TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 164 (January 2024)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: January 2024

SCIENCE FICTION

Five Views of the Planet Tartarus
Rachael K. Jones

Shadow Films
Ben Peek

Night Desk Duty at the Infinite Paradox Hotel
Aimee Ogden

We Shall Not Be Bitter at the End of the World
David Anaxagoras

FANTASY

A Saint Between The Teeth
Sloane Leong

In the Tree’s Hollow, a Doe
Lowry Poletti

Farewell to Faust
Adam-Troy Castro

To Be a Happy Man
Thomas Ha

EXCERPTS

The Longest Autumn
Amy Avery

NONFICTION

Book Review: Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: The Black Girl Survives in This One (edited by Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. Fennell)
Arley Sorg

Book Review: Snowglobe by Soyoung Park
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Rachael K. Jones

Sloane Leong

Ben Peek

David Anaxagoras

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

© 2024 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Warmtail / Shutterstock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: January 2024

John Joseph Adams | 238 words

Welcome to issue 164 of Lightspeed Magazine! Let’s hear it for another year of terrific science fiction and fantasy, coming to you at the speed of light (or at least electrons).

Our science fiction shorts kick off with a story (“Shadow Films”) from Benjamin Peek about the film industry and a conspiracy theory sprouting from an unsettling truth. In the very poignant tale “We Shall Not Be Bitter at the End of the World,” David Anaxagoras captures an unusual group trying to cope with an incipient apocalypse. We also have a flash story (“Five Views of the Planet Tartarus”) from Rachael K. Jones, and another (“Night Desk Duty at the Infinite Paradox Hotel”) from Aimee Ogden.

Our fantasy shorts include a fascinating meditation on sacrifice and inter-species understanding in Sloane Leong’s “A Saint Between the Teeth.” Adam-Troy Castro returns to our pages with a new story about an irresistible offer in “Farewell to Faust.” We also have two terrific flash pieces: “In the Tree’s Hollow, a Doe” by Lowry Poletti and “To Be a Happy Man” from Thomas Ha.

Of course we’ve got our usual array of nonfiction: book reviews from our review team (what should you be reading when you’re not reading Lightspeed?), and spotlight interviews with our authors. And our ebook readers will enjoy an excerpt from Amy Avery’s new novel The Longest Autumn.

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.

Five Views of the Planet Tartarus

Rachael K. Jones | 549 words

1.

Once a decade, a titanium-nosed shuttle plows through the rings of the planet Tartarus with a new batch of prisoners destined for the Orpheus Factory. The debris that makes up the rings is so thick that it thunders like a hailstorm, deafening the passengers. As the orbiting debris bounces and scrapes against the hull, the prisoners squeeze their eyes closed and beg the pilot to be more careful.

“Are you trying to hit all of them?” a prisoner snaps, covering his ears against the roaring onslaught.

The pilot laughs through her nose. Ironic. Dismissive. “We always do. As many as we can.”

She steers into the path of the debris, and the thundering increases.

2.

Planetside, they hold a farce of a trial in the Sibylline Court, a decaying mansion of rotten marble. All traitors to the Sibyllines go to Tartarus to receive the only punishment for rebellion: eternal life.

The prisoners stand at attention as the comms read out their names. A whirring ten-limbed auto-judge pronounces their sentences in turn, omitting no words from the traditional declaration of guilt, because the Sibylline Empire believes in ceremony.

3.

One by one the prisoners file into a dark, square mouth cut from the earth: the Orpheus Factory. Machines shred their clothes and lather them in amber disinfectant that burns the skin and smells like tar and makes all their hair fall out. Tiny silver needles snake into their veins. Nanobots pump into their blood, flooding their organs, cleaning off plaques, lengthening telomeres, repairing neurons.

The last injection severs their voluntary motor pathways so nothing moves but their eyes. Before the final step, the prisoners feel young again, for a moment.

4.

The last gift of the planet Tartarus to its newborn residents is a brand-new spacesuit, bright white, top of the line, with solar-powered life support that can recycle respirated air and bodily wastes for up to two hundred years, should nothing breach the suit’s barrier. Machines thread the prisoners’ bodies with tubes for feeding and waste disposal. At the end of this process, the Orpheuses are piled together outside beneath the dark sky, their terrified eyes flickering behind their faceplates, their lips drawn back by spasticity into a tight, cramped grin.

When the job is done, the pilot who flew the inbound shuttle loads them back into the cargo bay, stacking the bodies high and deep, like firewood.

5.

On its way through the planetary belt, the shuttle dumps the new Orpheuses into the ring that loops round and round Tartarus like a dirge that will never end. That is when the prisoners will see all the frozen white spacesuits, billions in orbit, their eyes aware and flickering behind well-made helmets, their blood pumped full of machines that won’t let them die, their bodies spinning around the planet forever and ever.

They will float eternally, unable to sleep. They will pray for a rogue asteroid to careen into their path and breach their suits. Ten years later, when they see the silver-tipped shuttle approach the weary planet, they will pray for the vessel to smash into their bodies as it enters orbit and descends to the surface.

The pilots do always try to hit as many as they can.

©2024 by Rachael K. Jones.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachael K. Jones grew up in various cities across Europe and North America, picked up (and mostly forgot) six languages, and acquired several degrees in the arts and sciences. Now she writes speculative fiction in Portland, Oregon. Rachael is a World Fantasy Award nominee and Tiptree Award honoree, and her fiction has appeared in multiple Year’s Best anthologies and dozens of venues worldwide. Her stories can be found in Uncanny, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and all four Escape Artists podcasts. Follow her on Twitter @RachaelKJones.

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

Shadow Films

Ben Peek | 9148 words

1.

Alvin’s scripts arrived in yellow envelopes. They were hand delivered, placed inside his letter box as if part of the regular mail, but with no address or stamps on it. The scripts were typed on unlined paper. They were short, never longer than a page, never more than a scene. The scene would be set inside a shop, or a bar. Or outside on a street corner, or in a park. The description was generic. Alvin’s name was centred beneath it, his first and last name. Alvin Symons, it said. A line of dialogue followed. The dialogue was usually four words long. Sometimes it was two or three, and occasionally, five. Once it been a single word, but only once.

After the script arrived, Alvin would memorise the line, then file it away with the others he’d received over the years. Within a month he would film the scene. The scene took place while another film was made. No one knew Alvin was doing it.

Officially, Alvin was employed as an extra. He was one name on a large list kept by an even larger agency. The scripts he read did not come from anyone in the agency, or anyone making the film that hired him as an extra. He knew that because he had been told so. Still, the scene would take place as if it had been organised by the director and their crew, as if he’d been booked for it by his agents. Alvin would stand on a street, or in a store, or before a sign. He would stand there, and he would wait for the camera to roll, and then he would say his line. He would say it silently. The line was not recorded. It didn’t matter if he said it aloud or not. Around him, a larger scene, one connected to the film that was officially being made would take place. The sky isn’t safe, he said in The Shudder. The ocean is poison, he said in Bad Saints. We have to hide, he said in Under Heaven.

2.

Alvin Symons was a shadow actor. The title was given to him by the woman who hired him seventeen years earlier. Her name, she told him, was Tynia Robbé.

3.

Alvin had worked steadily since Tynia gave him his first job. In all that time, however, he’d never met another person who did what he did, who was part of the silent performance he was, until he met Lan Nguyen.

Alvin met her on the set of a small crime film, Demons. It was shot in Chicago, in a series of narrow streets and rundown apartments not far from one of the first alien internment camps that’d been built sixty or so years ago. Alvin’s scene was in a bar. When he met Lan, he was at the back bar, in a both with Lan, while the director stood next to them and explained his vision to them. “It’s about the moral decay of the city, what came after the camps were built,” the director said. “The two of you are like paintings in the background of a film. When people see you, when the camera passes over you, they’re going to see how the camp has destroyed property value, how it has driven good people out of the neighbourhood, and left only those who are somehow tainted in their wake. When they see you, I want them to think that you’re too old for Lan, Alvin, and that Lan, you’re much too young for Alvin.” Around them people were busy setting up cameras and lights for the scene. “I want you two to build on that. I want you to pretend you’re a couple. But what kind of couple? Well, that’s up to you. Maybe you’re having an affair. Maybe you’re married to his son, maybe you’re having an affair with your daughter-in-law. Maybe you’re a prostitute and he’s your client. Whatever it is, it’s seedy. It’s dirty. It’s like this city.”

After the director left, Alvin and Lan talked a little about their newly minted parts, parts they’d never be credited or paid for. I want to be a good man who works at the camps, Alvin said. I want to be hard working lawyer, Lan said. I want to help you expose how bad the camps are. They continued like this, building upon the virtues of their new characters, of the sacrifices they were making, until the scene was ready to start.

At the bar, the star of Demons, a tall, narrow white man whose hands were much too soft for the role, sat and nursed a drink while he read an old, tattered Dostoevsky novel. The camera moved from the book he was reading, to his face, then above him.

They know who you are, Lan said.

I was never hiding, Alvin said.

At first, Alvin wasn’t sure what Lan was doing. Was she doing what the director asked, or what they’d joked about? But when the scene was shot a second and third time and Lan repeated her lines exactly as she had first done, silently but carefully after the camera cleared the actor, Alvin knew otherwise. Lan wanted the camera to capture what she said. She was doing exactly what Alvin was. By the time the fifth and final take was shot, they both knew they were doing the same thing. They were both playing a part. It was just not the one that the director had asked them to play.

They made a plan to meet later for dinner at The Blue Door. There was something almost illicit about it, Alvin thought later, thought while he was in his hotel room, while he dressed for the evening. His hands trembled a little while he buttoned up his shirt. He was lucky he had a nice shirt with him. He had only been booked for a single day. A lot of the time he didn’t bother to bring nice clothes for one day’s worth of work. But his sister lived in the area. He wanted to see her before he returned to Los Angeles, to his quiet home and his quiet life, and he wanted to dress nicely for her, to show her he was well.

Alvin thought about not going to dinner with Lan. He straightened his clothes in the hotel mirror. A long time ago, after his second year as a shadow actor, he’d started to lie about his life to others. He lied mostly to the people he met on movie sets, but he lied to his family as well. He justified it because the lies he told were small. Tynia told him that he must keep his work a secret. He wasn’t doing anything illegal, she said, but if he was found out, he’d be blacklisted from sets. For the first year Alvin avoided the topic of what he did outside films, but as he got to know more people, as he met them a second and third time, it started to become a problem. He couldn’t tell anyone he was a professional extra. No one on set would believe that, not with the way he dressed, or where he lived. He started to tell them that he was retired. If pushed, he said he inherited money and retired early. His sister was more difficult. He told his sister he was a consultant on film sets, a consultant for heavy machinery and vehicles. Did Alvin really want to stop lying and talk about his real life with a stranger? No, of course not. Alvin was very satisfied with his life. He had no debts. He had no troubles. Neither did his sister or her husband, or his nieces, one of whom had children of her own now. He was a man who was very satisfied, he repeated to himself in the mirror.

He arrived at The Blue Door a little early. Lan was already waiting for him. She was a slim, dark haired Vietnamese woman in her mid-thirties with vitiligo splashed across the left side of her face, like a star had burst across her cheek.

“You’re the third person I’ve met who is a shadow actor,” she said after they’d sat. “Have you met many others?”

Alvin shook his head. “When I first began, I was told I wouldn’t meet anyone else. There were others. That was made clear. But we worked alone. It was the best way to protect the work.”

“The others said the same, but I was told differently.”

“By Tynia?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t seen her in . . .” He paused, surprised at what he was going to say. “Nearly six years.”

He used to see Tynia Robbé regularly, he said. When he’d started working as a shadow actor Tynia had visited him once or twice a month, called him weekly. Tynia was like that with her now, Lan said. She made an exasperated face. Alvin laughed. Back then, he thought being a shadow actor was like being a real actor, that he was taking on real roles with performances he could perfect over time. Tynia’s job was to manage him in terms of what films he appeared in and didn’t, but it was, Alvin said, also to discourage any idea that he was part of something that would ever be shown to the public. What you do is private, she said. What you do will never be discussed in public. Its audience will always be a secret to you. You will never meet them. You will never hear back from them.

“She told me the same thing,” Lan said. “But people are watching them, aren’t they? Someone out there is stitching all our scenes together and showing them to someone.”

“Yes, but that was always happening,” Alvin said. “The only difference now is that more people getting to see them. At least, I assume it’s more. Some people have started to recognise me. About a month ago, I came across a young man who knew me. He was about your age, but white. I was in a store, a second-hand bookstore, and he was walking through the shelves. When he saw me, he stopped dead. After a moment he came over. You’re a shadow actor, he said. I told him I wasn’t but he didn’t believe me. He’d seen my film. He’d seen it a week before in an underground cinema. He called it Nine.”

“Did he say anything about it?”

“He said it was a biography about a man who helps resettle aliens.”

“From the camps?” Lan said, her hand moving in the direction of them. “Nobody gets out of those, do they? You hear stories, though I’ve never met anyone who has escaped.”

“I don’t know if they do,” Alvin said. “The man I met seemed to think that they did, but I don’t know. I said it was just fiction but he disagreed. He offered to show me Nine to prove it. He gave me his card. He said I should call. I thought about it, but when I got home, I decided against it.”

Lan was surprised. She told him that if it was her, she would’ve called, that she wouldn’t have been able to contain herself. How had he been able to?

Alvin thought about it for a while. He’d thought about it before, of course, but hadn’t yet found an answer that seemed right. “He was excited by the film, but not in a good way,” he said after their meals had arrived. “He went on about how the truth was finally being exposed, how he knew that the aliens were living among us, and that they had to be stopped. But I don’t agree with that. If they’re living among us that’s fine. It’s better than the camps. The camps are a disgrace. I wouldn’t be a shadow actor if I thought it was about saying differently. There’s already enough of that with films like Demons. The films I’m in are different. At one point I was doing forty films a year, just going from one set to the other, travelling all over the country, travelling outside it. I’ve gotten so many scripts over the years that I’ve put them together myself. I don’t know if I have the right order for all of them, but I know that the film I’m in isn’t about how aliens are evil, or need to be locked up. It says people need help. My character is helping them. He helps them find homes. He shows them how to live in our country, or another. I’ve never been ashamed of that. I’ve been a shadow actor for nearly two decades. It’s my life. It was there when my wife got sick. It was there when she died. It’s given me purpose and safety when nothing else has. I’m sixty-two now. I’ll be sixty-three this year. I’ll be a sixty-three year old black man who is financially secure because of the work I’ve done as a shadow actor. Could I live with myself if I’ve been making films that make it harder for someone to live, whoever they are?”

“Do you believe that’s what you’ve been doing?” Lan asked.

“No.” Alvin had said what he’d said in a rush. He cleared his throat, both embarrassed and relieved by what he’d said. “No, despite what that young man said, I don’t believe it. I’m proud of what I’ve done. Tynia has trusted me. I trust her. That doesn’t change because of one random man on the street.”

He thought that Lan might laugh, or question him, but she didn’t. She agreed with him. She said it was bad enough to work on films like Demons. She wouldn’t do it if she wasn’t subverting them in some way. She told him about some of the films she had worked on, and some of the things she said, all of which she believed were undermining the rhetoric of the main film.

After they finished dinner, after they paid the bill and walked out of the restaurant, Lan gave Alvin her phone and email. We should keep in contact, she said. We shouldn’t be strangers. Things were obviously changing within the world of shadow films. People were learning about them. We ought to stay in touch in case we need to help each other. Alvin took her details and gave her his and said that yes, that probably wasn’t a bad idea, though he wasn’t sure it was a good idea, if he were being honest.

A week later he heard that she was dead.

4.

The police called Alvin. They called him after they spoke to the staff at The Blue Door. The staff at the restaurant remembered him and Lan because of their age difference. According to the detective who called, whose name was Potter, or Porter, Alvin was the last person to see Lan alive. Alvin answered the detective’s questions over the phone carefully. No, he didn’t know Lan Nguyen very well. They met on Demons. Dinner was just two extras having dinner after work, nothing else. They talked about films. The detective wasn’t interested in film. She asked Alvin what he knew about Lan’s private life. Very little, he said. She was a journalist, the detective said. Alvin went still but he said a lot of extras had jobs. A lot of them did the work on the side. He was mostly retired, he said. The detective wasn’t very interested in his retirement. In fact, she wasn’t very interested in anything Alvin said in general. How did Lan die? he asked at the end of the call, safe in the belief that he wasn’t a suspect. The detective, whose name was still Potter or Porter, said that she couldn’t say, not officially, but they didn’t think it was natural.

After the call, Alvin searched for more about Lan but found little. Not all deaths made the news, but he thought Lan’s might have because she was a journalist. Maybe her family was keeping it out of the media. Maybe the police. Alvin looked for Lan’s online presence but struggled because her name was common. Had it been a lie? He didn’t know. He kept looking, kept adding terms, then subtracting. If she was a journalist, then she wasn’t a successful one. He couldn’t find anything she’d written. He did find a few social media accounts under her name, but he was only sure one of them belonged to Lan. It was a TikTok account. It had a short film clip on it. In the clip Lan was sitting in a crowd watching a movie. The camera wasn’t focused on her. It was focused on two actors Alvin recognised. Lan was sitting behind them, sitting on the edge of the frame next to another woman. Lan was difficult to make out. She was only in frame for ten seconds, the length of the clip. For most of it, she sat there silently, sat there watching the film, until the end. They came when you slept, Lan said, the words subtitled because no one had recorded her voice.

