examined it some more. It was a hunger, an overwhelming desire to hurt Brian. Had I found the source of Rufaro’s venoms? Should I eat it? I’d never fed on a human before, all I’d ever done was absorb the energy in a room. Could I eat a human? But wasn’t everything in this universe energy, including humans? I focused on Brian, the mouthwatering smell of him. I pulled him toward me.

• • • •

Rufaro held up the rock toward Brian. At first, Brian didn’t budge. He was an immovable sack of energy wrapped in flesh and then suddenly, an invisible force was dragging him across the mud toward Rufaro. A flash of light and then he was gone, swallowed whole by Pinky’s rock. The vows enchanting the house fell, the chains around Rufaro melted to dust, the doll lost its teeth and fell to the floor. Rufaro grabbed Simbimbino and tossed it into the fireplace. It let out a shrill cry as it burned. Rufaro stumbled toward the kitchen counter, her hands shaking. The rock was warm in her hands like a baby’s belly, full from a good serving of Brian. Rufaro limped towards the front door, turning the knob gingerly. She inhaled deeply, savoring the outside. She dialed Pinky’s number and took her first step with her best friend’s cheerful voice humming in her ears.

©2023 by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano (storyteller). Her debut short story collection, Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky, Spring 2023), was selected for the 2021 UPK New Poetry & Prose Series. Her novel manuscript in progress was selected by George RR Martin’s team for the Worldbuilder Scholarship to attend Clarion West in 2022. She is pursuing her MFA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where she teaches in the writing program. She has taught at Clarion West Writers Workshop online and earned her BA at Cornell University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She received the 2017 Cornell University George Harmon Coxe Award for Poetry selected by Sally Wen Mao, and was the 2020 fiction winner of Columbia Journal's Womxn History Month Special Issue and the 2021 Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest winner selected by K-Ming Chang. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Workshop for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in African Risen (Tordotcom Publishing, 2022) and has appeared or is forthcoming in F&SF, Tor.com, Fantasy Magazine, Columbia Journal, Fiyah Literary Magazine, Mermaids Monthly, and Kweli Journal. She is currently at work on a novel.

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

EXCERPT: Womb City (Erewhon Books)

Tlotlo Tsamaase | 4812 words

This genre-bending Africanfuturist horror novel blends The Handmaid’s Tale with Get Out in an adrenaline-packed, cyberpunk body-hopping ghost story exploring motherhood, memory, and a woman’s right to her own body.

Nelah seems to have it all: fame, wealth, and a long-awaited daughter growing in a government lab. But, trapped in a loveless marriage to a policeman who uses a microchip to monitor her every move, Nelah’s perfect life is precarious. After a drug-fueled evening culminates in an eerie car accident, Nelah commits a desperate crime and buries the body, daring to hope that she can keep one last secret.

The truth claws its way into Nelah’s life from the grave.

As the ghost of her victim viciously hunts down the people Nelah holds dear, she is thrust into a race against the clock: in order to save any of her remaining loved ones, Nelah must unravel the political conspiracy her victim was on the verge of exposing—or risk losing everyone.

Set in a cruel futuristic surveillance state where bodies are a government-issued resource, this harrowing story is a twisty, nail-biting commentary on power, monstrosity, and bodily autonomy. In sickeningly evocative prose, Womb City interrogates how patriarchy pits women against each other as unwitting collaborators in their own oppression. In this devastatingly timely debut novel, acclaimed short fiction writer Tlotlo Tsamaase brings a searing intelligence and Botswana’s cultural sensibility to the question: just how far must a woman go to bring the whole system crashing down?

Coming January 23, 2024 from Erewhon Books.

The evaluation room: concrete floors, concrete walls, with one glass wall overseeing the misty city. In its center stands a human-sized, onyx-colored glass house, facing a forensic panel. The words on its gold plaque glint: AI Criminal Behavior Evaluator (CBE), notoriously known as a hound that, through simulation, sniffs out traces of sociopathic tendencies in the blood, in the gene. Predicts the crime. Sees the crime. Tells the crime. A reel of motion picture film, reeling out your ocean of shadows and punishing you for it. All because this AI machine tells on you 100 percent without error. What could possibly be worse?

I swallow hard. My footsteps falter toward a workstation, which holds four seven-inch, wrist-sized, thick metal restraints.

A young woman, kohl-lined eyes, black hair clasped into a bun, shakes my hand. “Dr. Farahani. I’ll be overseeing your simulation today.”

I glance at my distended reflections dancing on the surface of the assessment chamber’s compact glass house. I blink. Reflections are steady as hell. My hands have a viselike grip on my arms, my thoughts stick with a clingy anxiety to my skull. I want to flee. I want to ram my head against the wall. I want to slam through the glass walls of the police precinct and fall fifty-five floors down, splat to the ground. Anything to avoid my evaluation. I’ve seen confident people walk into evaluation rooms only to be immediately evacuated from their bodies because they failed.

Someone clears their throat. I look up. The forensic panel, sat like a bored brown mannequins, fits into the shadow of a wall across a long table. The Honorable Judge Rorisang Moitshepi, criminal profiler Aref Sayed, forensic anthropologist Percy Nkile, and prosecutor Serati Zwebathu, overlooking a hologram screen that will transmit my simulation. These are friends, mostly my husband’s, who’ve come to our home for weekend braais, chuckling over glasses of wine. These are uncompromising and ruthless, justice-seeking people who could easily sentence their own blood, their own children, to abide by the law. It makes me wary. Close friends will bear witness to the intimate parts of my life.

A young man with dreadlocks busies himself at his transcribing station, which will record my simulation conversations much like a confession.

I grip the chamber’s framing, the metal sickly cold. Why did they give me Serati? Her questioning techniques infinitesimally slip through the simulation into the evaluatee’s loved ones’ speech, using emotion to extract a confession. After all, don’t we trust our closest friends with some of our deepest, darkest secrets? The affairs we’re having, the car we accidentally veered into in the parking lot and left without notification, the times we had to skive work for a potential job interview. How long would it take you to spill your guts to your best friend, your lover, your confidante because of the inability to endure the overwhelming, unbearable weight of a secret? It’s very hard to trust in the real world when the simulation is just the same.

One question. One trigger. And I could spill my crimes. Even those I’ve yet to commit.