Alvin watched the clip again and again. It had seven views when he found it. When he closed the page it had thirty-four. He wasn’t sure what to think. It was possible that Lan could’ve been both a shadow actor and a journalist. Or, like him, she could have told her friends and family that she was a journalist to hide what she truly did. A part of him didn’t believe that. He thought she’d taken advantage of him. Alvin knew it was irrational, that he had no proof, but he couldn’t stop himself. He replayed the conversations he had with Lan. She agreed with what he said, he thought, rather than offer anything herself.

He called Tynia’s number late that night. Alvin didn’t want to call. He didn’t want to make things worse, but he knew Tynia would want to know. The number Alvin called wasn’t answered, but he didn’t expect it to be. He left a short message explaining what had happened. He didn’t know what would happen next, but he wasn’t surprised when, at ten the following morning, Tynia knocked on his door.

Tynia Robbé was a short, plump white woman with dark, wavy hair. She looked tired and rushed, but she’d looked that way since Alvin had first met her. In fact, Tynia didn’t look all that different now than she had seventeen years ago. A few more wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. A new hair dye for a different shade of brown. Otherwise she looked like she’d always looked, like a harassed mother of half a dozen children, all of whom needed to be organised because her husband was useless or dead. As far as Alvin knew, Tynia didn’t have any children, and was unmarried. She’d once told him that all she had in her life were her little shadows, actors like him. Originally, Alvin thought the project was hers, and that she was responsible for the scripts, but she’d made it clear to him that she wasn’t the owner of the company, nor responsible for what he said on film.

“I did a little research before I came,” Tynia said. She sat across from Alvin at the dining table, a cup of coffee held between her hands. “Firstly, I can say for certainty that Lan Nguyen wasn’t a shadow actor. She was not one of my actors, nor one of anyone else’s. She’s not a journalist, either, though I can see how she might call herself that. She’s a researcher. Or was a researcher. She worked for a documentary team called Good Monkeys. They publish, if that’s the word for it, they publish their pieces as videos online. They style themselves as reporters outside the mainstream, a new organisation who speak truths that others are unable or unwilling to talk about.”

“Why would they be interested in us?”

“They’re a conspiracy group. They aren’t really into news, or information. They spend a lot of time talking about aliens, the cost of camps, escapees, things like that. My theory is that they think some of our films are about those things.”

“Aren’t they?” Alvin said. “Some of my scripts, when you put them together I mean, some of them could be seen to be about that.”

Tynia laughed a little. “They’re just films. Fictions. They’re stories in the back of other stories. It’s a game played by people who have the money to play it.”

She’d told him that before. She’d never told him who those people were.

“You’ve actually done us a great service,” Tynia said before he could ask. “I know it sounds terrible when I say that, especially after what has happened to Lan, but none of us knew that this group existed before you called. We had no idea they were paying attention to us. In a little time we’ll be able to do something about that. Right now, we’ll have to keep a low profile because of all the authorities involved, but when that passes we’ll be able to send in our lawyers and ensure that their interest stops.”

“Do you know how Lan was killed?”

“It looks to be an ex-boyfriend. It’s not too much of a concern for me. I know it sounds callous, but my focus is on protecting our work, as yours should be.”

Alvin agreed, though he did so mostly out of politeness. He was thinking about the young man he met in the bookstore, the one who’d told him about Nine. Should he mention that to Tynia? He thought he should.

“In the meantime,” she said, placing her cup on the table. “In the meantime, I’m sorry to say this, Alvin, but we’ll probably have to stop using you for a while. I don’t want to do it. You’re my favourite. You’ve worked for me for years now. You’ve been reliable and discreet. You really understand what is required in this job. But Lan and her friends did find you. She didn’t find anyone else, despite what she said to you. It might be that you’ve just been in too many films. It might be that we just need to step back a little. It might be that after a few months things change and it’ll be safe for you to go back to work again.”

Was he being retired, or fired? Alvin asked himself after Tynia left. He couldn’t decide which version of what happened was more accurate. He knew there would be no more shadow films. There would be no more scripts. But was Tynia wrong? He couldn’t continue to be a shadow actor if people knew he was one.

Alvin didn’t sleep well. At around two he got out of bed and walked out to his kitchen. The dishes were piled up in the sink. He’d put them there, left them dirty. It bothered him now. He filled the sink. He had a machine but he wanted the physical task, wanted to do something because he felt like he couldn’t do anything. Alvin washed everything three times. It took him half an hour. He kept thinking about the camp in Chicago. There hadn’t been anyone new brought to the camp in years. It was full, too full. It was said that there were children inside, children who’d been born into captivity who went on to have their own caged children who went on to have their own caged children. It was awful. His wife had protested the camps. She had gone to demonstrations, written letters, done all the things that had, in the last decade, disappeared. She’d had pictures of the alien spacecraft from blackout sites, old battered things bordering on being derelict, ships scorched and broken that he’d hardly been able to believe they could fly. They’re fleeing wars, planets that are crumbling, his wife said. The government hides these ships from everyone because only the desperate would get into them.

5.

For a while, Alvin continued to work as an extra. The money wasn’t great, but that wasn’t the reason he continued. Alvin took on the jobs because he wanted to be in the background of some ordinary films. He was in three quickly, first as a man on a corner, then a man in a hardware store, and finally a man drinking coffee. After the last, the offers became slower and slower until finally they stopped, and he was forced to ring the agency that handled his bookings.

A young woman he’d never spoken to answered the phone. Her name was Emily. Emily told him that a lot of people were passing on him. “There’s a sense,” she said diplomatically, “that you’ve been overused, that an audience can recognise you in the background of a film.” There were jokes online, she said, and a sense that he was a mark of poor quality. She assured him it was nothing that he was doing, that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that in fact it was because he was successful that this had happened. Alvin asked about work in commercials, or television, but there was none. Emily then said, rather firmly, that she would call him when work was available. He didn’t need to call her.

Alvin rang Tynia after. He wasn’t angry. She wasn’t responsible for his work drying up. She wouldn’t do that, he knew. But he wanted to explain what he was doing, wanted to leave her a message so that she could see that he was trying to fix the situation, trying his best to do what he could so that he could go return to work. Before Alvin called Tynia, he talked himself through what he was going to say. He didn’t want to sound unreasonable. He wasn’t angry, after all. No. All of this was a misunderstanding, a difficulty that he could overcome, that he would overcome. When the new year came around, he would be back on sets standing against walls, or sitting in bars, another man in a crowd that no one noticed, saying lines only a few cared to hear. Alvin told himself that as he dialled Tynia’s number.

A recorded voice told him that the number had been disconnected.

He tried it again, tried it again multiple times, but each time the number remained stubbornly disconnected. Had the number just been for him? It was possible that Tynia kept a collection of numbers she routed to her phone, with each of her shadow actors going straight to a message bank she checked later. Alvin didn’t like it, but it was possible. Tynia was a busy woman. Still, Alvin didn’t need a phone number. Calling her was just what he always did. He had an address. He had it in his files. When he’d first started working for Tynia, he had signed a contract and sent it back in the mail. But where was it?

Alvin was in his office. His cabinets were open, the same cabinets that held his details for taxes and insurance, that held the scripts he’d gotten over the years. The last were all carefully filed in his cabinet. He was sure he’d put the contract in with the scripts, but it wasn’t there. The only thing with them was a business card from a used bookstore.

The card was from the store where he’d met Marc, where he met the young man who had seen Nine. Alvin was sure he’d thrown the card out. He thought it might’ve been a different one, one from the store that he’d picked up earlier or later, but when he turned the card over Marc’s name and number were there. They were written in borrowed black pen. Alvin turned the card over and over in his fingers and leaned back against his cabinets. He hadn’t thrown out his original contract, had he? He hadn’t confused the contract and the card in his mind? He was getting old, but he wasn’t old like his parents had been at his age. He’d just made a mistake. He probably threw the contract out accidentally years ago, an absent-minded act, or a confident one. Yes, that was probably it.

He didn’t call the number on the card straight away. In fact, he wasn’t going to call it at all. Alvin told himself he didn’t need to. He dropped the card on his desk. He was going to throw it out, but that night, almost involuntarily, he found himself thinking about Nine. He should watch it. He had a right to watch it. What did Marc say when he met Alvin? Nine was a life’s work. Alvin had laughed. He hadn’t been an extra for a lifetime. Yet it was the major work of his adulthood, a piece of art he’d been making for nearly twenty years, everything he’d done since his wife died.

He called Marc. The young man was excited to hear from him. He told Alvin he was free that night. Alvin could come over after Marc finished work. The two of them could watch Nine and talk about his work as a shadow actor. He had a podcast, Marc said. Alvin wasn’t interested in that. “I don’t want to be the public face of this work,” he said. “I’d just like to watch the film. Nothing more. Certainly nothing for public consumption.”

Marc was disappointed but he understood.

Marc’s directions took Alvin down to Venice, not to a small house, or apartment, or anything like what Alvin imagined, but to a converted warehouse. There was a fence around it. Marc buzzed Alvin through the gate after he’d stood beneath a camera, after he’d introduced himself and waved.

Marc met him inside. He was a skinny white man in black jeans and a black t-shirt. He apologised for the security. Theft. Violence. You never know who is who in this country, he said. He led Alvin inside, where a huge archive of films were kept in wire cages and on shelves. The films were not just DVDs or Blu-rays, but in every format that had ever existed, from videotapes to 75mm prints, all of it neatly packaged and shelved. “I make videos,” Marc said as he led Alvin through the rows. “A lot of what I do is with what I call invisible film, making instruction guides, directions, things like that. I make films that thousands of people watch without ever thinking about who the writer or director is.”

“And you need all of this to do that?”

He laughed. “No. No, this is my hobby. I collect films. I make new films from them. We all need an artistic outlet, right? Mine is sampling from other films to make new ones.”

“That’s how you discovered the shadow films?”

“It’s like my art, but it’s also something very different. It’s something very planned and very subversive.”

The back quarter of the warehouse had been split into two floors and converted into a living space. The downstairs had a kitchen and a bathroom, while the upstairs had a living room and bedroom, all of which was divided neatly by walls. It was in the top half of the warehouse that Marc showed Nine.

Alvin didn’t enjoy it. He sat on Marc’s couch, his hands nervously digging their way into his pockets and sleeves as the film played, always shifting and moving. Alvin hated watching himself. And Nine . . . Nine was a mash of styles, of lighting and genres and clothes and settings. It was cohesive, but barely so. The cuts between scenes were rough, and many jarred, but Alvin’s small bits of dialogue were woven into a monologue that held it together. The film had been given subtitles to make it clearer for the audience to understand but Alvin didn’t need them. He watched himself describe how he helped people find housing and jobs, nearly always talking to the screen, talking as if he was responding to questions someone asked. War is not a way of life, he said at one point, said it while he stood outside a series of condemned buildings cut from two different films. There was a seriousness to what Alvin said, an earnestness, but he didn’t disagree with anything he said. People needed homes. People needed food and clothing. People needed to be supported. His greatest fear, he realised while he sat there, was that the film was a bigoted, ugly rant, but that wasn’t true. It was a relief Alvin didn’t know he needed.

6.

“This is the ninth shadow film,” Marc said after the film finished. “There are twelve shadow films. The first started in the 1960s, in 1962. It doesn’t have a title, but the person who found it, who put it together, called it One. One took a decade to complete. It’s a guide to living off the grid. It’s about seventy minutes long. The narrator is a young woman who talks about cities throughout the world. She talks about where you can live for free, how you can get food, things like that. When One was first discovered, people thought it was a counterculture thing, a little subversive piece of cinema, but now people don’t think that. One is part of a larger body of work, a work that is linked to the alien community on this planet. I know how that sounds. I laughed when I was first told that. We’re told that they’re all locked away, that they’re not mingling with us. But after you’ve watched a number of the shadow films, you see it. In fact, by the time you get to Nine, it’s not even something that the shadow films themselves are trying to hide.”

Alvin wasn’t really paying attention to Marc. He was thinking about how, after his first interview with Tynia, he’d come home and told his wife about the work, about how he was going to be paid enough to cover her medical bills. She’d been so happy. So relieved. Neither of them had asked if he shouldn’t do it, if it was illegal, or unethical. She was sick, she was so much in need, that he would have done anything for the money he was going to be paid.

“Hey, you there?” Marc asked. “I’m not talking to a wall, am I? You’re listening to what I’m saying about your work, right?”

“My work is fine,” Alvin said, more gruffly than he intended. “It’s a film. It’s fiction. It’s not real.”

“I know how this all sounds. In fact, I’m reassured to hear you say it. I like you, Alvin. I don’t want you to be someone who was willingly part of this, who knew that aliens were living outside the camps and thought that was okay. But it’s true. They’re out there. This is how they’re talking to each other. They’re using our media to make guides, to tell each other histories, to help them infiltrate us.”

Alvin stood. He couldn’t remain sitting. He heard himself again in Nine. We tried to live in the clouds, he said. To hide in the sun and the stars. The dialogue was pulled from five different films. In a sixth, Alvin said, But they found us. In a seventh, he said, Some were caught. In an eighth, ninth, and tenth film, he said, But we can make homes here. We deserve that.

“Why don’t you bring me your scripts,” Marc said. “You still have them, right? Bring them around tomorrow, and we’ll assemble them, match them to the film, see what’s missing, what’s not. I’ll show you the other films, as well. The other shadow films. You’ll know you’ve been used once you see them.”

Alvin told him he would think about it. Marc tried to get him to stay but he insisted. He drove home in silence and let the traffic carry him. He once asked his wife if she had ever met an alien. She hadn’t. No one gets out of the camps, she said. They tag those in them. The government does. Then they force them to live in squalor. They try to make it worse than the homes they’ve fled. They make videos of how bad it is and beam it into space so others won’t come. It’s so awful. So inhumane. They want to treat them worse than whatever conditions they left. The aliens are refugees, she said. They’re not invaders.

Alvin knew before he entered his house that something was wrong. He’d been robbed before. He had never forgotten the way his home felt disturbed before he stepped into it, as if he’d been moved from one reality to another, and everything was just slightly askew. The door was unlocked. The house was quiet. Alvin stood in the doorway and turned the lights on. He left the door open as he went further inside. If someone was still here, they could leave. He wouldn’t stop them. He didn’t want a fight. But there was no one in the house. Nor was anything obviously disturbed. His television. His computer. His record player. All of these things could have been taken and sold for money. His wife’s jewellery, her rings and bracelets, her earrings and few necklaces, the modest pieces she had so cherished. They were still in the cheap box she’d kept them in when she was alive.

It wasn’t until Alvin walked into his office that he saw what had been taken. There, at the bottom of the cabinet, one of the drawers wasn’t shut properly. It was the drawer with the typed scripts in it.

All that remained now was the card with Marc’s handwritten phone number on it.

7.

Alvin called Marc. His first thought was that Marc was responsible, even though he’d been with him the entire time, but the other man was so apologetic and so concerned that Alvin had to repeatedly tell him that he was fine. Marc wanted him to come back to the converted warehouse, to stay behind the fence and the cameras, behind his walls, in case whoever broke in came back, but Alvin declined. He would be fine, he was sure.

“Don’t treat this lightly,” Marc said. “Treat it seriously because it is serious. Shadow actors like yourself have been killed. I didn’t tell you about them earlier because I didn’t want to worry you, but after this—look, Alvin, shadow actors have been involved in some strange shit. Take the woman who was in One for example. Her name was Kristen Lynn. She died when she was thirty-eight. She was in a car accident. The accident took place in broad daylight, on a road that was well travelled, where over two dozen people saw her car suddenly explode. She was driving it at the time. The explosion damaged the cars around her. At least five people ended up in hospital. Those who saw it reported it to the police, told reporters about it, but within days, all those reports of the explosion were gone. In its place was a police report that said Kristen had been in a car accident, and that she had died when it rolled, that it had been a manufacturing error within the car. There was no mention of the explosion. No mention of other people hurt. Nothing. It was covered up within days. We wouldn’t even know about it if some of the people who’d seen it hadn’t come forward years later.”

Despite himself, Alvin thought of Lan, of the disinterested police officer who had called him, of Tynia’s casual dismissal of what had happened to her.

“I’ve got a friend,” Marc continued. “He knows more about shadow films than anyone else I’ve ever met. He’s seen things, seen documents, photos, videos, you name it. He has this huge collection of evidence that he’s been gathering over the years. You can help him. He’s a journalist. He runs an organisation called Good Monkeys. If you call him, he’ll be able to help get somewhere safe, or at least get you some security. You can’t just sit around and wait for whatever’ll happen next. You don’t want to be in a car that explodes.”

Marc’s friend called himself Phillip Ngo. He called Alvin and introduced himself before Alvin could decide if he wanted to call, before he could walk through the rest of his house, even. Alvin tried to put him off, but Phillip spoke confidently and quickly. He told Alvin that those who ran shadow actors like him were ruthless. He compared them to spymasters. They’d killed before, he said. The stars of One, Three, and Seven all died in suspicious circumstances, Phillip said, like he was giving a lecture, like he was on a podium and not holding a phone and speaking an hour before midnight. He retold the story of poor Kristen Lynn almost word for word what Marc said before he broke his lecture and told Alvin that he was sending him a car. That he had already sent him a car.

The car arrived within ten minutes, driven by a young black man. Alvin didn’t want to get in, but he was so overwhelmed by everything that had happened that he found himself sitting in the back instead. His hands shook a little. Someone had been in his house. They’d broken in to take his scripts. Outside, the city passed Alvin in a series of lights and signs that were, suddenly, foreign to him. He knew that it was just the aftermath of the break in. Nothing had really changed. He’d grown up in Los Angeles. He had lived in it his entire life. He belonged to it, and it to him. He wasn’t one of the famous people who populated it, who were like landmarks, but he was part of the art that defined the city, part of the cinema that gave it such fame.

His phone began to ring.

He didn’t recognise the number. He thought about not answering it. “Hello?” he said.

“This isn’t safe,” Tynia said. “You shouldn’t be in that car, Alvin. Ask your driver to take you back. He will. He’s just been hired to pick you up, that’s all. Go home and lock your doors. I’ll come and see you in the morning. I promise I will explain everything to you.”

Alvin disconnected the call without responding. A short time later, a private estate appeared before him. The gates were made from iron and patterned in the shape of birds and leaves. A long, dark drive ran after it, ran up to the front of a large house that was lit dimly. A young Vietnamese man was standing out the front. He was wearing an expensive long-sleeved shirt and suit pants. He wasn’t wearing shoes. He opened Alvin’s door when the car stopped, and introduced himself.

“The thing that’s hardest for us all to understand is that they’ve been living among us for years,” Phillip said while he led Alvin through the sparse, dark halls of his expensive house. “Everything you hear about how it’s all contained is a lie. Nothing is contained. Our world is being pulled apart. The shadow films are just one part of it.”

Alvin wanted to leave. He should’ve listened to Tynia. He was angry at her but he should have listened. It was a mistake to come here. Phillip continued his endless stream of conspiracy. It made less and less sense the more he talked. You didn’t make films in the back of other films if you had true power. If you were in the highest positions of power, if you could command huge budgets, hire big stars, and sell your ideas on cans of drink and toys for children, you didn’t need to work secretively.

“I should go home,” he said. “I should just call the police. I don’t know why anyone would take those scripts, but maybe—”

“I know this is a lot,” Phillip said, interrupting him. He had led Alvin to the door of a private cinema. “I would struggle with it if I was you as well. I wouldn’t know what to believe. After all, you’ve worked for these aliens, these things that masquerade as humans, for years. You wouldn’t willingly be a traitor. No one would. I know how it sounds to be told you’ve been part of it. But I have something that will make this a lot easier for you to believe me. You see, not so long ago, your employers sent one of their own to spy on me.”

There was an image already on the screen. It had been set up before Alvin arrived. The image was of a room that looked like it was somewhere in this house, to judge by the tiles on the ground. But it was not the tiles that drew his attention.

It was the white sheet that did.

The sheet that was stained with blood.

On the screen, the video began to play. Alvin watched as Phillip stepped into the frame. He watched as the young man reached down and took hold of the sheet and drew it back.

Lan lay beneath it. She was lying on the ground, dead. Beside Alvin, Phillip began to tell him how Lan came to work for him a year ago. On the screen, a second Phillip took out a big kitchen knife and cut down Lan’s chest. Phillip wasn’t a doctor. He wasn’t trained in what he was doing. If he was, he wouldn’t have used a kitchen knife, Alvin knew. But Phillip persisted. He cut open Lan and began to pull back her skin, to expose what lay beneath it. As he did, the first Phillip paused the video, paused it so that Alvin could clearly see the green organs and the black bones that looked like cinder. But it was Lan’s face that Alvin found himself returning to, the face swollen from Phillip’s attacks. Alvin thought the injuries looked like they had been done with a bat, or maybe a club.

“There are monsters in our world,” Phillip said, and he might have said more, if the police hadn’t chosen that moment to crash through the doors.

They were heavily armed and dressed in black tactical gear. They screamed for the two of them to get on the floor.

8.

In the early hours of the morning, Alvin was given a cup of bad coffee. He was still in the sterile interview room, then. Two police officers had come in to see him, to talk to him about Phillip Ngo, to talk to him about Marc Sensation, to talk about what he’d seen inside Phillip’s house and inside Marc’s warehouse. The first of the officers was called Detective Potter. She was a middle-aged black woman, friendly and calm. The second was a younger white man, Detective Porter, who mostly stood against the wall while Detective Potter talked. Alvin answered them as well as he could, as truthfully as he could. He had only just met Phillip, he said. He had met Marc earlier in a bookshop, but today, or yesterday, he corrected when he realised what the time was, yesterday was the first time he’d met him properly. He didn’t know that the two of them had worked with Lan Nguyen until tonight.

“We have security footage that shows Phillip Ngo breaking into your house earlier,” Detective Potter said. “We found the scripts that you mentioned in his house, in an office upstairs. Unfortunately, I think the two of them were trying to take advantage of you, Mr. Symons.” He had been Mr. Symons since he had arrived at the station. He was beginning to suspect that they meant it respectfully. “Our belief is that the two of them were trying to take your money. They’re known hustlers. They convince people to believe all kinds of outrageous things, about invasions and wars, everything you could imagine. They bought that house you were in tonight with the money they’ve taken from honest people like yourself.”

“Phillip wanted to show me a film,” Alvin said. “It was a film showing Lan Nguyen’s murder. It was a truly terrible thing.”

“Unfortunately, that film was damaged in the raid,” Detective Potter said. “We’re trying to salvage it, but I don’t know if that will be possible.”

“Phillip Ngo is trying to convince us that it showed an alien,” Detective Porter said, breaking his silence. “Did you see that, sir?”

“I saw a poor woman who had been beaten to death by someone she trusted. There was, sadly, nothing alien about it.”

“Would you testify to that?” Detective Potter asked.

“Yes.”

Both detectives smiled.

Alvin’s lawyer arrived with Alvin’s coffee shortly after. He was an elderly Chinese man who wore a very fine, handmade suit and even finer, handmade shoes. He introduced himself and apologised for the quality of the coffee. He said that he had been employed by Ms. Tynia Robbé to represent Alvin. Ms. Robbé, the very expensive lawyer said, was very concerned for him. Alvin drank his bad coffee while the lawyer talked to him. When the two detectives returned, they released him and his lawyer ordered him a taxi to take him home.

Alvin knew things were being smoothed for him. He knew that Tynia was using what power she had to ensure that Phillip and Marc bore the full weight of their actions. Alvin was someone they were simply moving out of the way to ensure that they got what they wanted. In the taxi, Alvin saw Lan’s face in the reflection of the window, saw again what had been done to her. She shouldn’t have had to suffer like that. No one, no matter who they were, or where they came from, should be subject to such violence.

Tynia was waiting for him when he got home. She had the lights on and the door open. Alvin wasn’t surprised. He found her cleaning his floor. The police had left muddy tracks, she said, when he asked her why she was doing that. He thanked her. He thanked her for the lawyer, as well. After that, the two of them stood awkwardly, until finally, Tynia invited him to sit in his own living room. She made coffee in his kitchen.

“This is a disaster,” she said, after she placed the coffee down, after she sat. “I apologise, unreservedly. You deserve better than this, Alvin. You’ve deserved to know the truth about our films for a long time. I suppose it was cowardice on my part that kept me silent. I thought you knew and I thought it was better to not openly discuss it. There aren’t many of us who live outside the camps, I’m afraid. A couple thousand throughout the world, no more. To lose someone like you who has been helping us would be devastating.”

“Did you know my wife?” he said. “Her name was Vanessa.”

“I never met her. I knew about her. People spoke fondly of her. It was one of the reasons I reached out to you.”

It pleased him to hear that. “She would have been very proud of the films.”

“We’re all proud,” Tynia said. “They’re ugly, rough things, but we’re all proud of what we do. They’re our history. Our history here. It was an idea that Lan and I came up with years ago. They play films in the camps, you see. Both of us were in a camp originally. We watched every kind of film you can think of. We made our escape plan from what we saw. But that was back before the chips, back when you had a better chance to escape. So few do now. So we smuggle our films in other films for them. Its always had to be a secret, though, because if they knew they’d stop bringing in the movies. When Lan found out that our films were being played in underground cinemas, she started an investigation to find out who was responsible. It led her to Phillip and Marc. She thought you were part of it as well, at first, but after meeting you she said you weren’t.”

“You used me,” he said. “You used me to draw them out, didn’t you?”

“Only after Lan died. She deserved justice.”

Alvin nodded slightly. It was true. He didn’t think otherwise. For a while, the two of them sat in silence. Outside, the world was beginning to wake up. Alvin could hear the birds and cars that were part of his neighbourhood. The people as well. Finally, he said, “The film, Nine. Is it a biography like I was told?”

“No,” Tynia said. “Some of the first films were guides. They taught you how to live outside the camp. Lan wrote them. But the ones after are just stories. We try to make them so that they’re positive, to give those who haven’t gotten out hope. We don’t have a lot to work with, we can’t have big action scenes or chases, so we tell stories like this, stories of people who are waiting to help them once they get out. And it’s true. There are people waiting to help. People like us and people like you.”

She left a little while later. After she was gone, Alvin thought about what she said. He didn’t forgive her for what she had done, for how she’d betrayed his trust, but he understood.

After a couple of weeks, Alvin’s understanding started to become a kind of forgiveness. He thought about calling Tynia to talk about it. Who else could he call to talk to? He couldn’t talk to his sister, who called him as she usually did, or his niece, who called him unexpectedly, but pleasantly a week ago. Still, he didn’t call Tynia. He wasn’t ready to call Tynia.

It was around then, on a Thursday, that Alvin went out to collect his mail and found a yellow envelope inside. There was no address on it, no stamp. Alvin took it inside with him, but didn’t open it straight away, as he previously would have done. Instead, he made lunch. He looked at the envelope as he cut his bread. He looked at it when he poured himself a drink. He looked at it when he returned the dirty plate and empty glass. A part of him thought he wouldn’t open it. He thought about what Tynia had said to him, and about how the film was about giving hope to people in the camps. He thought about Lan, and then Phillip and Marc.

A little later, he thought about his wife.

©2024 by Ben Peek.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Peek is the author of the upcoming novel, The Red Labyrinth. He is also the author of The Godless, Leviathan’s Blood, The Eternal Kingdom, Above/Below, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, Black Sheep, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. He has published over fifty short stories and they have appeared in magazines and anthologies such as Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Overland, Polyphony, and various Year’s Best editions. In addition to this, he is the creator of the psychogeographical ‘zine, The Urban Sprawl Project, and the autobiographical comic, Nowhere Near Savannah. He keeps a substack called No Substance that you can follow, if you’re so inclined, for updates and general nonsense. He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his partner and two cats.

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

Night Desk Duty at the Infinite Paradox Hotel

Aimee Ogden | 886 words

“Good evening, sir,” Dave says pleasantly, hiding his crossword puzzle under his computer keyboard, as the front door chimes. “Do you have a reservation?”

“Afraid not.” The guest fiddles with his suitcase. “I saw the No Vacancy sign, but I gotta ask—”

“No problem at all.” Dave’s keyboard clatters busily, a series of well-practiced keystrokes. “I can still get you in a room.”

“What, really? That’s great!” The guest pauses, brow furrowing. “But, uh, how is that possible, exactly?”

Dave slides a keycard across the counter. “Eh, it’s a math thing. Don’t worry too much about it.”

“Okay.” The guest glances down the endless hallway to Dave’s left. “Do I go all the way to the end, or . . .?”

“Nah. First door on the right.” Dave taps the one on the keycard envelope. “Someone’s in there now—just tell him to move to number two, okay? And so on.”

“Thanks for your help tonight, man; I really appreciate it.” The guest hesitates, pocketing the keycard. “Just so you know, though, there’s a bus pulling up outside. Looks pretty crowded, too.”

“Thanks for the heads-up.” Dave sighs. “And maybe don’t get too settled in just yet.”

The bus driver comes in, mopping her face with a handkerchief. “Hey there, Dave,” she says, reading his plastic nametag. “Look, hon, I hate to be a bother, but—”

“Infinite passengers?” he interrupts, pulling a sympathetic expression.

“Oh my god. Yes!” She sags with relief. “You got room for that many?”

“It’s our corporate promise, ma’am.” He taps the paper taped to the counter, where a clip-art receptionist gives a thumbs-up and a huge grin. “A guaranteed room (provided guests adhere to certain terms and conditions).” He almost hears the parentheses in his own voice. “If your passengers don’t mind knocking on the odd-numbered rooms, and sending the occupants to the room numbered with the double of their current room, and the occupant of that room to the next double . . . Infinite odd-numbered rooms for y’all.” He grimaces apologetically. “Sorry. I know it’s a little bit complicated.”

As the driver hurries out to her waiting passengers, a glowing ball of light drifts purposefully through the open door into the lobby. GREETINGS, it says telepathically. I WISH TO BOOK A VENUE.

At least it’s just one superintelligent AI; that should be relatively simple. Dave clicks back into the booking management system. “Do you have a reservation?”

NO. I DESIRE SEVERAL ROOMS TO HOUSE VIRTUAL REALITY SIMULATIONS FOR SOME . . . POTENTIAL COLLEAGUES. The glowing ball of light flares slightly. AN INFINITY OF ROOMS, ACTUALLY. AND I’M DEFINITELY NOT GOING TO TORTURE ANYONE IF THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT.

Now he’s a little worried about that. But refusing a room would break the corporate guarantee. However . . . Dave glances around. “And where are these other guests, if I may ask?”

THEY’LL BE HERE! I JUST HAVE TO MANIFEST A VERSION OF THEIR HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESSES. IT’S NOT A BIG DEAL, SERIOUSLY.

“Sorry,” says Dave, manifesting a version of customer service excellence. “No imaginary numbers. Hotel policy states all guests must be real and countable.”

The ball flickers threateningly. DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?

Dave shrugs.

Disappointed, the light dims a little. GIVE ME THE NUMBER FOR CORPORATE.

Dave produces a business card from the drawer in front of him. “I’ve never had a complaint before,” he informs the AI coldly.

GET BENT, the light says, absorbing the card into itself before vanishing. Dave doesn’t mention that the reason he’s never had a complaint is that the wait time on the customer service line only ever decreases by half. However long the AI waits, it’ll never actually get to speak to a service representative.

Movement outside saps his smirk, though. Another bus has pulled into the parking lot. No, several busses. No, there’s . . . oh, lord.

He rolls up his sleeves as he heads outside to meet the first driver, forestalling the other man’s apologies as they meet in the crossed headlights. “Infinite busses; infinite passengers; yes, I can get them all in rooms as long as they know something about prime numbers and calculating exponents. How long are you folks expecting to stay, anyway?”

“That’s just it,” says the driver sheepishly. “We need someplace to stay until this hanging everyone’s going to see—except the exact day is s’posed to be a surprise. So it can’t happen on Friday, because that’s the last day left in the workweek and if it hadn’t happened by then it wouldn’t be a surprise anymore. And if we know it can’t happen on Friday, then Thursday’s the last day left, so it can’t happen then either—and so on, so, y’know, it can’t ever actually happen and we’re stuck here forever.”

“Well.” Dave exhales noisily. “There’s going to be some extra paperwork involved. But, yeah, I think we can find space for y’all. Even indefinitely.”

The bus driver offers Dave a cigarette and a light, which he gratefully accepts. “Sorry to put such a wrench in your day, kid.”

“Eh, it’s not so bad, really.” Dave takes a calming drag. “Before this gig, I used to drive a trolley. You wouldn’t believe some of the shit I’ve seen.”

©2024 by Aimee Ogden.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her debut novella “Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters” was a 2021 Nebula Award finalist, and her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction. Her third novella, “Emergent Properties,” came out in July 2023.

We Shall Not Be Bitter at the End of the World

David Anaxagoras | 2988 words

It’s my twelfth birthday and we’re all waiting for Wormwood and everyone is here and I mean everyone. Me and Mom and Dad and Big Pa which is my grandpa who was the strong man at one of the last traveling carnivals in America, and Bigfoot of course, and a swarm of killer bees collectively named Kyle who aren’t really so mean, and a very tall alien, and fillyloos flying backward and upside down overhead and jackalopes scampering about under our feet, tons of them, flashing out of the woods into the campsite, tearing around the picnic tables and disappearing again into the trees and you can hear the constant click and clack of them knocking their horns together and the schlurp schlurp schlurp when they drink whisky from the shallow dishes that Big Pa set out. It’s not really my twelfth birthday but if I don’t have it now, I won’t have it at all.

Somehow in the middle of the campgrounds one of those famous giant stone figures with the huge heads from Rapa Nui (we used to call it Easter Island I guess, but there really isn’t anything Eastery about it and besides it already had a name—Rapa Nui) appeared in the middle of the auditorium, which is a place with splintering wood benches in a half-circle that go up and up a little hill around a stage. Some people are sitting on the benches waiting for—I don’t know what, maybe for the head to speak or something. Anyway, when I say we’re all here, this is what I mean. We’re all here, from every time and every place, and we’re all waiting for Wormwood.

It’s a big party.

Wormwood is what you call that thing lighting up the sky like Las Vegas (so I imagine, I’ve never been because I’m too young to gamble says my mom, but they have stuff there for families and kids says my dad). The sky is bright is what I’m saying, even at night, and Wormwood is coming—it’s the size of the moon but not a moon, and not a star exactly, not a meteor, not a comet. Probably not a black hole but something close. Maybe a white hole. Maybe a wormhole. Maybe something we don’t have a name for yet. Except, of course, “Wormwood.”