I swallow. Study them. Serati. Shorn hair. Light-brown skin. Bright, wide eyes. No makeup. No earrings. Full, plump lips patted with beige. A soft, quiet beauty often depicted in tones of rage in the media, a beauty that buries us, a beauty that audiences long to replicate through incisions, surgeries, injections.

The ventilation system hums and sings through the glow-lit ceiling as Dr. Farahani clasps the thick rings of metal restraints around my wrists and ankles. They’re cold and heavy.

“Don’t be nervous,” she says, causing my eyes to veer from Serati. “There are chains inside that will magnetically connect to these restraints. For your safety.”

“Or in case I become . . . difficult?”

She smiles. “You’ve nothing to fear.”

“Dr. Farahani is right,” Serati says, approaching us. “We do everything through Matsieng. We acquire peace through Xem. Matsieng understands your blood intimately; if you were dangerous, Xe would’ve flagged you to the Murder Trials. You are one of the safe microchipped people.”

I shiver. Why is Serati referring to Matsieng as if Xe were a government employee assessing microchipped people, determining which to report to the Murder Trials? “What does my blood have to do with that folklore?” I ask. “What do you mean by that?”

Serati smiles, evades my question. “This evaluation may feel like a nightmare, but from the nightmare comes heaven.”

She rejoins her colleagues, but her words leave me cold and empty. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t committed a crime in the now or the past. The CBE knows if you will commit a crime in the future. Which fucks me up every time. You know every detail of your current lifespan’s past, but how can you know your future? How can you even prepare to pass this evaluation? To trick it in the same way it tricks reality?

Forensic evaluations start at age sixteen. The original owner successfully passed two, the second host failed one, and I have passed eight. A good record for eight years. A model citizen. Yet why do I have this paralyzing anxiety?

Dr. Farahani tilts her head. “It’s protocol that I read you the process of what happens to your body hereafter. If the CBE simulation indicates your future self committing a crime, you have forfeited your right as a citizen of Botswana to receive a new body. Your current body will be considered unusable and a liability to the country’s safety; it will be cremated. After our forensic transcriber has noted down your confession, your body will be transferred to the theatre of Utopia Hospital—which is on the sixth floor Wing E of this building—where your consciousness will be transferred to the Crypt Prison, virtually incarcerated, and tortured forever. For the Security of Society.”

The Crypt Prison is a tower on the northern side of the city containing mainframes and servers of minds that have been uploaded, some in a virtual prison, others on a waiting list, all in the same building. They are stored in sleek black disks with intricate, honeycomb designs tucked into a wall. What would be my eternal new home.

“But if your crime is minor,” Dr. Farahani says, “given the history of this body, you will be provided with one year of intense therapy, after which, should this repeat, nothing can be done except to evacuate you.”

I remind myself that as much as the CBE predicts the future, it is not me. I know the real me, not a machine. But what if I don’t really know myself? What if using machines is the only way we can find out who we really are? No, I know myself.

Dr. Farahani lowers her head, eyes peering at me above the rim of her glasses. “As a reminder, should the forensic evaluation become faulty—which is very rare—we will remedy that.”

My knees tremble, and I grab the workstation’s counter for stability. This information never fails to spark terror, liquefying my muscles.

She reassures me with a consoling touch to my shoulder. “A body-hop season only occurs on two occasions: once you reach seventy, and any age before seventy when you undergo a natural death or an accident leaves you with only a couple of hours to save your consciousness. Should that happen today, you’ll be instantly given a body if you haven’t expired your two hundred and ten years of your lifespan.”

I have time: 182 years remain before my lifespan expires. But what if something goes wrong in the evaluation and they give me a body with worse conditions than this one? I can’t breathe, can’t swallow. Something’s stuck in my throat.

“Take a deep breath,” she says. “It’s going to be okay. Of course, you do have the option to forfeit your body, seeing that this is your first season.”

I glare at her. Some insane people donate their bodies like they’re spare kidneys. Others sell them for monetary reasons, preferring to sacrifice the years waiting for a body. The money would be registered to them, managed by an investor, so once they start their new lifespan, it’s with good returns waiting for them. That’s the typical strategy of first- and second-year lifespanners as well as first- and second-season body-hoppers and those who turn eighteen, the legal age to sell.

“No,” I say, rage seething inside me. “I have an unborn daughter whom I intend to be with.”

Dr. Farahani’s forced smile is cold and off-putting. I slow my breathing as I watch her tap a syringe filled with an opaque blue liquid. I gasp as she plunges the needle into my neck. Then: “This way,” Dr. Farahani says, clip-clopping to one side of the chamber’s wall that faces the forensic panel. She points to a slim opening in the cubicle’s façade. “Please put your hand here for biometrics data collections.”

I steer my eyes from this vitreous den of claustrophobic terror as I slip my hand between the warm LED lights that ferry away my data into her file, updating it of any changed information since last year’s session. I stare wearily at the glass chamber’s venous wiring network sandwiched between two planes of glass. It is retrofitted with amenities: a basic toilet, shower, and bed. You can stand or sleep as it assesses you. The simulation can last hours to months. “Some patients aren’t as forthcoming as we’d like them to be,” is what they told me the first time. “They need time. So let us in, and we’ll let you out. That’s the deal.”

Let them in, and it’s over.

Nowhere to run, except through it.

The doors hiss open. I step inside. The froth of darkness embalms me as the door clicks into place, locking automatically. I jerk back at the astounding number of people inside; women stuck in the walls, staring at me in terror. Women identical to me. I’m surrounded by mirrors. Except it’s one-way. I can’t see out, only in—within myself. I hate the thought of that. Step back to get out. Only no handle on the door. Just a sheet of mirror feeding the image of myself back to me, telling me this time I can’t run away from myself. I ease my face closer to the mirror, inspecting the slate-black wiring running beneath its skin, a delicate system of mechanical arteries that will somehow inhale my essence and provide feedback. It consumes the data that my body emits and shits out a strictly candid doppelganger. It’s the place where perpetrators vomit confessions. Sweat prickles my armpits as a charge singes through the chamber. My arms flick downward, pulled heavily by the force of the metal restraints driving toward the chains tied to the ground. I fall to my knees.