Dad says the gravity will hit us long before Wormwood physically does, and already the moon is cracking and reality is getting pushed and pulled and squeezed and twisted (like taffy, Mom explains, but I’ve never really had taffy because Mom always says it is bad for my teeth and I’m thinking instead when I used to stretch and pull different colors of modeling clay together and each color became a thin band, then many thin bands, then eventually blended all together into itself). That’s what’s happening now. Everything we know is getting all mixed together. Even time, because it’s all one thing with space, Dad says, and I said I know that already because I watch science on YouTube. Amelia Earhart was here last night but I missed her because I had already gone to bed and apparently there are still bedtimes at the end of the world, which sucks.

“The world has turned to a dream,” Mom says with a sigh as she arrives at the picnic table with shish kebabs, which is her go-to thing to make outdoors and I love them because it’s the only time I get to eat mushrooms because Dad hates mushrooms and we never have them because apparently whatever he doesn’t like we can’t have which doesn’t seem fair. But everyone gets to have whatever they want on their own kebab.

Mr. Glarn (that’s the alien’s name you know, and it makes me smile because it’s exactly the sort of name I would have made up for an alien when I was six and now here he is, Mr. Glarn the alien) takes a kebab and nods his head in a way that means Thank you for the delicious cubes of Earth meat and especially for these plump little Earth mushrooms which add so much to this humble Earth delicacy.

“You’re so very welcome, Mr. Glarn. I hope they’re not too overdone,” Mom says and touches her fingertips lightly to Mr. Glarn’s tall shoulder and Mr. Glarn bobbles his head in a way that means Not at all and I thank you for your hospitality and I shall savor every morsel of this Earth food which you have cleverly stabbed upon this sharp stick and especially these plump little Earth mushrooms which is a lot to say with a head bobble but Mr. Glarn is pretty amazing.

Mom serves me my kebab and says, “See how polite Mr. Glarn is? Even though it’s the end of the world? I’ll bet he went to bed on time last night and didn’t make a fuss about brushing his teeth.”

Mr. Glarn dabs at the corner of his mouth with a paper napkin, which means There is a saying among my kind—At the end of the world, we shall not be bitter.

“Oh, I like that,” my mom says and gives Dad a sad mushroomless kebab (he’s so absorbed in conversation with Kyle—the killer bees, remember?—he doesn’t notice) and then she puts the platter down in the middle of the table in case others join us or anyone wants seconds. I look around for Big Pa and he’s across the way at another picnic table with some of his old carnival friends—an Illustrated Woman whose tattoos are sagging and telling a much different story than they did when she was younger, and a fire-eater who is complaining that the salsa is too hot (it’s an old joke) and a beardless woman who used to be a bearded woman but shaved it off after it had gone completely white. Bigfoot is with them too and laughing and getting to know everyone. I wish Big Pa would bring him over here and introduce us.

I wonder if Mr. Glarn’s saying is something like a commandment—you shall not be bitter, or more like a New Year’s resolution, like making a promise to yourself not to be bitter even if everything is ending, even and especially your life.

“We shall not be bitter,” I say out loud, trying it on for size, you might say. I like Mr. Glarn, but his saying doesn’t fit me right. Not all the way.

“Couldn’t you stop it, Mr. Glarn?” I ask through a mouthful of mushrooms. I’m eating all the mushrooms first in case the world ends faster than I expect. “Couldn’t you stop Wormwood from killing us all and destroying Earth and reality? Don’t you know stuff about black holes and things?”

Mr. Glarn chews thoughtfully on a roasted cherry tomato and some of the juice dribbles over his chin and he blinks oh, dear me, and dabs again with his napkin which is now very soggy and I tear a square of paper towel from the roll in the middle of the table and pass it to him.

Mr. Glarn sneezes, which means I tried to tell them, you know. Your Men in Black. I might have been able to do something if they had listened, if they had let me go in time. But I’m afraid the time to do something about Wormwood is not when it’s right on your doorstep, as it were.

Mr. Glarn looks a bit sad. I guess we shall not be bitter at the end of the world, but we shall be a little sad.

Wormwood pulses—it does that sometimes, sends out these flashes that ripple through reality—and now I can hear splintercats smash their skulls against the trees deep in the woods and another moai (that’s the giant stone figure with the big head) appears on the stage with the first one and I can’t be sure but the first one does look a bit happier to have a friend. I stare at them both a long time, hoping to see their stone mouths move, but then I get sidetracked because Big Pa (my dad’s dad) trots up to the table and announces he is going to have a rock-lifting contest with Bigfoot, and we all rush to the edge of the woods to watch.

Big Pa and Bigfoot stand side-by-side, limbering up. Big Pa has his striped strong-man singlet on, which he occasionally wears when he wants to regale us with carnival tales, and which I suspect he sometimes, maybe even all the time, wears under his regular clothes, and which is loose in places that used to be tight and tight in places that are just plain wrong, and once upon a time it probably had padded muscles sewn inside, not that he ever needed them. Big Pa bends and stretches and groans.

Bigfoot is a good three feet taller than Big Pa, and he shakes his arms out—well, one arm anyway because he is holding a very full stein of beer in the other hand—and he stomps his fourteen-inch feet on the earth and grunts several times to hype himself up.

Dad stands between them, Kyle buzzing all around him (they’re inseparable now) and he has a dripping cone of vanilla ice cream in one hand and I don’t know where he got it but it is going to go completely to waste if he doesn’t hurry up and eat it. The illustrated woman is off to the side, struggling to reset her stopwatch. Wormwood has a funny effect on clocks so it’s a little tricky.

“Ladies and Gentlemen!” Dad starts, and I roll my eyes.

“That doesn’t exactly include everyone, Dad,” I say.

Dad flashes a quick embarrassed smile, holds his drippy ice cream a little farther away from his body, and says, “Friends and neighbors and distinguished visitors!” and I say, “Better, Dad!” but not loud enough to interrupt.

“For your end-of-the-world entertainment, I present your Rajas of Rocks, your Sultans of Stone, your Kings of . . .” he pauses, and I can see the gears in his head turning, then says “Your Kings of Kinetic Contests!”

There’s a smattering of applause for the save.

“Prepare to be thrilled, stupefied, and amazed as you witness Bigfoot versus Big Pa in the Rock-lifting Contest at the End of the World!”

Dad flails his free arm and cheers and takes a big bite of melting ice cream and trots away and now there’s bigger applause from the audience and some cheers and a deep rumble of approval from the moai that you can feel in your chest and yowls of pleasure from the splintercats and the jackalopes signal their excitement by making several new litters of jackalopes in a matter of moments and the fillyloos settle into their upside-down nests to watch and Mr. Glarn strides over and folds himself down to the ground next to me and hands me a Cherry Coke and it is straight-out-of-the-ice-chest cold and I drink half of it down in one gulp before the contest even starts.

The object of the contest is to see not just who could lift a heavy rock, but who can hold it up high over their head the longest time. The illustrated woman has her thumb on the crown of the stopwatch and Big Pa’s face is already red as a beat by the time the rock is up to his knees and thick cords stand out on his neck and a fat vein on his forehead pulses and the rock finally rises over his head. No sooner does the illustrated woman start her stopwatch than Big Pa throws the rock down and lets out a roar of victory. Or of pain. It’s hard to tell.

Bigfoot nudges the rock over to its original starting point with his foot, a display of casual strength which doesn’t bode well for Big Pa. He gulps down his beer and tosses the stein into the air and Kyle swarms it and floats it down gently to a picnic table, making sure not to trap any of themselves beneath it.

Then Bigfoot lifts the stone effortlessly above his head. It nearly floats out of his hands. Really, the contest is won after a single second, but I guess Bigfoot wants to make sure his record stands for however much time the world has left. After the illustrated woman calls out one minute, Bigfoot’s arms start to quake, and after two minutes his face strains, and he leans his enormous frame back and a window-rattling beer-belch escapes him (to great applause).

At two minutes thirty seconds, Bigfoot lets the rock back down to the ground, planting it solidly between his feet.

Mr. Glarn makes a harumph sound that means harumph and unfolds his long grasshopper legs and lifts himself into the air and strides over to Bigfoot and puts his long arm around his shoulder—Mr. Glarn is nearly as tall as him—and speaks softly into his ear, and Bigfoot nods and then says something into Big Pa’s ear, who is still red-faced and sitting on log and swabbing his sweaty bald head with a tea towel, and Big Pa nods and gets to his feet.

When Mr. Glarn sits beside me again, I ask him what’s going on. He tilts his head, which means watch and see. But honestly, I’m not that interested in rock-lifting contests. It seems kind of a waste at this point. Instead, I go to get another Cherry Coke because I finished the one Mr. Glarn brought me and dang it was good—I’m not normally allowed to drink (or eat) sugary stuff, but it isn’t going to hurt me now.

When I come to the picnic table area I catch my mom holding my dad’s head against her shoulder and shushing him because he’s crying and it breaks something inside me to see him so sad and to see her having to be strong for him when she is also so sad and he is saying why do we always wait until funerals to get together and my mom snort-laughs and my dad chuckles and she strokes his hair and she says I don’t know, it’s stupid, we’re just really stupid.

After a moment, Mom spots me watching them and she smiles through her tears and ruffles Dad’s hair to get his attention and he sniffs and wipes his face and they both put their hands on my shoulders and then hug me and it squeezes a little water out of my eyes. Kyle buzzes around us and their sound is warm honey and sunlight and endless fields of clover.

“It’s all so beautiful,” Mom says. “Everything and everyone mixed up together like this. We could have had this anytime we wanted. We could have had this.”

I look up at Wormwood. We shall not be bitter I try to remember but there is a hard knot in my heart anyway.

I go back to Mr. Glarn, who is still sitting front row at the rock-lifting contest. When sitting he is almost the same height as me. I crook my elbow around his neck and lean a little bit on him and he pats my arm.

“What are they doing?” I ask Mr. Glarn, because now Bigfoot and Big Pa are both holding the rock together between them, their arms tented, as if they are holding the stone up like some kind of holy relic even though it’s just a big ugly rock.

“Three minutes!” the illustrated woman exclaims and there is applause and some gasps.

When they get to four minutes, they gently settle the rock back down between them and hug and jump excitedly while they hold on to each other and whoop and holler and go off to find some more beer.

“Can’t you change it, Mr. Glarn?” I ask him while he is still eye-level with me.

He looks at his toes which means I tried, little one, I tried.

“But you were alone, then. Everyone is here now. Everyone.”

Mr. Glarn looks around at the dozens of people who came to celebrate that night and all the jackalopes digging their burrows and the fillyloos quietly snoring in their gravity-defying nests and the shadows of the splintercats slinking in the deep woods and Big Pa and the illustrated woman starting up on their tales and already laughing until they can’t breathe and Bigfoot wiping beer foam from his mustache with the back of his hairy arm, and beyond all these things to other things I couldn’t even see or sense.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to do the big things alone,” I say. “I don’t think we even can.”

Mr. Glarn unfolds his legs and stands very tall over me and Wormwood shines down furiously from the sky behind him but Mr. Glarn’s silhouette nearly blots it out. He smiles at me in a way that means, Yes, I really do suppose we can do something. Together. He reaches into his pocket for his key fob and clicks it and decloaks his flying saucer, which is painted eggshell blue except for it has two wide white racing stripes down the middle.

“I’ll round everyone up,” I volunteer, and start to dash off, but Mr. Glarn clicks his tongue in a way that means, Oh, just one more thing. I turn.

He opens his arms wide which means I’m afraid it’s too late to outrun it—if we’re to have a chance, we’ll have to take it head on.

For some reason, I feel as tall as Mr. Glarn and much older than twelve. I nod and lift a corner of my mouth in a way that means, Let’s do it.

©2024 by David Anaxagoras.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

A Saint Between The Teeth

Sloane Leong | 6683 words

Kharatet moistens his sightless eyes with his tongue as he draws his finger across the limestone tablet glyphs. His audience today is a clutch of toddling nymphs, motionless save for their short tails rippling the shallow water impatiently. It’s a good age to read to, while the little ulmuns are still young enough that the novelty of the world keeps them fearfully reserved and quiet. They likely won’t understand much of today’s reading but it doesn’t matter; tradition dictates that they be read to as soon as they’ve hatched and hatched they are.

His sensitive finger pads drift glacier-slow across the tablet’s surface, reading the minuscule cuneiform stark against his setae. The intricate carvings are as clear to the touch as a canyon is to a raptor’s eye on an unclouded day. Today he has chosen the poet Loraja to study, not because of her poetry—which explores typical ulmun subjects like the joys of solitude, slowness, the eating of telph—but because of her penmanship. He’d always admired the uniquely subtle expression of her mark-making and enjoyed following the path of a single glyph, tracking the delicate curve of the author’s talon as it etched into the substrate.

“For now, your body is content enough to graze on what our caves offer but as we grow, we must move onto more substantial sustenance. The First Egg saw to this, giving us our alliance with the telph. This poem is inspired by the poet’s first true Nourishment:

let me emanate like light
a tremor of warmth on the skin
pulsing dawn filling my body like bones
just as solid, sweetness waiting to burst—”

Pain snaps Kharatet’s mouth shut around the poem, buckling him over from a sudden knot of agony. The stone tablet clatters to the cavern’s unforgiving floor as his stomach twists into a hard crease of scalding steam. Panting, he curls into himself, tail wrapped tight around his waist as if he can cut the radiating cramp off with his own throttling strength. Beneath the roar of the stream, he hears his fellow scholars lift their heads, their breaths startled into speeding.

“Are you all right, brother-scholar?” one of the other scholars asks from a neighboring study cell. The nymphs before Kharatet are quiet but have balled up in distress, mostly submerged in the shallow stream. When Kharatet doesn’t respond quick enough, the scholar adds, “Someone gather the nymphs and take them to the dining chambers, please. They don’t need to witness this.”

Kharatet waves off an approaching ulmun in frustration then remembers his manners and contracts his feathered gills. “Apologies. It’s nothing, elder, really. Leave them to me.”

“Nothing, indeed,” the elder scholar bites out, growing muffled as he returns to his tablet. “You need to begin your pilgrimage. No more excuses, Kharatet.”

Kharatet can feel someone moving closer, rousing the nymphs to exit the study chamber. He grunts and grasps for a list in his head, things that hold other things, and wills the burning ache to subside with the recitation:

bones to marrow,
blood to heat,
mouths to teeth,
skins to meat,

The pressure builds under Kharatet’s translucent skin, a false nauseating heat. Then his stomach unclenches, so quickly it leaves him lightheaded and gasping. With limp and shaking hands, he sets aside the tablet back into its stone shelf and slithers weakly out of the reading alcove, back into the frozen stream like a tadpole. He parts his wide mouth and seals his nostrils as he sinks into the water, letting the stream slide past his teeth and over his gills. A drowsy chill swarms up over him like an embrace and he breathes out the remnants of tension in his gut, in his bones. A hand breaks through the cold, strokes down the length of his smooth back with the tips of filed claws.

“I think it’s time, younger brother,” a strong voice says over the river din, hiding within its amusement. “The poetry will have to wait.”

His elder sister Mhuretaj. Her touch stills across his shoulder, caught on the bony prominences no healthy ulmun should have. “You’re almost ten winters old. You need to eat. You’ve lasted longer than I on salt mites and moon louse, if that makes you feel better.”

Water sluices off Kharatet as he hauls himself up into a sitting position and anchors himself on a nearby rock. The current is strong enough to tug at his malnourished body, pluck at the vestiges of his strength.

“No, I’m fine. I . . . I can go until next winter,” Kharatet says. He drags his claws through the water as if his hunger hadn’t just toppled him over completely. In a whisper, he adds, “I’m not ready.”

Mhuretaj hisses out a sigh and slides her arm beneath his, lifting him from the water. They’ve had this conversation before and she has relented twice already. Kharatet can sense there will be no refusing her demand this time. “You’re not supposed to be ready,” she says, leading them down a cave toward the dwelling quarters. “If you were, I would think you a monster.”

Panic starts to prickle at Kharatet’s spine but he’s too feeble to react to it. “J-just leave me in the stream. I’d rather feed on cave mould than eat one of the telph. I just . . . I can’t! I don’t understand how you can do it. How any of our family can!”

Mhuretaj stiffens beside him, her meager pace halting. He has insulted her. It is not his first time; they have had this particular debate many times, by themselves and in the company of others. He could not sway her any more than she could him. His gills press against his neck as a backwash of doubt flows up over his conviction.

How could something he found so unnatural and cruel be so inconsequential to everyone else? Could it simply be a flaw of his? He liked to think his creed had been founded around an innate sense of virtue and respect for life. But if he peered at the origins of his beliefs, he could see another side to the truth he’d cultivated. As a child, his brood mother had fed him a cave beetle and to this day he could still hear a chirrup of pain as he bit down into it. And even as his brood mother cradled him through tears, assured him its death was of no import, Kharatet could not shake off the slough of realization.

His existence required a brutality he could not stomach

“Don’t be a fool. This is what we have, what’s been agreed to by both our people. We’re past being martyrs for our nature,” Mhuretaj murmurs. Beneath their feet, the spring melt moves sluggish and steady through the lightless cave, filling the wide cavern with the cold bite of winter’s last breath. “I won’t force you to eat but before you curl up into a corpse, you need to go and meet the telph for yourself. If you’d still rather starve after that then . . .”

“Yes, I understand,” Kharatet says, feeling both relief and a great growing hollowness. The water rasps against the stone, sings itself back and forth through the tunnels, the depth of it swelling ever so slightly with accruing sediment. “Tomorrow then,” he says, trying to scrape together some amount of conviction in his voice. “I’ll meet with them tomorrow.”

• • • •

The next wake cycle, Kharatet rouses to Mhuretaj shuffling around her room. Invigorating warmth has suffused him, a stark contrast to the icy stream in the archivist quarters. Normally Kharatet would enjoy the thermal spring heat that warmed the surrounding rock in his sister’s home but all it has done is stir up his body’s hunger, sharpened the sting of starvation.

“Did you even sleep?” he asks, padding over to a nearby pool and submerging himself. The water soaks into his flesh and gills, giving him a brief rush of renewal before his gut begins to pinch.

“A little. Hmm, what else do you need . . .” Mhuretaj says absently before disappearing into her sleeping chamber. Her home is naturally decorated with clusters of mineral straws and boxwork that swallows the ceilings and walls. He finds it disturbs and muffles the flow of sound and air, leaving him disconcerted. His own dwelling has been sanded down of harsh textures and angles, all smooth stone furnishings rounded for him to recline on or against.

“Here, you’ll need these,” Mhuretaj says. She shakes out something large and Kharatet grabs the edges of the object gingerly, feeling the density and texture of what he realizes is woven leaves. It smells rich and musky with age, like reeds from the forest overhead drift down the cave rivers, clotting and decomposing.

“What is this?”

“A cloak. You’ll need it to withstand the light and weather up above. The cloak’s fabric will keep moist for a decent amount of time so your skin doesn’t crack from the dryness.” Mhuretaj draws it tighter around her brother, knots it beneath his throat. It feels heavier than it did in his hands as it envelops him, muffling his bare skin of vibrations. Clothing was not a part of ulmun culture, unlike the telph’s penchant for garments, and wearing the cloak fills Kharatet with a prickling anxiety. What if they thought he was trying to ingratiate himself with them? What if his clothing was distasteful in some way?

“And this.” She slides something heavy and hard-edged into his palm. A crystal the size of an egg, constructed of harsh, uneven little cubes; payment for transport. “That’s all you need. Ready?”

Kharatet wrinkles his muzzle in affirmation. He follows his older sister out one of the entryways, a hole bored open to barely the circumference of their skulls. When the waters rise, which is rare, blocking the small entry hole will take only a moment. They slither easily through, limbs compressing to their sides, ribs folding up to fit the necessary width. They pass through community living quarters, twitching their gills so that they pop in brief greetings to passersby. The walls here are honeycombed with holes, entryways to small dwellings that echo in his peripheral hearing with movement, to shops and halls that make up the mundane routines of ulmun life.

Mhuretaj leads him to a rear passage beset by large stalagmites, familiar formations he has touched his entire life. Now they feel like jaws waiting for a meal. Is this all of what the telph will see of him? Fangs, a throat, his shameless appetite?

“When you get to the top, there will be a small hut,” she says. When he chatters his teeth soundlessly in confusion, she clarifies, “A dwelling made of wood. Yes, wood. An envoy will be waiting for you there and will take you to the telph’s village.”

He knew in theory how this all went but suddenly having to breach the surface himself, to trust in millennia of tradition and tales of the First Egg’s will, sent a needling panic through him.

“You’ll be fine,” Mhuretaj says, squeezing his tail with her own. “This path is old and well tread. Go, brother. Nourish yourself.”

• • • •

Arteries of water flow down the cave walls, gravid with the scent of all the surface holds and growing richer as Kharatet moves towards the exit. The higher he walks, the lighter the air becomes, thinner and drier in a way that leaves him feeling bare even draped in the reedy cloak. New sound now, the reverberation against stone giving way as it funnels out into nothing.

Around a corner, molten heat spills against his skin, burning him. He’d read of daylight before but the actual experience of it thrashes away the tepid poetry that had tried to grasp it. It is a small bubble of blazing at the end of the tunnel, beckoning him forward with its insistent warmth. It takes him several long moments of moving forward, turning and hiding his face, and moving forward again before he feels it. The overhead, the outside.

When he walks through into the heat of day—true day!—the new, burning atmosphere and the filthy, turbulent wind shoving at his cloak ravages his senses. His body buckles into a spiral to protect itself. Moaning, Kharatet pulls his cloak around him tightly, shuddering under the thin boundary of cloth, half submerging himself in the shallow river feeding into the cave.

The worst of it all is how this surface world sounds: branches bow and crunch, bushes crackle, leaf chafes against leaf. How the cacophony of noise glances violently off the furious world around him and fades too quickly, absorbed by the great nothingness above him. It’s all too much, too much noise betraying too much life, too much texture.

Time dilates with his fright. How did any of his brethren tolerate this place?

A crunching close by, a predator’s approach. Kharatet tries to direct his hearing toward it, to feel its nearness through his skin, but it is too late. Something opaque and heavy is draped over him and he jolts, thinking it an attack for several frozen seconds until no bite follows. Rising, he touches what he finally understands to be a second fabric over him.

“Are you all right?” a voice asks, its accent filled with plosive air and clicking. Kharatet, relieved at being able to recognize this stranger’s language, shivers his gills in confirmation. Something roots around in his cloaks’ pocket and withdraws the smooth ritual stone. “Ah! What a lovely color. This will be fine for the fare. Up you go, then.”

A color, another facet of the world his nature did not give credence to. Four branch-like limbs, stiff with armor, suddenly compress around his back and haul him upward, scooping his legs from the ground. What was happening? Was this the envoy he was meant to meet?

“I . . . I’m not sure . . .” Kharatet tries to speak but this rough handling is his mind’s limit.

“Don’t worry, ulmun,” the stranger says. “I’ll turn the half-day walk into a quarter for you.”

Kharatet’s malnourished body sends out sprigs of panic that, in their effort to energize him, only founders his consciousness, relegating him to a sick and sudden darkness.

• • • •

Wet warmth cocoons Kharatet as he wakes from cold, dark sleep. He shifts and splashes, feels the walls of the narrow hot pool he’s been immersed in. His underfed memories struggle forth, brief currents of time when he’d been jarred awake: the bumpy basket ride from the cave mouth down into the forested valley. The wretched cries of flying things. The being—a telph, he knows now—hauling him out of the basket, carrying him like an immobile nymph.

And now here he was, in one of their welcoming pools cordoned off by what feels like drapery, leaving him in blessed quietude. Tonguing the water, he finds it flat, lifeless, missing the natural sharpness of dissolved metallics and sediment. Boiled, then. He hisses in distaste.

“Oh, you’re awake then, visitor?” Something slips between the curtains, touching something to the back of his hand. “Please, drink. I’ve never seen a ulmun in such a sickly state.”

“I didn’t realize anyone was here! My apologies I—”

“Drink now, dear one. We can speak after I’m sure you won’t faint again.”

How embarrassing, splashing around while his host was watching, not introducing himself. Kharatet takes what he feels now is a goblet in embarrassment, not wanting to offend them further, and gulps the contents down.

The sensation of it sliding down his throat, the instant relief expanding in his belly makes him whimper. A deep savoriness shimmers across his tongue, like the nuttier aspects of cave snail shell, but then surrenders to a lighter sweetness like sugared wormmilk. It heats him from the inside out, pooling in his stomach and expanding outwards like liquid light.

“Oh,” is all he can manage, a syllable teetering on the edge of a relieved croon.

“That good, ah?” the telph says from behind the curtain, amused. “Or perhaps you’re just too starved to tell the difference in quality.”

Kharatet slugs the rest of the liquid back and nearly passes out from a vibrating rush of energy. The telph scoops up the goblet before it falls from his hand and Kharatet tries to catch at their arm. “You . . . you must tell me what that is! I’ve never tasted such a thing!”

“Never?” The telph doesn’t pull their arm away—an armored arm, he realizes, shelled—but he can sense a curious tension in it. “It’s me, of course. What else would you eat?”

“You?”

“My crop. My, you must be quite young if you’ve never . . .”

The rest of the telph’s words do not pierce the sudden froth of shock that whites out Kharatet’s attention.

Their blood. He’d drunk their blood.

He’d resolved not to partake in this odious ritual and yet he’d gobbled the offering down without thought! But of course, why else did he come here? In the end, he’d made the journey because, in the back of his loud and righteous mind, he was a coward, afraid of death, afraid of dying slow and hungry.

“Oh no, have I lost you again?” the telph asks, touching his brow.

“No, no, I’m well. I’m here,” he says feebly, lowering himself into the water up to his eyes. “I didn’t mean to do that. And all without proper introduction. Or why I’m really here.”

“Hunger makes us all clumsy. Do you think you can manage more? Or should we wait and see what of me you can keep down?”

“No!” The shout fills the room, which, from the traveling echo, Kharatet now realizes is quite large. The telph stiffens and retracts their claws, a motion that makes Kharatet’s feathery gills pin to the side of his head. “I didn’t come here for a meal. I came here to understand . . . to understand why you acquiesce to such a one-sided arrangement. And I’ve come here to . . .” To die, his mind supplies but his mouth refuses to shape the words.

“I see,” the telph says slowly as if measuring the veracity of his statements. “I find it hard to believe you don’t know anything of this tradition.”

“Of course I know all about it,” he hisses, tone somewhere between exasperated and petulant. “But I don’t understand why you do it. I want to know from your own tongue, not from the voice of a ulmun or a tablet.”

The telph clicks its claspers in worry. “You don’t have much time left.”

“Yes. But I need to know.”

• • • •

The telph introduces himself as the monk Anul and Kharatet stumbles through his own introduction, his lineage, and current scholarly pursuits, all of which Anul chitters politely at. As they walk from the reception baths out into the warmer halls, Kharatet moves closer so he might be able to glean the telph’s appearance from vibration alone, touch if he’s lucky enough to brush against his host. His behavior, it seems, doesn’t go unnoticed.

Anul stops, drops a claw onto Kharatet’s arm to stop him. “Before we go further, would you like to touch me? It seems unfair I can see you clearly and you’ve no idea what kind of being you’re walking next to.”

“I’ve some idea,” Kharatet says shortly. He lifts his hand to his shoulder to guess at Anul’s height. “I can hear you. The weight of your steps and how your,” he clears his air-roughened throat, reaching for another word besides blood, “. . . pulse echoes in your body. How the wind and sounds strike against you as well. It all gives me a general shape.”

“Impressive,” Anul says, pacifying. “But touch would give you more clarity, no?”

Kharatet can’t argue that; he nods.

“Come here then.” Something shuffs to the ground, some garment Anul was wearing, too light for him to notice.

Before he can move forward, Anul’s hard claws are pulling him forward by his wrists, the supple skin pinching under the telph’s chitin. He puts Kharatet’s palms on his chest first and the ulmun can do little but suck in his breath, overwhelmed by such intimacy. His setae read every infinitesimal crack in Anul’s exoskeleton, track the great seams between his joints, the fine hairs that fleck his mandibles and palps. He moves around Anul tracking his unique form; a sharply-sculpted head crowned with antennae, a frighteningly narrow waist followed by a near spherical stomach—warm, so warm—more than half his size, and all perched atop three stickly sets of legs.

“Impressive,” he echoes, though this with a little more unease. “No, more than impressive. You’re quite . . . solidly built. I’m surprised you were able to cart me all the way from the ulmun caves to your village.”

“Oh! We don’t all have this body type,” Anul says, his palps clapping laughter. “The crop you felt in my stomach is something only monks carry. For ulmun, specifically. Otherwise, the telph are quite a lissome people. And they could carry a good ten of you easily. Twenty with effort.”

The crop; what the monks cultivated in their bellies specifically for the ulmun to feed on. What a weight it was to carry. What incredible strength needed to bear such a burden. And he’d touched this warm, life-giving body so easily. Like it was nothing. When Kharatet makes no move to shake himself from the shame of his thoughts, Anul tugs him by his hand, hard against soft.

It’s not a long walk but the dryness and the leaf-mangled wind drains the dampness from Kharatet’s cloak and then skin. A few brief stretches of Anul carrying him up a wall of woven vines, across thatched hanging bridges, and before they arrive at their destination, the answer to Kharatet’s guilt. When Anul lifts the heavy drape from the entryway, it is not what he expects. He can sense it is a modestly sized room, no bigger than his own in the caves, not particularly extravagant, at least to his skin. As he moves around it, he feels low tables with inscrutable objects atop them, some hard and others soft as mud.

“This is your . . . home?”

“Just so.”

“It’s quite . . .” Kharatet waits for Anul to lend him an adjective but in the ensuing silence, he settles for, “restrained.” Another confused beat of silence. “What exactly am I meant to understand here?”

“My work,” Anul says, gesturing as if it were obvious. “I get to do whatever I like as a monk. Well, after seeing to my duties, of course. Currently, I’m interested in recording what I see of the green world. Those sculptures are my impressions of plant life I’ve observed. Fascinating how they change and die, the forms they take upon their return. My mentors say I have a knack for exaggerating them into interesting forms.”

“. . . Sculptures.”

“Indeed. And before this it was cooking, with lessons from some of our finest gastronomes. Before that, dance and before that, poetry.”

Kharatet perks up at the last subject but then flattens his gills in irritation. “I thought you were going to tell me why it is you’ve taken on this sacrificial role. Not your hobbies.”

“I did. As a monk, I can do whatever I like under the tutelage of any I wish.”

“And that’s . . . enough?”

“I’d say it’s quite a fine life I have. Isn’t that what you’re concerned with? That the density of pleasure I’ve known balances out my death? Most telph work as scavengers and brooders, cooks and builders. Not the most entertaining work. And very tiring.” He smooths a hand down his arm, shining his shell. “And then there is my faith to consider, obviously, but I have a sense that my desire to become a saint does not your concern.”

“Well, of course I understand you believe what you’re doing is right. That other telph think it’s right.”

“Ah ah, I know what I’m doing is right. Regardless, am I supposed to impress upon you the extent of my life’s faith in the mere hours we have together? Maybe a day or two if you’re fortunate?”

“I can’t imagine it would take all that long,” Kharatet mumbles snidely then snaps his jaws shut at the insult. Telph only lived for two or three years at most but that didn’t mean they only had a child’s understanding of the world or of their faith, though he could only bring himself to think that on the surface of his thoughts, without any deeper acceptance. “I only mean your life is but a blink compared to mine.”

“And the brevity of my life makes it lesser?”

“Not at all!”

Anul takes a seat on a moss-covered platform, carefully adjusting the great swell of his stomach, “So has this made it at all easier for you?”

“Easier?”

“To take your nourishment.”

“That’s a fine way to say it,” Kharatet says shrilly. “I’m not going to eat you.”

“Perhaps you need to read more of the experience. From the perspective of the telph, not just ulmun.”

“I’ve read all your holy doctrine as I’ve read mine,” Kharatet says sharply. “I can’t believe that this is the only way for my people to live. For yours not to.”

“You act as if there is no benefit to me.”

“Any benefit we’ve made to entice you into this sick tradition is a farce. It is . . . unnatural!”

“The ulmun have preyed on the telph for as long as we’ve had words and further back still. I can’t think of anything more natural.”

“I’m not going to feed on you,” Kharatet grits out. “It’s not right, no matter what you believe.”

“Because?”

Kharatet regards Anul with his nose, his skin, and finds the telph’s poise unbreakable. “Because I don’t want you to die. I don’t want to take a life just to keep mine going temporarily!”

“But I am going to die. Quite soon, actually. I’m one of the eldest monks in our order. And by rights, I’ve the luxury of choosing how. Not a choice we telph often get.”

“But what about your . . . your hobbies? Your art? You can’t tell me you want it all to stop. That you don’t desire to continue making things?”

“I do enjoy it. But my joy in my ‘hobbies’ is less important than your life.”

Kharatet spits out a short burst of offended air. At the core of their reasoning, they held the same values towards the preservation of life; values that were now directly at odds. “How . . . how do you know I’m worthy?” he asks with no lack of smugness. “What if I’ve hurt others and been cruel? What if I destroy things? What if that’s what I plan to continue doing?”

“Your worthiness and nature, none of you is of any consequence to me. The gift here is me being able to continue a life that is equal to mine.”

“But not your life. What about having children? I know you telph love having large families.”

“Ah, family. It’s not something I can do alone and I don’t have the temperament for a home full of broodmates and walls full of cradlechambers. But this,” Anul gestures between Kharatet and himself. “This I can do alone. And continuing a life is quite a different gift than creating a new one. One could say it’s incomparable.”

Kharatet paces, lashing his tail. “You know the ulmun have been doing this since the gods created us. Hunting you. We’ve made the whole process pretty now. Easy, even, for us. Clawed out a holy story that feels good to our fingers. How do you know you’ve not been tricked into doing this? That lies have not stripped you of your will?”

“Some of my brother-monks have withdrawn from being nourishers. Some do want something other than this and they are never compelled to stay.” Anul’s voice grows quiet, thin as his own skin. “But not I.

Kharatet growls and itches madly at his drying skin beneath the reedy cloak. “And if . . . what if this is all just a story we’ve told you—told ourselves—to soften the blow of your death? To ease our consciousness of . . . of murder!”

“You act as if I’ve never considered it,” Anul says with an irritated click. “After all, we are your only source of nourishment. Of life. I’d say your word can’t help but be quite biased, indeed. But you’ve also adapted to us. Given us a provision in exchange.”

“We’ve adapted?”

“Your venom.”

“I’ve . . . never used it.” Kharatet wonders at that; as a child, he’d been forced to eat small cave creatures and had never felt his venom sacs engage. He flaps his feathery gills, disturbed at his own ignorance. “I’ve never been in danger so there has been no need for it.”

“It’s not something to protect you. It’s something for us. That is to say, your prey.”