A quiet hum. Then a voice and neon-blue lights: “I stare at my husband, and sometimes I wish he was another man named Janith Koshal.” I jump at the sound of my voice, rereading my thoughts from two days ago. Fuck. The recording pauses; darkness becomes. Soft anger flows in this voice-lit cubicle; a channel of my thoughts, my feelings, my beliefs feed through it like the flow of blood. The veins of the cubicle glow neon-blue, pulsating to the pitch and pace of my voice as a bomb of thoughts and emotions explode inside me:

what if,

what if,

what if

Jan can impregnate me?

And I hate it. I hate how easy it is for a child to have a child.

“You misogynistic bastard.” There’s a knife in my hand, raised to stab Eli.

I am the Black Womb, everything I touch erodes.

Darkness torpedoes the room, plunging me into a swirl of fear.

The walls tremble, buckle, shake loose of today’s reality.

I scream, trying to hold on to my reality. “I’m not a criminal. I’m not a criminal. I’m not . . .”

But darkness swells into my sight; an ocean of shadows swallows me into a simulation.

Time has wilted; the day is grey. I’m standing in line at the Body Hope Facility, commonly known as the Body Hop Facility. Everyone moves with the pace of water. The mirrored walls reflect a light-brown woman, Senegalese braids fastened into a top knot. Me. The walls are muted colors and speak nothing. When I stare out the large-paned windows, there is no sun, just clouds skirting by like a mass of ice floe.

The line heaves forward. “Your prescription, please,” a bodiless voice behind the glassed dispensary compartment says. I press my hand on the screen. A blue light zips up and down, reading the fingerprint-tagged prescription. In several seconds, my medication is dispensed from the sliding glass partition. I step aside, a foggy mind, though something important floats at its bay, a shipwrecked thought I can’t seem to reach.

My husband appears, carrying a brown bag of something. “Got it,” he says. Though I don’t know what. He guides me to the waiting area, sweat flecking his forehead. We sit down, and his hands cradle mine. “Babe, what time did you leave the house?”

I stare at his shiny black shoes. “We left together. Shouldn’t you be at work?”

His gold wedding ring sparkles in the sunlight as he twists it around his finger. “No, I meant yesterday.”

“Around 9:15 a.m.”

“Was our son home alone?”

A headache snaps in some part of my brain that’s trying to compute something. “Our son . . .?” I gaze at the windows; soft, golden light filters in like embers of water—there’s a flow to it, a current.

“Yes, our little boy.” His eyes bore into mine, a weight I can’t manage.

The headache grows as I try to remember. “He was with the [indiscernible—lowered voice].”

“Who, love?” he presses, looking unusually desperate.

I cringe. “The maid.”

“Are you sure it was our helper?” he asks, gentler this time.

“Yes, who else could it be?” I snap.

“I gave our helper the day off that day. Remember? You said you’d stay home and watch our boy. Think hard, baby. Our boy is missing. Someone took him. The first twenty-four hours are critical. I won’t be mad if you tell me the truth.” His fingers tremble, shaking apart the brown bag. “Jislaaik, look what they have sent me. Look what they have done. His little fingers. Dear God, my boy. The maid, she was killed. A hit and run. What have you done?”

My vision sways. I lean forward. The bag is blood-soaked. The baby. “I only stepped out for a second . . . Everyone thinks I’m guilty.” My knees tremble. “What about our daughter? We’re behind with our payments.”

“Do you feel that you are guilty?” His expression stills of emotion, the room sucked of sound. In the stairwell sits the sound of a crying baby. The sound builds, overfilling my ears.

Tears flood my eyes. “How can you say that? I didn’t kill anyone.” Unimaginable strength crackles from my hands. I push him. His back smacks the floor, the vertebrae snap. I stand up abruptly and run. The floor gives beneath my feet. The walls collapse from its hold. The roof bulges out. My heart screams into my throat. Cold air grips me, the wind of gravity sucks me out into the empty sky-blue of the world and the soft cries of a baby. I’m falling, falling, falling . . .

I drop into reality. My eyes burst open, sleep-stained, a scream throttled from my throat. My arms flail, metal clasps cutting straight to my bone. The shackles. The CBE evaluation room. The fluorescent light burns into my eye sockets. A shadow; a sharp, angular face peeks into my vision. Prosecutor Serati Zwebathu. Pinched lips. Furrowed eyebrows. “Mm. I understand that you and your husband have been having difficulty conceiving.” She’s not asking me a question; she’s telling me. “How could your newborn son disappear when you have no children yet? Whose baby did you have?”

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4

09:15 /// SCREAM OF A SIREN

I thought I’d flunked my CBE until the prosecutor Serati said, “There’s nothing evidential beyond a reasonable doubt that you will commit a crime within the coming twelve months. Although, given your response attack on your husband in the simulation, we will up the surveillance of your microchip until your next forensic evaluation. Otherwise, do have a good day until next time.”

I felt light-headed as I made my way down the front stairs of the building, the daylight flooding my entire body with relief. I was trembling with glee that I didn’t have to worry about my next forensic evaluation for another twelve months.

Waiting in line at the Body Hope dispensary, I watch everyone. A teenage girl trots by, skin a beautiful, shimmering dark, faux locs tied up high exposing the nape of her neck, unsullied by the glower of a microchip. So free. So young. And not a body-hopper. Citizens in our country who haven’t body-hopped are incompatible with the microchip implant; they experience dizziness, migraines, seizures, nausea, and anxiety, so they’re only instituted to a yearly forensic evaluation.

To manage the high demand for bodies, the Body Hope Facility finds ways to augment “improper” and malfunctioning bodies with bionic technologies to upgrade them to proper condition. Disability rights organizations find that the real issues can’t be fixed by tampering with our biology and replacing it with mechanical limbs. The world should be augmented to make it easier for us to assimilate rather than manipulating us to fit into it.

Papa assumed that having bionic parts would raise the value of our bodies because of their superior functionality, but in actuality, it lowers our value. Bodies like mine are often supplied to those on the waiting list or offered to ordinary citizens since every Motswana is eligible for one free body per lifespan, unlike in other African countries, as the costs of body-hopping are regulated through private and public hospitals.