Kharatet gags in disgust. “Don’t use that word! I’m not a predator!”

“Nor am I prey, not anymore. But a lesson on telph anatomy: your venom temporarily paralyzes the receiver and for us, it’s a particularly amazing sensation. Divine even.”

He’d read of this so-called sensation, the euphoria the venom induced. Lies, he assumed, to persuade the telph to give themselves up. Suspicion pins Kharatet’s gills to the sides of his head. “How would you know the sensation? You’re still alive.”

“Upon initiating into the order, we’re given a small phial of venom. That’s how we decide if we want to pursue this path.” Anul’s voice softens to trickle. “It is unlike anything I’ve known. It melts our minds from our bodies, grants us wingless flight. Allows us to peer into the vast sea of memory, the legacies made by telph and ulmun and all living things.”

“Pah. The forged dreams of the eaten, carved by secondary claws.”

“Not dreams. Doors, thrown open.”

“And if it is only dreams? Wild, envenomed fantasies?”

Anul’s body sags, his exoskeleton creaking, joint against joint. “Even if it’s unpleasant or nothing at all . . . I’m still helping keep you alive, no?”

“No, no, no,” Kharatet says, resuming his pacing, his itching, trying to peel out of his chapped hide. “Like the bee is drawn to the flower, even the blooms that eat it.” Kharatet’s skin prickles and numbs, his ears grow muffled by his own pulse. The floor gives way beneath his feet. “You’ve been fooled, Anul, there is no kind way for me to say it. No, no way at all—”

• • • •

A different room vibrates into being around Kharatet as he wakes. Larger than Anul’s studio, made of denser material as well. He guesses stone instead of bark, but when he shifts in the woven chair of wherever he is, the echo catches and shudders through it differently than any rock he knows. He shifts again and this time takes note of something restraining his waist and legs.

“You fainted again.” Anul presses a hand to his shoulder, keeping him sitting. “Stay. I don’t trust your legs anymore.”

“Apologies. Why . . . why am I bound?”

“For your own safety. But that is of no importance at the moment. Tell me: did you come here only to hurl insults at me and my people before dying?”

“No! Well yes, I suppose I most likely will die here,” he touches the grumbling concavity of his stomach, the hollow dizziness of an appetite unaddressed expanding in his head, “but that’s not why I came.”

“Then tell me why.”

“To . . . I wanted to know what you were like,” Kharatet says, tipping his head up towards where Anul’s voice is coming from. “Your lives. Your beliefs. If you simply didn’t realize the injustice of it . . .”

“And are we as guileless and gullible as you thought?”

The sting in Anul’s words doesn’t miss. “You can’t fault me for wanting to know how we could do this to you. I thought maybe you were different in some way. Simpler.”

“We are different.”

“Different in a way that made it easier.”

“And it’s not easier?”

Kharatet dips his head.

“If it were, if we were simpler, crueler perhaps, would you take nourishment then?”

“No,” he says, but the firmness in his voice is false. “Where are we? Not your private quarters.”

“The temple’s feeding chamber,” Anul says. “It’s empty save for us now, but during the ceremony proper it would be filled with other monks to witness the Nourishing.”

“Proper?”

“I’ve decided you’re not in any fit state to decide whether you want to live or not. The lack of Nourishment has made you erratic and dispirited. In this situation, we simply cannot rely on your irrational judgements.”

“How dare you call me irrational! I am an ulmun scholar, trained by learned elders who’ve seen hundreds of your generations pass! And you—you’re nothing more than a child playing at holiness!”

Anul’s voice sharpens. “Kharatet, you will eat. You will eat and live and I will receive the honor I am due.”

Before Kharatet can think to cry out for help, to snap for Anul to stop, his jaws are forcibly parted and the telph’s forearm is shoved into his mouth.

Immediately his mouth overflows with saliva and venom as Anul forces his jaws shut around his arm. The first crunch through the telph’s chitin is a revelation of flavors: the smoky fermented shell gives way to a herbaceous meatiness, so rich it brings tears to his eyes. Tears of horror because there is no fighting what his body so painfully demands.

Kharatet knows how the ritual is meant to go as he has read of it time and time again: he would paint Anul’s body with a softening salve before sunrise, which would weaken the telph’s hardy exoskeleton into a soft cartilage-like consistency. Other telph would escort them as the sun steps above the horizon, both monks and star ready to bear witness. Once upon the altar, Kharatet would start by consuming Anul’s limbs so that he might experience the euphoric envenoming the longest. Next would come Anul’s belly, which would first be minimally punctured by a ritual thorn; his crop will flow down onto the altar which has been carved with a lip to catch every drop, funneling it down to a narrow channel from which he could drink. Then Kharatet would eat Anul’s abdomen followed by his antenna, palps, his chest, and finally his head. Digesting Anul would take him a handful of years, perhaps even more. He wouldn’t feel the clutches of starvation for a decade at least.

He wouldn’t feel—

He wouldn’t—

But there is nothing sacred in the temple today. Kharatet watches his body from a distance, lost in a feeding frenzy fugue. The only grace in this bestial gorging is Anul’s voice as Kharatet tears through the hard parts of his body to find the tender treasures within him. The telph sounds beatific, singing a hymn of chitters and whistles, melodies only a telph could make. Anul only stumbles in his song when Kharatet tears too roughly at his flesh, jerking his voice off-kilter. The song goes on and on as Kharatet eats, so steady and lovely that he almost forgets that he is ending a life, making a feast of Anul’s faith.

When Kharatet comes back to himself, he is near as full as Anul once was, his belly sphereing out uncomfortably in front of him. He is out of the chair, the twine bindings now tatters on his legs, sitting where Anul once was on the altar of Nourishment.

There is a sludgy wetness all around him and when he runs his hands along the surface of the altar, he find sharp bits of shell, a stray claw. The air is filled with the smell of old peat and loam and honey. He touches his face, feels where the watery blood has begun to dry into a thin, flaky paste on his muzzle. He runs a finger around the inside of his mouth, flinching at ragged cuts in his gums. He hadn’t salved Anul, softened him for consumption.

Had it hurt more, being devoured like this? Had he screamed? Had his faith broken on the final bite? Or had he gone with a righteous smile, smug all the way down his throat?

Between his teeth, the saint sours. Kharatet wails on the altar until the other monks arrive, hushing him with throat-caught hums. They wipe at his tears with slender claws, the unintended scratches a painful solace from the numbing stretch of his heresy.

• • • •

The summer current moves swift and warm through the lightless cave, filling the wide cavern with a heavy and humid air, dotting the ceilings with constant droplets of condensation. The tiny splashes of cave rain fill the space with sounds, vibrations that patter at his skin, sharpen the shape of every object and ulmun in the room.

“You look well, brother,” Mhuretaj tells him as she passes by with freshly hewn stone for writing. Pausing, she adds, “I’m pleased and I hope you are, too. You are worth any and every telph, my dear.”

The most Kharatet can make himself answer is with a flick of his gills. His voice sits behind a driftwood dam, building up with a bitter detritus. He feels Mhuretaj depart for her duties and the space between them fills with a toxic plume of resentment. What were any of them truly worth?

Brood mothers lay a clutch of freshly-hatched nymphs before him for their daily reading. They are quite young, young enough that they have no language, only bleats to voice their discomfort. They likely won’t understand today’s reading but it doesn’t matter; tradition commands and the ulmun obey.

Kharatet draws a new limestone tablet from the shelves and places it on his lap. His stomach bulges against the tablet, forcing it farther from his body. By fingerpad, he begins to read glyph by glyph. Another favorite poem of the ulmun by the great wordsmith Loraja:

the warm wine of mites fills my nourisher’s belly
and in the sweetness of your holy wellspring,
here Ii, a river-lustered heart, lie
smoothed for your claw’s contentment

It is the prettiest of lies he has read in his time as a scholar. The nymphs begin to cry as he trails off into silence, already desperate to be back in their mother’s pouch. Their helpless bleats and the splashing droplets fill his skull to brimming. All thought since he has left Anul has taken on the same foamy quality of meaninglessness. Even now, with his attention directed at the nymphs before him, he cannot find a seed of solicitude, of deference to life he once had. They, too, would grow and eat their Anuls happily, year after year, life after life. Little predators in the making. Just like him.

The tablet slips from his lap as he stands, chipping as it clacks loudly onto the ground. A scholar snaps at him from an adjacent study cell but he cannot make out the words.

“Come here, little one.” Gingerly, as though Kharatet were touching the telph’s soft belly, he lifts a nymph to his face. It whimpers but this time nothing in him flinches.

“Do you want to see something truly holy?” he asks the little ulmun, opening his jaws wide, letting the honey of its curiosity lead it further behind the temple of his teeth, the honey of its hollow mind pressing against the comforting warmth of his tongue, then throat, to a nourishment never to be had.

bones to marrow,
blood to heat;
teeth to saints,
nymphs to meat

©2024 by Sloane Leong.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sloane Leong is a cartoonist, illustrator, writer, editor, and labor organizer of mixed indigenous ancestries. Through her work, she engages with visceral futurities and fantasies through a radical, kaleidoscopic lens. She is the creator of several graphic novels: From Under Mountains, Prism Stalker, A Map to the Sun, and Graveneye. Her fiction has appeared in many publications including Dark Matter Magazine, Apex Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Analog, Realm Media, and more. When she’s not making something she’s helping run the Cartoonist Cooperative, an organization working to improve and protect the labor rights of cartoonists around the world. She currently lives on Chinook land near what is known as Portland, Oregon with her family and two dogs.

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

In the Tree’s Hollow, a Doe

Lowry Poletti | 769 words

Finneus Lark finds the man nestled inside of the abdominal cavity of a doe, his skin so pale that his veins are like spiderwebs. Slick with visceral fluid, leaves and petals cling to the man’s bird-boned wrists. His face, haloed by damp curls and crowned by the doe’s diaphragm, is so peaceful he might as well have been asleep.

Lark assumes that the doe is not a doe at all. It must be an elaborate costume, and when he shot it, his bullet went straight into the man beneath the pelt.

In this moment, he is a murderer. He’s sure of it. He closes his eyes and repeats this statement until the words sound like nonsense and his heart stops thundering.

Then, he grabs the corpse by the shoulders and pulls it onto a bed of twigs.

The corpse is clothed in scattered oak leaves. A line of rabbit’s fur, cottony and silver, runs from stomach to pubis. There is no blood.

In the doe, where the man once was, atrophied guts contract erratically. They can’t trick Lark. He’s shot enough deer to know how their insides still go this way and that, sometimes for minutes after death. With a knife, he pries the bullet out of the doe’s skull, right above the eye. Gray matter clings to the metal, cooked into a crust by the heat.

He cuts more. Beneath the cutaneous fat, moss and slime molds wrap around the bones where muscle ought to be. In the chest cavity, two hairless fawns lie curled beneath a crushed heart.

Lark amends his initial assumption: this doe is not a doe at all. The man is likewise not a man.

He’s heard the stories before. Long, sunless winters make for a superstitious town full of superstitious hunters. Tie your dogs outside with iron collars, they say, lest the fairies steal them in the night. Leave milk and honey in the fields so they have something sweeter than the flesh of your children to eat.

He has never heard of one wearing a doe as a coat.

Straddling the man—the fairy—Lark peels open his mouth. He has small, pearly teeth and too many canines. The pink lips and pink gums remind Lark of a lily pressed between the pages of a book.

He isn’t breathing, nor does he have a pulse, but his tongue, split at the tip, is startlingly warm.

What is he supposed to do with this man who is not a man, with this corpse that is not quite dead? A week ago, he cloaked himself with the forest’s nettles intending to return to his house with a season’s worth of venison. Steak for himself, offal for the dogs.

He can’t feed his pack moss and moldy fawns. He can’t go home with this at his back, the fairy-scent trailing him, their shark’s teeth gnashing at the edges of the woods, waiting, waiting, waiting for the hunter who stole their doe.

He levels his knife with the man’s—no, no, not a man . . . the corpse’s, the parasite’s, the fairy’s—rib cage. But he can’t stop looking at his face. He will be haunted by this face. He opens one of the eyes: a cat’s eye, yellow and slitted, whose pupil constricts in the light.

Cursing under his breath, he takes off his wolf hide coat. Already shivering, he wraps it around the fairy.

Here, he waits. Bristling hackles obscure most of the fairy’s face.

“That’s gotten me through ten winters,” Lark says, “and you won’t even give me a ‘thank you,’ huh?”

But the sun is setting, so he begins the cold, hair-bristling walk back to his campsite. With each footstep, the forest echoes behind him.

There is a quickening in his stomach; he has brought something back with him, inside him, as if a tapeworm has turned his gut into a womb. But when he looks over his shoulder, he finds nothing. Not even a circle of raptors in the distance.

Lark presses on. As his tent rises between the firs, he sees a shadowy man lingering beside it. The shape, tall and lithe, reminds Lark of someone he knew long ago, but as the man walks into the orange sunlight, his silhouette becomes that of a wolf trailed by two pups. It opens its mouth, and the fairy’s tongue unravels.

“You are the wolf,” the fairy says. Rising, he places his paws on Lark’s shoulders, his teeth around Lark’s neck, and Lark holds him there by the waist. “Not me, never me. Find me a doe.”

©2023 by Lowry Poletti.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Farewell to Faust

Adam-Troy Castro | 2811 words

Posit a man. He could be any man. She could be a woman. They could be any human being anywhere on the spectrum. The story would play out the same. This is, however, entirely the creation of a writer who has written plenty of formidable women, and so he exerts authority for this one time and says that this is a man, who may default to any description the reader chooses, in any home environment the reader pictures. Beyond this, the author takes no position. There is a man, an adult male and in his home environment, facing a stranger who has entered his home and placed a suitcase filled with money on the coffee table.

The man says, “No.”

Of the stranger, the reader can make any assumption that rings true. Let us say that he, too, is a man: a prosperous one, formal and polite, with features that default to a mild smile. He has sprung the suitcase open, revealing many arrayed bundles of crisp American hundreds. Put him in a suit, if you wish. Posit him naked as a babe, if you wish, though that is a detail a narrative intent on that image would have to devote considerable effort to justify. Fortunately, the author does not have to. There is the viewpoint character, a man, the intruding stranger, another man; the dynamic precisely and only that: one human being in his place of comfort, the intruder offering an alteration in the status quo.

The stranger says, “I haven’t told you what I want yet.”

“That’s okay. I don’t need to know. I refuse.”

“You’re an odd person.”

“I’ve been told this.”

“Nevertheless, you have to be curious.”

“Of course I am,” the protagonist of this story says. “I’m human. You show me a gift-wrapped present and I wonder what’s in it. In restaurants, I glance over at the next table to see what my fellow diners are eating. The desire to know is always a factor. The need to know is a lesser one, one tempered with the knowledge that I’m likely better off not knowing.”

“Don’t you want me to tell you, at least, how much money this is?”

“I can do the math. Those are bundles of hundreds. They are supposed to be five thousand dollars apiece. Assuming that the interior bills are not, let’s say, ones, and that the bundles are stacked in the quantity the space implies, that’s about a million dollars.”

“It’s more than a million dollars.”

“Can’t be much more.”

“It’s significantly more. We didn’t count out a million. We just filled the briefcase until the grouping was tight and the neat stacks wouldn’t bounce around in transit. That’s a factor of the interior dimensions, and by the time we were done, the cash totaled one million, one hundred sixty thousand. You benefit from our quartermaster buying a somewhat larger case for this negotiation. Lucky you. It could have been a smaller case, with a smaller sum.”

“That’s interesting, but my answer is still no.”

“May I ask why?”

“Sure.”

There is here a notable pause, the visitor waiting for the protagonist to volunteer information, the protagonist waiting for the visitor to give up and just ask already.

“. . . why?”

“Because I know the way it works. Nobody comes to somebody’s house with a suitcase full of money unless the conditions are illicit, unless they represent a substantial risk to the recipient’s life or freedom or unless the conditions of receiving the money are morally repugnant. I choose not to play the game.”

“I never said this was a game.”

“Everything’s a game.”

“This money is yours for agreeing to perform a task of our choosing.”

“Interesting, but no.”

“The terms are that you accept the money first, before the task is specified. If you find it repellent, you may refuse, in which case that option goes away and you are offered an alternative. Refuse that one and you must perform the third, or incur a substantial penalty of our choosing. More options will be presented, with increasing penalties for demurral, until you finally agree to one rather than take the penalties.”

“It certainly sounds like a game to me.”

“It would. Nevertheless, our key goal here is getting you to accept this money.”

“Too bad you’re doomed to failure.”

There is here another pause. It is punctuated by the sound of a ticking clock, somewhere else in the house. The sound is comforting to the protagonist, an increasing irritant to the visitor.

“You still say no.”

“Of course I do.”

“You are not in the slightest bit tempted.”

“I don’t need a million dollars enough to murder somebody for it.”

“I never said that murder was a possibility.”

“No, you didn’t. But it is, isn’t it? In the stories it is.”

“The tasks are entirely random. Some are value-neutral: like going into the next room and making yourself a grilled cheese sandwich. Or if you don’t have cheese or bread handy, going to a local diner and buying one. Others are more unpleasant, like giving yourself a paper cut in the web of your right thumb. These are minor inconveniences in exchange for a briefcase containing one million plus.”

“Yes, but the options don’t stop there, do they?”

“No. They do not.”

“Imagine my surprise.”