No one desires to buy or inhabit a body willingly and manage the functionality of its bionic limbs. The only issue I’ve had with this body is the microchip; that’s the disability for me. I’ve been called derogatory names; the label “improper” hardly hurts me. Even if we changed that language, it doesn’t change the real damage weaving itself through my life; it doesn’t remove the microchip noosed into my neck, it doesn’t remove the microaggressions I encounter in my professional life, it doesn’t change what my husband says or does to me. Having an organic or bionic arm makes no difference to me.

I only want to be free.

To live freely.

The line finally inches forward. Up ahead, an older man limps to the dispensary desk, his clothes dilapidated, wrinkles laced into his skin. “Hae mothowamodimo, asseblief, I need help. This is too costly for me to manage,” he says, tapping his bionic leg with his walking stick. “It’s malfunctioning, and the hospital said I could get it fixed or removed, but it costs money for each treatment. Please, I’m still trying to talk to my medical aid, but they won’t fully cover the treatment. What’s the point of paying for medical aid if they won’t help me? Hae, Jesu. This is very painful; I only want it out of me. Why, why did this bloody country give me this body?”

Hae, monna mogolo wa Modimo, I utter to myself.

The woman at the front desk looks uncomfortable as he’s spilling his pleas to her. She keeps uttering, “I’m sorry, malome, I’m sorry. Could I have your ID number? Let me check the system?”

This is not a good look for the Body Hope Facility. The lifespan of a bionic part is a few months to a few years. Some people are lucky not to incur unimaginable pain and functionality errors, and some of the rich can fix those issues with money; the poor who attempt to get out of poverty by selling their bodies can’t make a thebe from selling a body with disabilities. The Body Hope Facility will only accept payment for bodies that aren’t too disabled, using euphemistic bullshit jargon in their questionnaire to assess the impairment levels of a body. The older man is but a teardrop in an ocean of erasure. No one sees the poor and sick. I’ve been in that state, asking for help and not being able to get it.

We must pay the cost of the technology the facility put in us. Besides serving the nation’s cry for more bodies, what cost do they incur besides helping the country? Our lifespans were cut short because of this pressure. What other repercussions will follow?

I step forward to the older man. “Dumela malome, what seems to be the problem?”

“Joh, ngwanaka,” he says, sighing and leaning onto his walking stick. “Please, talk to these people. No one will help me.”

I’m dealing with more significant expensive issues. I can’t imagine his costs, which are perhaps an iota of what it takes to fund my firm’s monthly operation fees. Such a difference could hardly affect my ability to pay the maintenance fees for my daughter’s Wombcubator. Losing such an amount won’t make a difference to me, but it will make a massive difference to him.

I lean toward the woman with my wrist outstretched. “Please charge his treatment to my account.”

The woman clears her throat, her eyes skimming the screen before her as she taps in instructions. “It will take a couple of days to process,” she says, “and once we get the green light, he’ll be called in for his treatment.”

The man claps his hands into a prayer form and starts sending me blessings and prayers as he leaves, making a call to a relative.

The waiting list system adopted by the Body Hope Facility is supposed to treat each consciousness equally and fairly. Still, news reports declare that they can trace our original identity, and based on who we were, their algorithm decides what bodies we get, which dictates who lives in privilege and who doesn’t. Regardless of how you hide yourself from other people around you, the system will know if you are bisexual, lesbian, gay, trans, Black, Asian, or whatever minority. I find it aggravating that a soul’s first identity is tethered to it regardless of who it becomes in the next lifespan, and whatever oppression its identity carried, it will enslave it into another oppressed body. That to escape this cycle one has to game the system or earn an upgrade; to consider a change in gender or ethnicity an upgrade is ludicrous, for it is only the materialism of this flesh and the laws of this world that muddy the true calibre of our souls.

There are days I wish I owned three bodies—that of a man, that of a woman, and that of a liminal gender—and could decide which to wear every day. But because I have a microchipped body, I am ineligible for that status afforded to some after intense inquiry. It is far more expensive to transition fluidly from one body to another frequently than on a one-time basis, as it requires highly adaptive technology, cloning of the consciousness, and plugging into and out of these bodies. Only 0.01 percent of the population has this status.

Once the dispensary hands me my medication, I storm down the hallways by the maternity ward because I’m a masochist. Getting a dose of crying, cooing, laughing babies warms my heart, assures me that I, too, will have that one day. In Ward 6, Suite 1, a door’s ajar, almost empty, except there’s a baby inside the room. I inch my head inside the luxurious suite with beige walls, a strip of windows overlooking Notwane Dam, splaying golden morning sunlight into the room.

“Hello?”

No one but a cot with a baby inside. She’s gurgling, blowing bubbles with her spit, her legs folded to her chin, her toe in her mouth, with little chubby cheeks. Soft brown skin, downy black hair just waiting to thicken into a rich Afro. She’s so cute I could eat her up. She smiles when I come into her vision, and I smile, too, playing with her little toes. The sunlight doesn’t reach her from the window, and she looks like she needs a bit of sunshine. I take a whiff of her smell—it’s like cocaine to a drug addict. Lavender baby powder. Baby oil. Soft skin. She’s in my arms, chubby cheeks at my lips. Why would someone leave a baby here alone? What would’ve happened if I hadn’t walked in? Poor thing doesn’t deserve such parents. I will take care of you.

“We could go to the garden,” I whisper as she curls her whole hand around my index finger. She stares at me with dewy dark eyes. “Would you like that? Fresh air. The smell of flowers.”

I’m out of the suite’s doors. My body jerks. An electrifying current stabs my every nerve ending. The baby tumbles from my arms. I fall to the ground, convulsing, waiting for the pain to end. A mass of people clad in scrubs, their clogs squeaking on the vinyl flooring, rush past me to the fallen, wailing baby. Oh God, did I break her? I only meant to hold her. I wasn’t trying to kidnap her.

I scream, watching through the windows as the blue expanse of the sky burns with a sun of intoxicating minuscule machines that flit about like hummingbirds from their stations at the police towers through the city air to their miscreant owner. One of them, a drone, unhinges from its docking station, splits through the hospital wall like a bullet, and punches into my shoulder blade, wailing the scream of a siren. A drone registered to my microchip.

The microchip is a foolproof, bona fide police forensic tool.

I can’t kill, steal, or kidnap someone without it delivering a paralyzing shock to my nervous system.

A drone films me as the burn of electrocution drowns me, and I slip into the dark abyss of unconsciousness.

© 2023 by Tlotlo Tsamaase. Excerpted from Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase. Published by permission of Erewhon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tlotlo Tsamaase (xe/xem/xer or she/her/hers) is a Motswana writer. Xer novella, The Silence of Wilting Skin, is a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and was the first Motswana nominee for the Rhysling Award. Tlotlo received support from the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, and xer story “Behind Our Irises” jointly won the Nommo Award. Xer short fiction has appeared in multiple best-of anthologies, Africa Risen, New Suns 2, Chiral Mad 5, and other venues. Womb City is Tlotlo’s debut novel.

Book Review: Forged by Blood by Ehigbor Okosun

Aigner Loren Wilson | 513 words

Forged by Blood
by Ehigbor Okosun
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780063112629
Harper Voyager, August 2023, 400 pgs

Nigerian mythology meets fast-paced fantasy in Ehigbor Okosun’s debut novel, Forged by Blood. The first in a duology, Forged by Blood is set in a magical reimagined Ife where a young woman, Dèmi, has lost everything that matters to her at the hands of the white colonizer rulers. They have outlawed and killed off Dèmi’s people because of their ability to use magic and their dark skin. When she gets the chance to land a direct blow to the King, Dèmi doesn’t think twice about joining with questionable allies—both new and from her past.

This is a really exciting story with so much action that it moved quickly through the novel’s 400 pages. Dèmi is one of my favorite types of main characters, someone who has not only power but empathy and an inner fire that leads her to act. Each time she’s faced with a hard decision, she goes with what she believes to be right—even if it’s obviously not the best thing to do. And that agency charges the story with Dèmi’s wants, desires, and intentions.

At the center of what Dèmi wants is revenge for her mother’s murder, which happened when she was a child. The death of Dèmi’s mom is brutal and heart crushing, as are all the depictions of how genocide has shaped Ife. Okosun doesn’t protect the readers from what colonization looks like, digging into the ways it affects Dèmi and the ways she must hide in her own homeland. She highlights how people are exploited and abused, enslaved based on their skin and magical abilities. I appreciated how Okosun balanced the harsh world of colonization with the small pockets of resistance—both magical and cultural—that the characters created.

While Forged by Blood is very much a story of Dèmi and her fight for herself and her people, there is a rich world to find in the novel. The action of the story is well-paced with the slower moments of world-building and exposition about the politics and history of Ife. Understanding this history of colonization and genocide gives the reader insight into why Dèmi makes the decisions she does, often putting herself and others at risk.

With its tight worldbuilding, captivating main character, and unexpected alliances, Forged by Blood is a wild ride of twists and turns. Every time I thought I had an idea of what was going to happen next, Okosun flipped the switch, propelling Dèmi down a new path or throwing yet another obstacle in her way. Okosun’s debut is a thrill ride with romance, revenge, and magic, perfect for readers of fast-paced fantasies.

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: Unspeakable Horror 3 edited by Vince A. Liaguno

Arley Sorg | 1533 words

Unspeakable Horror 3: Dark Rainbow Rising
Vince A. Liaguno, ed.
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781957133461
Crystal Lake, June 21, 2023, 334 pgs

Crystal Lake Publishing and Vince A. Liaguno offer a strong, identity-focused set of stories in this anthology, inspired in part by the editor’s observations regarding “the cause-and-effect relationship between gains and backlash within the LGBTQIA community,” such as “more than 300 bills introduced by state legislators across the country that target LGBTQ+ rights.” Liaguno, who also co-edited Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology with Rena Mason (William Morrow, July 2022), describes the theme as “this idea of a rainbow darkening at its edges even as it continues to rise from the horizon.” This is indeed a fantastic description of many of the pieces. The introduction also promises a table of contents which is “diverse and distinct” and includes “A few straight allies. . . with their own thematic interpretations from the outside, looking in.” And I would agree, to a point. Twenty-six original selections are on offer, many of them quite compelling. But since diversity is promised, it’s worth noting perhaps that the diversity of perspectives could be richer—at least, in my opinion. Diversity can look like many things; what people mean by “diversity,” how it’s defined, the focus of the word, can vary greatly. Browsing through stories and bios it’s clear that authors from a range of certain kinds of lived experiences have been given space to speak, but the diversity across lines of ethnicity and race, to me, is not as dynamic as I would have liked. That piece of criticism said, it’s still a good book, perhaps even an important one. I’ll discuss a few of the entries and leave the rest for your discovery.

Chad Helder’s “Tattoo Artist” is an emotionally striking poem which evokes aspects of queer and specifically nonbinary history and culture. Helder utilizes both interesting turns of phrase and effective descriptions to create a combination of intellectual and visceral responses in the reader. This feels like a complete journey, a fully lived story in poetry form, which is no small feat. The ending is unexpected and startling in its own way, and interrogates, in the span of a few lines, the way cultural and technological shifts can mean both convenience as well as specific kinds of loss, resulting in isolation.

“Lavenders” by Yah Yah Scholfield engages the reader immediately with a complexity of internal conflict centered on racial and sexual identity, via a man who isn’t too happy about who he is. Scholfield paints the main character with careful and interesting prose, playing with language to wonderful effect. The journey here is an introspective one, even as the our protagonist moves around the town, but it is one that many queer folks will find relatable, and better yet, it’s told in Scholfield’s elegant style. As the night unfolds, some of the darker suspicions the reader will likely have from the beginning will congeal, taking clearer form. The underlying question that will still drive the read—that eager curiosity that the author will have brought out in you—is all about where Scholfield will take you. In some ways the broader strokes of the story are familiar, but Scholfield enhances the familiar with careful nuance and subtext, layered social observations, not to mention a struggle with the self that many folks of intersectional identity will find painfully relatable. All delivered in the form of beautiful storytelling.