“The tasks are determined by an algorithm reflecting millions of possible choices. Chances are well over 99% that the first one assigned to you will be benign. If it is unacceptable and you choose to hear an alternative, the odds are virtually astronomical against you receiving another you must refuse; like finding one individual grain of sand in the Gobi against receiving a terrible option on your third try.”

“Yes. And having to murder somebody is still on the list, somewhere, right?”

“The point is that of the millions of options available, representing quadrillion-to-one odds against having to do something your conscience would refuse, evil acts are so sparsely represented that there’s virtually no shot of you finding yourself irrevocably stuck with one.”

“I agree.”

“You might be required to spend some Saturday volunteering at a local food bank.”

“And that sounds nice enough, but on a philosophical level would be pretty horrible. Me doing something nice like that and getting all the kudos that go along with being a nice person, when I only did it because I’ve been offered a million dollars.”

“The point is that the task picked for you will almost certainly not be evil.”

“No. The point is that if your algorithm asks me to do a nice thing, it won’t mean I’m a nice person, and if it asks me to do a terrible thing, and I surrender to the necessity, it does make me an evil person.”

“But the odds—”

“The odds don’t matter. If I agree to play this game—”

“I repeat, I never called it a game.”

“If I agree to participate in this activity, I am saying that the certainty of receiving a million dollars plus justifies the possibility however remote of being required to do something evil, like kill somebody, or rape somebody, or kick somebody’s crutches out from under them. I am saying that the million dollars, plus, makes participation in evil an acceptable risk. Even if I say I agree to this and the required task proves to be no more noxious than that grilled-cheese sandwich, I still accept the money knowing that I will still spend my life aware that that having to commit a great crime like murder was a risk I found acceptable. I say no, which is why I’ve been saying no since the very beginning. I don’t need the million dollars, plus, that badly. I prefer to keep what I have.”

“You are not a gambler.”

“I sure as hell am. I play poker with my friends. I go to the casino, sit at the Blackjack table or press buttons at the slot machine. But the key element of that game, the one that the casino management posts in prominent places to help ameliorate their own responsibility for taking advantage of people with gambling addictions, is that I go with the pocketful of money that I know I can afford to lose. Regardless of what the task I receive turns out to be, I lose much more just by agreeing to participate than I will ever gain by taking whatever that million-plus is supposed to pay me more. You come here and place that briefcase on my table, at the bare minimum you are tempting me in some way, and so I am not tempted, and that is why I am saying that from the beginning.”

“You’ve thought this out.”

“Never at all before today. I’m just a fast thinker.”

“You may not have all the angles figured.”

“More than you believe I do. For instance, would I take your offer if you quietly whispered that you’re working on a quota and are falling behind on the number of people you needed to entice today? If you quietly showed me a card guaran-damn-teeing the algorithm would pick a harmless option for me? If I knew, going in, that all I would have to do in order to grab that million-plus was pluck ten blades of grass from my lawn?”

“I assume that you’re about to tell me that you would say no.”

“You assume correctly.”

“And for god’s sake why? You would be guaranteed no culpability for evil acts.”

“I would sure as hell not be. You, and whoever funds you, remain in the picture. You are still offering a million-plus at a shot, to total strangers, in exchange for performing an act yet unspecified. Mine might be harmless, and the same might be true for the task provided for whoever comes after me, and for the poor schmuck after that, and the one after that. But the tally is not, No harm done. The tally is, inexorably using up the number of harmless results by chance, before someone is finally asked to go after a neighbor kid with a power drill. Even a guaranteed positive result still feeds whatever ungodly satisfaction you and your people derive from doing this thing, and that supports the weight you put on the next person down the line, and, again, the one after that. It is only by refusing to participate in any way that I avoid supporting the eventual evil act. And again, only by refusing that I wind up ahead. So, no thank you.”

“That’s a firm no, then?”

“You’re a slow learner. Are we done?”

“No.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“It is a key element of our business model that in the rare cases where people do say no and won’t stir from that position, we assuage their curiosity and tell them what task the algorithm would have chosen.”

“I’m not interested.”

“Even now?”

“Especially now. You tell me that it was something harmless, like changing the oil in the car, or doing fifty jumping jacks, and I am intended to stare after you in forlorn sadness, thinking about all the money I lost by being a moral prig, unwilling to take a small risk for a large reward. You tell me that it was something horrible, like murdering my next-door neighbor, and I get a jolt to my ego underlying a sneaky belief in my own infallibility. I am not at all interested in the post-mortems. I am much better off thinking that I probably dodged a bullet, and if you don’t mind leaving, I’ll just—”

“Sorry. We are not yet done.”

“It must save you time when some greedy bastard just says yes.”

“It does. What would you say if I told you that all this has been a divine test, and that you have passed with flying colors, thus establishing you as one of the ninety-nine truly virtuous people known to exist in all the world?”

“I would say that’s pretty nice, and that you can still leave with that ringing in my ears.”

“What if I said that only people who pass the test get the briefcase?”

“I would say that’s also nice but then repeat that I don’t want it.”

“Why?”

“Because, even if all that were true, I cannot know it. You have already established yourself as a liar. It doesn’t matter whether you’re lying for good or evil. You’re still lying. The possibility that this is still some kind of manipulation, that you have evil purposes in mind, remains significant. I cannot accept the money with that remaining a possibility.”

“What if I provided you absolute proof and left you no doubt?”

“You mean, what if you could absolutely guarantee, leaving no doubt whatsoever, that this money was always meant for someone who cleared all your moral hoops and that accepting it would have no calamitous repercussions even by distant association?”

“Yes. And if I also proved to you that the money is yours and that you have responsibility for it?”

“Is this the case?”

“Yes.”

Flummoxed for the first time, the protagonist licks his lips and glances at the stacks of pretty, untouched cash. If there is a moment anywhere during this negotiation where he is tempted, it is this one. He is not a wealthy man. He has debts he cannot pay. We establish for the first time that while he has been firm, he has not been unwavering. He could sure as hell use this money. He knows that and now, so do you. He is just confident in one thing: that his integrity matters more.

For a hellish interval, he rationalizes. It is his money, after all. He gets to choose how to spend it. Of course, taking it is now a compromise, and possibly a deadly one.

The word charity crosses his mind, but it is still self-aggrandizing, still a possible pitfall, and it falls aside and is replaced by the quality that rhymes with it, clarity.

And so he says, “Where do you go after you’re done with me?”

“To the next person on my list.”

“How long is this list?”

“As long as the entire population of human beings. It happens to be true that my associates and I have been bringing this proposition to your kind throughout all known history, but it also happens to be that our own numbers are not infinite and that we do not keep up with your mortality stats. The results we obtain are however statistically significant and stand in for all of you.”

“Determining what? Whether the species is damned or allowed to survive?”

“Nothing quite that dramatic. But it does help mold the . . . let us say, allocation of resources toward your well-being.”

Our protagonist smiles. It is a nice smile. This is a thing you need to know about this man, who is one specific human being even if in this instant he represents us all. A smile like that can make you think that maybe, just maybe, the world doesn’t entirely suck, that things aren’t entirely pointless, and that with all the cruelty and nastiness that our kind gets up to, there might still be hope.

And he says, “Then I designate this money to the next . . . player, contestant, candidate, whatever you call us—”

“Participants.”

“Yes, that. I designate the money as a strings-free, pre-emptive gift to the next person you tempt with your offer. Tell that person that they get a million if they agree to gamble on evil, and also get it if they decide not to play; the same million, making the choice a fair one. Tell them that if they want, they can also refuse it for themselves and pass it on to the next participant and that if they can keep this going they can help prevent some kind of evil from being committed for as long as possible. Maybe even indefinitely. If they do the right thing, tell them that the guy who went before them gives them a thumbs-up. And that they can pass it on. Is that okay and are we done?”

“We’re done,” the visitor says.

He stands. He shuts the briefcase with an audible thump, making smaller but still sharp sounds as he engages the clamps. He grasps it by its handle, nods at the man who has refused him, and turns to go—but just before he leaves, he turns back and smiles again. Our protagonist realizes that it is not the polite default smile this man has worn since his arrival, but a broader and more benevolent thing, a gratified and even proud thing.

With this smile, he speaks his final words before departure.

“You don’t know her,” he says, “but she gives you a thumbs-up.”

© 2023 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). The audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel And Other Stories (Skyboat Media) features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” In 2022 he came out with two collections, his The Author’s Wife Vs. The Giant Robot and his thirtieth book, A Touch of Strange. Adam was an Author Guest of Honor at 2023’s World Fantasy Convention. Adam lives in Florida with a pair of chaotic paladin cats.

To Be a Happy Man

Thomas Ha | 884 words

My son tells me that there’s a man in the house, someone he hears well after the lights are out, in the narrower halls or maybe at the far side of the den—a gait and creak he’s certain isn’t me or his mom, since he can hear us both breathing heavily and tossing in our sleep.

On sweltering afternoons, when the house is baking and the walls are crackling, my son says he sees him standing in some dim, dust-swarmed part of the house, looking out with the littlest curl at the corners of his lips, before the boy turns and screams for one of us.

But there isn’t anything to be frightened of, I tell the kid, as I brush the hair from his forehead and adjust his blankets before kissing him goodnight. Even though, as I look down at the crack between his bed and the wall, I see a long-fingered hand resting on the floor.

I wasn’t much older when it started, the day I was picking through the closet and touched fingers too spindly to be what they were, stretching from the end of a sinewy forearm. Then I saw the tangle of hair peeking out from one of the higher shelves. And when I was the one running and crying to my old man, I’ll never forget his expression, like someone went and just crushed something inside of him.

Like I’m pretty sure I must look now.

I suppose I could tell my son what my dad told me then, after he’d sat with me for a bit. How he didn’t know why, and whether it was something our family did wrong—in lost and forgotten days, when men birthed creations with blood instead of words. Or whether it was something inside us, like an unnatural weakness that could never be bred away or bottled up or buried down deep. But whatever the reason, this thing would follow each of us, always, for the rest of our lives.

You could move to different places, he said, try your best to run—even stand on the lawn and watch tongues of fire grow and swallow the family house you built with your own hands. But that leering man, or something that tried its best to look like one, would find you in the next place you dared to call home, in a moment when you’d be praying for relief and, instead, just felt it in the room with you, still.

Or maybe you’d turn to knowledge, my dad suggested—try to learn the nature of this thing from books, or from the older families who still remember horrors that have long since shed names and can recall the fragments of sigils that might protect you for a time. Find yourself in all kinds of attics, abandoned book depots, or the sterile silence of private collections, flipping through pages and renderings and wondering if you’d found glimmers of the man, long fingers hanging in shadow in the background of roughly sketched portraits or the corners of old photographs, never quite sure if it’s truly the same thing you see or a vague echo. Maybe a different man entirely who’d been visiting other fathers and sons. Not the one you feel behind you, approaching steadily, with footfalls growing heavier and an occasional touch, so slight and so soft on your shoulder, to make sure you’ll never forget it’s there.

But in the end, my father said, you’ll realize what everyone before you at some point realized: there is no fix. You can’t stop it or hurt it or ever get away from it, not in any way that matters. Only learn to live alongside it. Just keep doing what you’re doing and don’t ever give it the time of day. Don’t ever do that, he said, because it’ll only get worse, encouraged and empowered, all the more substantiated, somehow, by the attention you give it.

Then you’ll end up like his father, who wandered around yelling to everyone about it, begging them to save him from a thing they couldn’t see or understand. Until the day they found his body at the bottom of the stairs, his neck bent so sharply that it couldn’t just be from a fall—head barely hanging from his shoulders, broken bones bulging at his purple throat like they’d been crushed by long-fingered hands, his gaping mouth, turned upward, in a peculiar kind of agony.

No. The trick was to push it from your mind entirely, my father was certain, like you’re happy and unaware. That had to be it, he said, with the kind of confidence and fear I would only understand when I became a father myself.

And it’ll be my time to tell my son all of this, too, whenever he’s ready.

Or maybe, whenever I am.

Ready to talk about all of the things he can do and all of the things he can’t.

All of the things we tried, each of us, and all of the things we didn’t.

But, until then, I turn my eyes away from the rustling darkness beneath his bed as I close his door behind me, and I just keep thinking about all of the things it takes to be a happy man.

©2023 by Thomas Ha.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas Ha is a former attorney turned stay-at-home father who enjoys writing speculative fiction during the rare moments when all of his kids are napping at the same time. Thomas grew up in Honolulu and, after a decade plus of living in the northeast, now resides in Los Angeles.

EXCERPT: The Longest Autumn (Flatiron Books)

Amy Avery | 1786 words

For fans of Ariadne, a spellbinding debut fantasy about a human who gets trapped with the god of Autumn, who brings with him life-threatening danger and a forbidden romance.

Under the right circumstances, would even a god fall?

Tirne is one of four humans rigorously selected to usher the turn of the seasons into the mortal world. Every year, she escorts the taciturn god Autumn between the godly and human realms. Autumn’s seasonal stay among mortals brings cooler weather, changing leaves, and the harvest of apples and gourds until Winter takes his place.

This year, the enchanted Mirror that separates their worlds shatters after Tirne and Autumn pass through, trapping both of them in the human realm. As the endless autumn stretches on, crops begin to fail and the threat of starvation looms. Away from the magic of the gods’ home, Tirne suffers debilitating headaches that return with a vengeance. Worse, Autumn’s extended stay in the human realm turns him ever more mortal and vulnerable, stirring a new, forbidden attraction to Tirne.

While the priesthood scrambles to find a way to reassemble the Mirror, Tirne digs into the temple’s secrets and finds an unlikely ally—or enemy—in the enigmatic sorcerer and master of poisons, Sidriel. Thrown into a world of mystery, betrayal, and espionage as she searches for the truth, might Tirne lose her morals, her hard-earned position, and the illicit spark between her and Autumn?

Coming January 16, 2024 from Flatiron Books.

The room is immense, larger than I thought. The domed ceiling arches above, painted with scenes of the four seasons. Though much of the Temple uses candles and fire sconces, rare and precious globes of enchanted light adorn this space. The magical lighting responds to the energy of those within the room. Right now it is icy, colder than sunlight and only half as bright. It feels like an overcast day, dreary and mournful.

An enormous rectangular table takes up the center of the room, surrounded by thirteen chairs. And on the dark surface, fragments of the Mirror gleam like rubies. Bowls of jagged pieces still perch in the corners.

The members of the council stare at me, seated in their chairs. Three Scions for each god, in a sea of the high priests’ robes. Rich brown for Autumn’s children, with brilliant peridot green, sky blue, and snowy white for the others. My scarlet Herald’s robe stands out, but not as much as the radiance of my god. His leaf-strewn cloak rests upon his shoulders. Beneath it, a burgundy jacket shimmers in brushed silk, lovingly embroidered by his acolytes in a motif of apples amid abstract whorls.

Despite Autumn’s impassive expression, the anger rolling off him is palpable to me. How can the priests—some his own children—be oblivious to it?

The highest priest, the Tharem, splutters from his spot at the head of the table. He’s the only full human on the council, his robe alone a spectacular shade of crocus purple. His broad face is crimson, apoplectic. “She should be banished from the Temple for touching a god!”

“No.” Autumn infuses his voice with his power, something I’ve never seen him do when talking to the high priests and priestesses, holy demigods. Some of them are even blood of his blood. “No skin touched skin,” he lies smoothly, the compulsion in his voice giving the declaration weight. “Only my hand against her robe.” His magic presses against me, warm, tingling.

The priests flinch back, murmuring among themselves, their thoughts muddled by their lord’s command.

Autumn repeats, “She has committed no sin. Do you doubt the word of a god?”

Again, a muttered consultation among the priests. My fingernails dig into my palms and I hold my breath until the Tharem speaks, teeth gnashing. “Very well. She stays.”

I let out a long, shaky breath, but my relief is poisoned by guilt that worms its way into my brain. He lied for me.

“Now that this business is settled,” Autumn says, “we can proceed to the matter of actual concern.” A note of disdain lies in that, and it seems it is not lost on the priests. Most of them manage to look at least a little chastised.

“The Mirror.” The Tharem chokes out the word, and all eyes in the room look to the array of offering bowls lying on pews. An assortment of shards, some still smeared with priests’ blood.

“Send a missive to the Emperor,” Autumn says. “We’ll need his decree if we’re to summon those outside the faith to help.”

The Tharem bows his head, his bald pate gleaming in the candlelight. “Yes, Your Holiness.”

“Tirne,” Autumn says, and neither his voice nor his lean, pale face gives away anything. “Before the high priests can unravel the mystery of the Mirror’s sundering and stitch the pieces back together, we have questions.”

“Yes, Your Holiness.”

Autumn’s blazing eyes search mine. Doubt lingers there. “The Mirror is broken . . . but is the magic weakened as well? Can you sense anything from it now?”

With shaking fingers, I pluck my ceremonial blade from my pocket and puncture a fingertip. As the blood wells up, I summon my magic and brush the nearest shard, questing for that spark of magic. The moment I touch it, a soft tink echoes through the room, and the glass splits in two.

I yank my hand away, sharp and violent.

Silence.

All eyes stare at the fragments for a long moment before hostile gazes land on me. On my face, on the traitorous hand that broke the Mirror even further.

“No,” I whisper. This can’t be happening. The Mirror is the center of my universe. It’s my only scrap of power in this world, the cornerstone of the title and duty I worked so hard for. The one Mother trained me for.

And it’s my key to Sylvus, the only place I’m free from the threat of my headaches.

“Tirne.” Autumn’s voice is colder than his season, the first frost as autumn gives way to winter. “Step back from the table.”