“Strange Enchanted Boys” by Craig Laurance Gidney begins as a contemplation on human nature and time—especially the way time erodes what is—as seen from the outside. Curious to experience a different way of being, the observing entity passes into our world, and into the “rhythm of time.” As humans find the observer, the narrative becomes an astute contemplation on the shifting nature of perception, accompanied by vivid imagery. Until someone sees the observer for what it is, and then the contemplation shifts focus to communication and connection. Humans being humans, things can’t stay peaceful for long. After connection, the observer has to deal with the tides of new emotions, as well as the violence that intolerance often brings. Ultimately the observer is faced with the conundrum of remaining an observer or abandoning the relative peace of not being too involved. Gidney brings grace and the fantastic to real-life terrors, to circumstances and events that are all too common.

A.P. Thayer’s “Un Lamento de Flores” is perhaps a well-constructed comeuppance story, as well as an origin story, set against a backdrop of toxic male culture. There are elements which overtly speak to the theme, but I found the subtler touches to be fairly intoxicating. When a man shows up at a young wife’s door to conduct business with her husband, he brings an unexpected visitor: his niece Alejandra. The niece is alluring, beautiful, and Thayer almost poetically captures the moments of her entry into the wife’s courtyard, along with said wife’s subsequent nervous attraction. Similar in function to poetic metaphor, the flowers in the courtyard punctuate the tides of their attraction, their relationship. Ostensibly, the niece is meant to help with the housework while the wife is pregnant. This gives the two women opportunities to experience the slow burn romance. Meanwhile, the women in the village have all kinds of bad things to say about Alejandra. As the romance develops, the wife wonders at the possibility of some kind of supernatural influence, while still enjoying the experience of the attraction—which effectively adds layers of tension, drama, and potential subtext to the read. But things start to escalate, and with this escalation, even more tension builds: sometimes there’s a fine line between seductive romance and mysterious, perhaps even suspicious surrender. Thayer plays the tension subtly and expertly. When Alejandra’s uncle plans a marriage for her, it forces the women to take action. Where it all leads is unexpected, brutal, and raw.

Mathew L. Reyes gives us “Such A Lovely Place.” This one starts with an intriguing line and then digs right in to suburban stress, invoking tensions specific to being new to the neighborhood, and all those subtle discomforts—not to mention the sense of vulnerability—that come with feeling or actually being judged. This delicious tension is juxtaposed with a scene which exemplifies the comfort of companionship and trust, of friendship and, importantly, being around folks who don’t just “accept” you but who actually feel like family. Even among friends, however, the pressures from outside a social group can seep in and cause trouble. This is especially true of marginalized groups, as individuals often have conflicting opinions about how to integrate with larger society, or if integration should even be a goal. Reyes does important work bringing this conversation to story, as it tends to be a topic which is less often explored, despite that it’s a major part of the experiences of so many marginalized people in so many ways. Reyes also uses story to explore the uncomfortable “kindness” of neighbors, the half-measures of superficial acceptance, and the pain of issues around survival and personhood being reduced to dismissive terms like “political;” smiles setting you up for a gut punch—those kinds of encounters which many people from marginalized backgrounds will find all too relatable. As Reyes plays out these scenes, he never loses sight of the underlying horror narrative, letting that particular flavor of unease surface again and again, reminding the reader that something is even more “off” about the suburbanites than usual. Things escalate wonderfully, and the suburbanites discover that they aren’t the only ones with secrets.

“Daughters of Eve” by Holly Lyn Walrath opens with mesmerizing and mysterious scenes involving a phenomenon tied somehow to sexuality and perhaps even intimate connection. The story also brings in cultural, often life-threatening dangers that are related to identity and sexuality. There is a lovely complexity to the way these dangers are initially layered in, suggesting an array of effects, including the way people are forced or taught to see and limit themselves; simultaneously, the danger is just-palpable, instilling in the reader a sense of uneasiness that lurks right under the skin. The writing itself is great, a straightforward and expertly composed style, and the storytelling is seriously spellbinding. The piece overall feels like a frank, personal, and kind of beautiful exploration of self-discovery, with a speculative element that brings even more nuance and metaphor into the conversation.

There are a number of contributors lining the table of contents that horror readers will recognize, such as award-winning authors Eric LaRocca, Hailey Piper, Sara Tantlinger, Paul Tremblay, and more, as well as a few newer writers you may want to look up after reading their work here. All told, Liaguno has pulled together a worthy group of creatives who know how to tell a story. It’s a good book. Queer or not, give it a read, you’ll certainly be entertained and engaged.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is an associate literary agent at kt literary. He is a two-time World Fantasy Award Finalist and a two-time Locus Award Finalist for his work as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. Arley is also a SFWA Solstice Award Recipient, a Space Cowboy Award Recipient, and a finalist for two Ignyte Awards, for his work as a critic as well as his creative nonfiction. Arley is senior editor at Locus, associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and an interviewer for Clarkesworld. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, movie reviewer, and book reviewer, and ran a series of interviews on his site: arleysorg.com. He has been a guest instructor or speaker at a range of events—and for a variety of audiences—from Worldcons to WisCons, from elementary students to PhD candidates. He was a guest critiquer for the 2023 Odyssey Writing Workshop and the week five instructor for the 2023 Clarion West Workshop. 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. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Book Review: Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia by Jason Pargin

Chris Kluwe | 865 words

Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia
Jason Pargin
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250285935
St. Martin’s Press, October 2023, 416 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! For this month’s offering, we’ll be examining the third tale in a satirical universe of quippy prose and weird violence all in service of skewering the modern age—Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia.

This novel is the third in Jason Pargin’s Zoey Ashe universe, and while you don’t have to have read the first two to fully understand what’s happening, I highly recommend doing so because both are hilarious (the first is Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, and the second is Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick, which might be the best book title of all time). All three deal with the titular character, Zoey, a poverty-stricken young adult who inherits a sprawling business corporation/wildly criminal organization from her deceased absent father, and then has to figure out what to do with her life as a newfound billionaire/mob boss now holding all the reins of power. The novels take place in chronological order, so you’ll miss out on some backstory elements if you jump straight in to Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia, but Pargin does an excellent job summing up characters and previous events when they matter to the story, so it’s not a major concern.

As far as what the story is about, well, the Zoey Ashe novels are primarily a means for Pargin to turn a no-holds barred eye on the idiocies and inadequacies of the modern age, and Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia delivers just as strongly as the first two entries. Ostensibly about Zoey’s travails trying to put on a large-scale music festival in a city (Tabula Ra$a) constantly on the edge of immolating itself, all while dealing with a series of horrific public crimes and an upcoming election, the actual, underlying subtext covers everything from democracy’s slide into fascism to performative religion to the shallow spectacle of always broadcasting reality living to what truth actually means in a post-truth society.

If that previous sentence seems like a lot to take in, well, much like the rest of Pargin’s writing, that’s what this book is like—a non-stop rollercoaster of ideas, musings, insights, and inanities that flow together into a wildly pleasing whole. There’s no real way to describe the Zoey Ashe books other than “some real weird stuff happens, but it’s clearly obvious that it’s based on the weird stuff that happens in the real world on a daily basis that we’ve somehow convinced ourselves is normal.” You could also legitimately describe Pargin’s writing as Terry Pratchett crossed with Hunter S. Thompson, in that it is an extremely candid view of the human condition, but one that feels like you’re on a lot of drugs that haven’t been named yet.

In terms of cast and crew, Pargin’s excellent dichotomy of “this person cannot possibly be real” and “I can absolutely believe this person is real” introduction of secondary, tertiary, and potential future primary characters remains fantastic, while at the same time he continues exploring both Zoey’s growth as well as the adopted family she’s surrounded herself with. I would like to say that all of the inhabitants of Tabula Ra$a feel three-dimensional, but that would be a lie, since most of them would probably break the laws of Euclidean physics if subjected to such frivolous concepts as “dimensions.” Suffice it to say, this book has characters, and they’ll stick with you long after you finish closing the cover.

The pacing of Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia is also suitably frenetic without being outright exhausting, with Zoey and company constantly lurching from near-disaster to near-disaster, each more unexpected than the last, but everything comes together in a satisfyingly neat conclusion that didn’t leave any threads hanging. I also felt that the world-building of Tabula Ra$a was just as entertaining as always—a suitably distorted mirror of all the worst (and best) parts of our increasingly intertwined physical and digital society.

Overall, if you’re looking for a book that will make you laugh, make you groan, make you angry, and most importantly, make you think, I cannot recommend Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia enough. For all of its feverish spectacle and rapid-fire conversations, the topics that Pargin addresses are ones that are well worth considering with care and deliberation. I really enjoyed this entry in the Zoey Ashe universe, and I hope there are more in the future.

Read if: you’ve ever felt in over your head; you’re more concerned with delivering help than doctrine; you want justice for Bandito.

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: John Kessel and Bruce Sterling

Laurel Amberdine | 438 words

How did “Money in the Bank” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

John: It started with a story beginning I wrote, a conversation between my hero and somebody named the Glovemaster about being hired by a powerful person named the Mealybug. It never got past the first page. I sent it to Bruce and he picked it up and ran with it. Making this story about cryptocurrencies and the culture surrounding them was Bruce’s idea, and we both pushed the characters toward comedy.

Bruce: I wouldn’t say that cryptocurrency is inherently comical, but from its very beginning there was always something weird-funny about it.

What was your writing process like?

John: The story got passed back and forth between Bruce and me through the summer of 2022, each of us revising and moving it forward to the next scene before passing it back. Many details changed from draft to draft, but gradually the plot got worked out and Wayne and Jacqui went from figures of fun to something more like real human beings trying to save their marriage.

As drivers, Bruce is always flooring the accelerator to beat the next light while I try to keep the passengers alive. There was a bit of tug-of-war over the steering wheel, and some questions about when the story was finished, but we eventually arrived at a mutually agreeable destination. The result is something I don’t think either of us could have written alone.

Bruce: In collaborations with other writers I tend to be the guy who throws a lot of hot spaghetti at the wall.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

John: I’m working on a novel-in-stories with fantastic elements set at the turn of the twentieth century featuring historical figures including H.G. Wells and Stephen Crane, President William McKinley, and the French film pioneer Georges Méliès. A big collection of my stories, The Dark Ride, came out in 2022 from Subterranean Press. I’ll also have a short collection in PM Press’s “Outspoken Authors” series in 2024, The Presidential Papers.

Bruce: I just wrote a cover story for Newsweek about Artificial Intelligence, although Newsweek isn’t what it once was and neither is Artificial Intelligence.

If you’ve got to read a Bruce Sterling book, I would recommend the recent collection Robot Artists and Black Swans because, although every story in there is about Italy, they’re about Italy in a very Bruce Sterling way.

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: Jo Miles

Laurel Amberdine | 500 words

How did “Simmered in Their Wealth Like the Richest of Sauces” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I was thinking about dragons and capitalism (as one does) and wondering why dragons—at least European dragons—are always depicted as greedy and hoarders of treasure. They can’t use it, after all, no matter how shiny. What if the point was to separate us humans from their wealth? Certainly, some people have far too much of it. Dragons might be better, less corruptible caretakers of riches than we are (or at least, they tell themselves so). So I wrote a literal “eat the rich” story.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

Every story is different. Sometimes I spend months just making notes before I even start writing, and months more revising while I try to find the heart of the story. With other stories (far more rarely) they spill right from my head and onto the page, and they only need light revision. For me, that’s more likely to happen when the story has a very strong narrator’s voice, which was the case for this one. But it’s a real rarity, and I always feel lucky when it happens!

Where are you in this story?

Um, is it bad to say the dragon is my role model? Only half joking! But seriously, capitalism is a broken system, and billionaires shouldn’t exist when people they employ are working long hours at exhausting jobs and yet can barely make ends meet.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Since this is a dragon story, I’ll share two other clever and unusual takes on dragons that I’ve read recently.

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose is a twist on the magical academy, where a young Indigenous girl bonds with a dragon and has to attend a colonizer-run dragoneering school in an alt-history New England, all the while resisting attempts to (big air quotes) “civilize” her. It’s absolutely engrossing.

And The Keeper’s Six by Kate Elliott has some of the strangest, most delightful worldbuilding I’ve read in a long time, about a middle-aged Jewish mom who has to rescue her adult son from one dragon, and save another dragon who’s part of her family.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

As a matter of fact, my first novel, Warped State, has just come out! It’s a space opera, so no dragons (sorry), but it’s thoroughly anti-capitalist. So if you like seeing obnoxious corporate types get their comeuppance, it’ll be right up your alley. You can find links to buy it at jomiles.com, plus a list of all my short fiction.

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: Gene Doucette

Laurel Amberdine | 540 words

How did “The Hole in the Garden” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story came about in part as a by-product of research for another project, and in part because I wasn’t entirely in my right mind. I began work on a new novel in the first half of 2022 (Graffiti on the Wall of the Universe) and decided I needed to know more about the holographic principle, which led me to the Leonard Susskind book, The Black Hole War, and then I had black holes on my mind. Then, in the latter half of the year, I had to have emergency oral surgery, the consequence of which was that I couldn’t eat solid foods for roughly eight weeks. Somewhere in the middle of that liquid-diet fugue state, I thought of a micro-singularity in a garden.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

My writing process is that I write until I am no longer entertained, and then I stop and either go back to the beginning to fix what made it no longer entertaining, or I wait until I am entertained again. Since I was writing this while in perpetual starvation mode, I was easily entertained; I wrote it pretty fast. The downside was that I had no idea if it was any good, because I couldn’t trust myself to be able to tell.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

I was stuck before I got started. I loved the idea of a civilization that deliberately nurtured a singularity for the short-term gain of clean energy, knowing they were handing an inescapable nightmare scenario down to their descendants. But I couldn’t figure out a way to tell it without boring myself and the reader, and telling an overlong story. Then I got the idea to frame the scientifically dense parts within a story told to a child, which I think worked great. As for where that idea came from, I’m going to go back to blaming the fugue state.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’m reading two nonfiction books right now. One is an oral history of Hollywood, and another is something called The Atlas of Cursed Places, from which I’m hoping to find a few story ideas. As for inspiration from other writers, I have been reading very little fiction of late, but I will say that the child’s story element of this short story was probably at least partly inspired by Neil Gaiman’s work.

What are you working on lately?

I’m writing this about two weeks before my latest novel, Graffiti on the Wall of the Universe, comes out. It’s the third book in the Sorrow Falls series—after The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens. Hopefully, by the time this interview lands, I will be working on book four in my Tandemstar series. Fingers crossed that future-me has his act together.

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: Yvette Lisa Ndlovu

Laurel Amberdine | 818 words

How did “His Thing” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This is the first story I wrote at Clarion West in 2022 during the week that P. Djèlí Clark was the instructor so I set out to write an AfroSurrealist story because I knew horror-mastermind P. Dèlí Clark would be reading it!

AfroSurrealism for me blends absurdity, horror, fabulism, and the uncanny to tell Black stories. My stories usually explore the absurdities of patriarchy and its impact on African women. What I ended up with is a story I like to call domestic surrealism or maybe even a Zimbabwean gothic about a newly wed Zimbabwean girl trapped in a sentient house. Women are taught to aspire to marriage, to aspire for a marital home but the marital home can be a house of horrors, so in thinking of the house as a site of horror and violence I started worldbuilding around it. The house’s magic is controlled by the husband, the house makes her life difficult, new rooms appear and disappear, dirt and grime feed on her sweat and labor to keep her unendingly cleaning, etc. The house is not her friend and wasn’t made with her needs in mind. (But she does have a sentient rock that was gifted to her by her friend that’s her ally!)

The story also draws on Zimbabwean fabulism called Ngano. There is a popular Ngano called Simbimbino about a farmer who digs a hole in his field to trap his wife, when she falls in she transforms into a pig and her husband intends on cannibalizing her. I wondered what if the woman had some magic of her own at the end to fight back? What if it’s the husband who gets eaten at the end? What if she saved herself and wasn’t rescued by her son? What if her son, Simbimbino, who is the hero of the original Ngano is complicit in her oppression as well and feeds off of her? So in a lot of ways, the story might be a retelling or reenvisioning of that Ngano.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

I like to write in community, I don’t think writing should be a solitary pursuit and it can be a communal affair! So I meet up with friends or get on zoom with friends that live too far away and we do writing sprints. The Kenyan author Shingai Njeri Kagunda is my main writing wifey and our writing sessions are always fun and chaotic. After the writing session, we sometimes read our favorite line or talk through whatever writer’s block or trouble we’re having with that particular scene or story. That kind of communal “troubleshooting” usually does the trick in getting me through the tough parts of getting a story together. Writing in community has also been really helpful in keeping me grounded and motivated. For this story in particular, I wrote it at Clarion West in Seattle surrounded by my cohort who are talented writers I could bounce ideas off of. Some of the changes I eventually made to the story came from the wonderful feedback and ideas I received from both my instructor and cohort.

In terms of how a story comes together on the page, I’m inspired by the real world. Whether it’s something I read in a newspaper, or a fable, or an urban legend people whisper to each other, or a conversation with a loved one. I’m always drawing from the real world because the real world is full of the uncanny and absurd. I think the biggest instances of magic, mayhem, and myth come from the real world and AfroSurrealists tap into that weirdness.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I’m excited by all the books by African writers that have come out in recent years, we need more of that. I would love to see more work drawing on African story forms and indigenous knowledge systems, especially from southern African countries that are still underrepresented in genre spaces such as Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, etc.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

My debut short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells came out in March this year. It’s a genre-bending collection that blurs the lines between social horror, Afrosurrealism, and fantasy to tell the story of vengeful spirits, southern African mythological creatures, and Black women taking on the patriarchy and capitalism. I’m currently working on an epic fantasy novel inspired by the stone city ruins of The Great Zimbabwe about three magical Black girls taking on the gods and the patriarchy.

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 | 253 words

Coming up in October, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll be serializing a new SF novelette by A.L Goldfuss: “Where the God-Knives Tread.” It will run in two exciting parts, so look forward to that! We also have two terrific flash SF pieces: “The Void Wyrm’s Guide to Devouring Stars” from AJ Wentz and “Excerpts from a Scientist’s Notebook: Ancestral Memory in Europan Pseudocephalopods” by David DeGraff.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe (“Immortality Soup, Or, An Excerpt From the Cookbook of the Gods”) and Jae Steinbacher (“What You Are and the Wolf”). We also have a flash story (“A Small God”) from Jeff Reynolds, and another (“Four Self-Care Secrets for a Long and Happy Life”) from Tina S. Zhu.

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Carlie St. George, Izzy Wasserstein, Oyedotun Damilola Muees, P H Lee, and Thomas Ha.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that speculative goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

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Newsletter

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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.