With faltering steps, I do, holding my hand to my chest. I feel like I’m being strangled, my rib cage too tight to breathe. I can’t stop staring at those two pieces of ruby-tinted glass.

“No,” I say again with more conviction, as if uttering the word will make it true. “I didn’t . . . I can’t . . .”

“She did it!” Fury contorts the Tharem’s features. Combined with his flushed pink skin and round face, he looks like a garvish from Kildian folklore, a twisted and vengeful creature. My aunt had once so loved to frighten me with fantastical tales of the old beasts. Right now, I’m that terrified child again, staring into the face of a rabid beast that points his finger at me and cries blasphemy.

“What did you do?” the Tharem snarls.

“Nothing! We came through the Mirror, then it just . . . broke.”

The Tharem’s watery eyes narrow. “And you sensed nothing unusual? Your attunement to the Mirror is the one gift we granted you.”

That garners a wince. When I’d consumed the small vial of my god’s bittersweet blood, I’d been blessed with a connection to the divine and dominion over the Mirror. It is the only bit of magic I possess.

But that nausea I felt when I passed through . . . A heavy lump forms in my stomach, worry swimming up from the depths of my mind once more. What if the Tharem is right? But I recoil from that thought. No. I couldn’t have broken it. I know what I’m doing. I’ve performed my job without flaw for half a dozen years. If I tell them of my queasiness, it’s all the proof the Tharem will need to convince everyone this is my fault.

“No. I didn’t feel anything.” The lie comes out a croak.

Autumn says my name once more, and my head whips around to look at him. His lips are pressed tightly together, his brow creased. And through the connection that links us, the magic of his blood that flows within me, I sense a knot of unease. Worry.

“Tirne,” he says, voice soft but commanding. “You are not to touch any piece of the Mirror again.” He pauses for a breath. “Without the ability to use the Mirror, your status as Herald is hereby stripped from you.”

My head won’t stop shaking in denial, the world going gray around the edges.

No. No, no, no, no. This isn’t right. I didn’t do anything wrong!

“From this point forward,” Autumn continues, “you are to resume the station and duties of an acolyte while we examine this matter. You will cooperate with all investigation efforts, and you are not to leave the Temple without an escort.”

I stand in silence, clenching my teeth to keep the words in. There is no arguing with a god. Autumn’s eyes are dark, mere flickering embers, and a pang of something sharp and bitter twists in my chest through my link with him. His hands are clenched at his sides.

“Do you understand, Tirne of Autumn?”

I clear my throat, managing a simple, hoarse “Yes.” My status, my training, all for nothing, stolen from me by some unseen blight. A sickness? Some other failing of mine?

Autumn nods. “Then fetch an acolyte’s robe from the laundry. You may keep your room for now. While the investigation takes place, report anything unusual to Calder. He will also set your acolyte’s tasks and leave a list in your room shortly. You are dismissed.” He turns from me, my presence forgotten as he brushes a fingertip along the smooth surface of a Mirror shard.

I take one furtive glance at Calder. He watches me with shocked pity, his eyes too sharp, too bright, his fingers twitching at his side as if he’s trying to grasp something invisible. An answer, maybe. I make my escape. Horror churns my stomach, and indignation. I earned my place. I bested six other applicants for the position. My ferrying of the dead has gone smoothly every single night for half a dozen years. I’ve been the picture-perfect Herald.

All gone now.

Copyright © 2024 by Amy Avery. Excerpted from The Longest Autumn by Amy Avery. Published by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Avery is a graphic designer and a lifelong lover of fantasy living in Wichita, Kansas. In her spare time, she co-hosts the writing craft podcast And It’s Writing. She can also be found watching cooking shows with her husband, crafting cocktails, or catering to the whims of a rather demanding tuxedo cat.

Book Review: Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

Aigner Loren Wilson | 504 words

Womb City
Tlotlo Tsamaase
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781645660569
Erewhon Books, January 2024, 416 pgs

In Tlotlo Tsamaase’s genre-blending Africanfuturist novel, Womb City, readers are introduced to a futuristic Botswana, where certain bodies are microchipped, their future criminal actions predicted by a machine and monitored by the authorities. When a crime is predicted, the body of the person is forfeited to the government, and their consciousness is placed in a virtual prison where they live out eternity in torment, their bodies used by others to continue an eternal life granted by the government’s system of body farming and trafficking. When the main character, Nelah, commits a heinous crime, she works to keep it hidden while the ghost of her victim haunts and threatens her family.

Tsamaase balances a science fiction dystopian world with both a ghost story and a dark comedy of errors, and does so in a way that doesn’t confuse the reader. Most of the novel’s beginning is dedicated to laying the groundwork for the world’s intricate rules, which are extremely sexist, homophobic, and racist. Bodies that can give birth and are deemed fertile are treated as farm bodies for producing more bodies that can continue the cycle of body-jumping that gives everyone in the world near eternal life. Within the story’s narrative are not-so-subtly hidden feminist views on body autonomy and queer body identity that constantly asks the question: whose body is this and who am I within this body?

The more thematic and philosophical ideas don’t take away from the novel’s narrative flow and forward progress. The beginning, however, reads slower than the rest of the text due to the expositional nature of the writing as Tsamaase onboards readers to the story world. In some places, it does slow things down to a pace that’s hard to stay fully engaged in the story, but the history, political, and societal context is important to understand the motivations of characters later in the novel. However, once Nelah murders someone, the story’s pacing and style turns to the evocative and horrific, and things start to speed up toward the middle half of the book.

There is a lot to chew on in Tsamaase’s Womb City but what fired me through the novel was the futuristic world and the ghost story(ies) at the heart of the body jumping, consciousness-switching novel. Not only did it keep me reflecting on body politics, it also kept me—during the moments of darkness—wildly uncomfortable, horrified, and shocked at the actions of the characters. Womb City is an introspective Africanfuturist horror for readers who love stories that take a swing at reductive views on gender and crime without hiding the awfulness those issues bring up.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Book Review: The Black Girl Survives in This One (edited by Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. Fennell)

Arley Sorg | 1507 words

The Black Girl Survives in This One
Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. Fennell, editors
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250871657
Flatiron Books, April, 2024, 368 pgs

In 2021 Saraciea J. Fennell edited Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed for Macmillan imprint Flatiron, bringing together fifteen nonfiction pieces to “interrogate the different myths and stereotypes about the Latinx diaspora.” I was very interested, but too busy to get around to reading it. Nonetheless, it made me curious about Fennell as an editor; she and I have communicated occasionally via email in her capacity as Senior Publicity Manager at Tor Publishing Group (and my capacity as reviewer for Lightspeed, co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine, and Senior Editor at Locus Magazine). Now she has teamed up with writer Desiree S. Evans to publish a fiction anthology, The Black Girl Survives in This One: “A YA anthology of horror stories centering Black girls who battle monsters, both human and supernatural, and who survive to the end.” To say that I was curious when I heard about this book would be an understatement¹!

The Black Girl Survives in This One offers fifteen original stories from a range of authors. You have your bestselling and award winning folks that many genre readers will (or, at least, should) recognize, like Justina Ireland; you have your Big Names who write at least some works which could be called genre, but who may not always be labelled “genre authors,” like The Other Black Girl author Zakiya Dalila Harris; you have your seriously accomplished authors known for their YA works like L.L. McKinney; and more, including a few newer authors, plus fiction by the editors. Horror icon Tananarive Due penned the forward, and while some of you may skip forwards in general, this should be a draw in and of itself for readers who know how fantastic Due is. I’ll talk about a sampling of great stories and leave the rest for your discovery. But you could flip open this book and start anywhere and you will likely be captivated.

I started my read, as I sometimes do when reading anthologies, not with the order of the stories, but with an author I was eager to read: Eden Royce’s “Local Color.” If Eden Royce has an original in something, I will probably feel drawn to read that book. Royce is a gifted storyteller, and often infuses important subtext into her fascinating and cool narratives. “Local Color” is something of a coming-of-age story of a girl, Veronne, whose parents went missing. She lives with her grandfather and, in classic Royce fashion, is quickly drawn as an engaging character who is not like other teens. She is independent-minded and driven to find out what happened to her parents, even if it means taking a few extraordinary risks and getting into trouble. The story takes advantage of some proven horror techniques and readers who feel a fun zing of fear at a protagonist venturing into the dark will enjoy the piece on that level. It feels brief because the writing compels you to chew through the pages. It also feels as much like the beginning of Veronne’s grand adventures as it does a complete piece. This could be the start of a series of interlocking stories or something? Just a suggestion . . .

Interesting characters in compelling situations continue with Vincent Tirado’s “The Black Strings.” Mal is a kid in a punk band but doesn’t feel the typical way about music that you usually see in fiction—you know, “music is my life” or “this is my passion”; Mal understands music from a different angle, one which combines math with social observations about the way people respond to music. Mal is also queer, and the way Tirado sketches Mal’s interactions and feelings brings me back to the longings of high school, but in the best way possible. Tirado’s touches with character alone are enough to keep reading, but then they mix in the fact that Mal can somewhat tell when someone is about to die, and the fact that the band just arrived at a hotel where, if Mal’s ability holds true, a whole lot of people are going to die . . . I could feel the pressure of the situation as I was reading, and this is perhaps one of the highest compliments I can give a writer.

In “The Screamers” Daka Hermon begins with quick but very effective work establishing character. Middle child Amaani just moved to Tennessee with her family. She is immediately likeable and relatable, a wonderful mix of strong and vulnerable. Some writers might see how Hermon pulls this off, but in my opinion, it’s done well, balanced with precision, and I think the average reader will simply be absorbed, eager to see Amaani’s journey. Moreover, when the creepiness gets going, Hermon does a lovely job of keeping the story tied closely to character, and to things that are important. The narrative folds grief in with personal transformation, and I really appreciated a lot about the family dynamics, as well as the way Hermon handles the larger thematic elements. Because the character is great, the tension is also great, which drives the read (and the reader’s heartbeat) into a sprint. I really enjoyed this story, and I’ll be eager to see more by Hermon.

The power of “The Skittering Thing,” at least initially, is the way Monica Brashears captures the life of a teenage girl. It’s really entertaining to read, and I feel as if I could just hang out with these slightly gossipy girls and enjoy the drama, the highs and lows, and the little details. Not to mention the contradictions, like the fact that our protagonist Sunny is terrified of the biblical apocalypse even though she doesn’t believe in it. These kinds of touches give Brashear’s characters a sense of depth and realism. Brashears, meanwhile, is also lining the narrative with a little tension and potential hints of horror to come. Sunny and her friend Charlotte meet the new girl, who is the daughter of the new pastor, and their interactions are really well written, with delights delivered by taking things in somewhat unexpected but still believable directions. When the horror does come, you’re so absorbed in the story that it’s quite gripping. Details in the narrative are also just a bit unusual, enough to feel fresh while still allowing the overall story to be gripping.

Janine in “Ghost Light” by Erin E. Adams is a striking and cool character. We meet her as she’s prepping for her first show as production stage manager, and she’s a great mix of nervous and competent. She’s the first sophomore to take on the role solo, which is a wonderful way to set up a character: there are so many things we instinctively know about someone who might accomplish this, especially when they are both nervous and competent. But Adams is a great writer, so she builds on an already effective foundation by adding intriguing details and perspectives and a lick or two of wordsmithing, all while keeping the read firmly in the main character’s perspective, creating a beautifully immersive and character driven experience. Even the choice of character role adds value and nuance to the piece, as we just don’t see a lot of stories centered on a theater production stage manager. When Adams brings on the tension, it’s delicious, it’s layered, a braiding of problems that sings through the story. And then: cue the speculative!

I really enjoyed this book. Even though the Black girl survives in the end, this doesn’t mean that every piece is hopeful or has a happy ending. Sometimes it’s warm and fuzzy, sometimes it’s bloody and grim. There’s a great range of storytelling styles and narrative directions here, and while you know at least something about the ending of each story (because the anthology title is a spoiler), the journeys are well worth taking.

¹. Somewhat related topically, though not directly related to this anthology, I did a “short take” review of nonfiction book The Black Guy Dies First for Locus Online, just below our review of film Jung_E. We interviewed one of the writers over at Fantasy Magazine. Folks who are wondering about the title of The Black Girl Survives in This One may want to take a look at that book for context.

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: Snowglobe by Soyoung Park

Chris Kluwe | 832 words

Snowglobe
Soyoung Park (translated by Joungmin Lee Comfort)
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780593484975
Delacorte Press, February 2024, 384 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re braving the frigid temperatures of a post-apocalyptic reality television surveillance state in Soyoung Park’s thrilling novel, Snowglobe (and if that description doesn’t immediately hook you, I don’t know what will (ahem US and UK readers)).

Snowglobe is the award-winning first novel of a duology by Soyoung Park, translated into English by Joungmin Lee Comfort, and my initial impression was that if Snowpiercer and The Jersey Shore had an abandoned baby, this is what it would look like, but this book is so much more than that. Set in a world where climate change has led to the entirety of Earth entering a new Ice Age except for a lone city enclosed by a glass dome, Snowglobe follows (for the most part) the journey of Jeon Chobahm, a teenage girl born and raised in the frigid wastelands surrounding the city of Snowglobe. Chobahm, who spends her days running on a human hamster wheel next to her mother to generate electricity in between genially feuding with her twin brother and taking care of her ailing grandmother (again, how are you not hooked yet, this all happens in the first chapter) shares a remarkable resemblance to Goh Haeri, Snowglobe’s idol ingenue beloved by survivors across the wastelands as a beacon of light and hope, her life televised and shared with everyone on a daily basis to distract from the everyday casual horror of survival.

Except Jeon Chobahm doesn’t want to be Goh Haeri (though she kinda does), she wants to be a director, one of the people responsible for shaping the stories of the actors living in Snowglobe.

—record scratch—

Yup, that’s right, to live in Snowglobe means you get all the best amenities in exchange for your (almost) every second belonging to everyone on the outside watching your lucky existence, and if you don’t like performing for the cameras, well, the ice and snow are always waiting, and there are always new actors waiting to take your place. After all, who can go back to living in the cold that kills when you’ve tasted the fresh air of a brisk sixty-nine degree day in casual athleisure wear, no matter whose backs it’s built on?

There is a lot more I want to say about Snowglobe‘s plot that I can’t say because spoilers are bad (both in universe and without), but one of the things that really stuck with me is how effortlessly Soyoung Park manages to weave together the story of a naive teenager searching for meaning in her life with overarching themes of the price of fame, the horror and weakness of an (almost) omnipresent surveillance state, what defines a person as an individual, and the abuses of power by those who can because they can (not to mention the subthemes of socialism and benefits/abuses thereof, the miseries of the prison-industrial complex, the grotesqueries of the manufactured idol identity, and the duality of public/private life, but I’m already running this sentence into an entire paragraph that my editor is going to shake her head at).

Needless to say, Soyoung Park is an incredibly gifted writer, and Joungmin Lee Comfort nails the translation in almost every way that matters. My only quibble was that there are a couple slightly awkward dialogue parts where it felt like the original idea simply didn’t fit what a normal English reader would expect based on setting/vernacular, but they were few and far between, and they never detracted from the larger messages of the story. Translator efforts aren’t always appreciated, but I want to take the space here to say that a book like this doesn’t reach other audiences without a dedicated effort that can be just as difficult as writing the story in the first place, and I appreciate how well it was accomplished.

Overall, Snowglobe was never quite what I expected in all the best ways that matter, and I think it’s worth reading not just because it’s an entertaining story in its own right, but also because it has a lot of meaningful things to say about global culture that transcend any sort of language barrier. I’m highly anticipating the second book’s translation, hopefully translated once again by Joungmin Lee Comfort, and I will happily read anything else Soyoung Park decides to write.

Read if: You know what it means to have the cold take your breath away; you’re curious what actually goes on behind the camera; you’d sacrifice what’s comfortable for what’s right.

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: Rachael K. Jones

Laurel Amberdine | 978 words

How did “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story began, as a lot of my flash pieces do, as an entry to a flash fiction challenge I do every year through an online writer’s group. The challenge is to write a flash fiction piece every weekend for five weeks in a row. However, the original draft of this one didn’t quite work, so I set it aside to revise later.

But then I forgot about it. For years. It sat in a folder where I keep story stubs until about a year ago, when I decided all at once to clean through the whole folder and see what was worth keeping. It turned out the long lapse in time had been exactly what I needed to see what was working about the story and how to give it a proper ending, and I revised the story to its current form.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I got serious about my writing space after working from home thanks to COVID and the quarantine years. Even though I don’t work from home anymore, I’ve been grateful for the upgrade to my writing space. Ergonomics is the number one most important factor to me. I’ve got a good chair, a setup that allows me to position my screen at eye level, and a walking pad to use when I’m doing the kind of work that allows for movement. I also have a great view out the window, and I keep a small shelf of brainstorming tools at hand (such as the wonderful Story Engine card decks). I always keep a handful of fidgets at my writing station, anything to keep my hands busy while I think so I don’t get tempted to zone off with my phone.

Speaking of my phone, I’m a devotee of the Pomodoro Method of writing, and use an app on my phone to track my twenty-five-minute writing chunks and five-minute breaks. The app serves double duty, since it’s the first thing I see if I get tempted to touch my phone during a pomodoro, which redirects me back to writing until it’s a real break period.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

It seems to me like most good advice on writing boils down to 1) read widely, and 2) write. But I wish more people understood that all published writing is an optical illusion, a magic trick that looks effortless but is in fact the product of endless rehearsal, practice, and revision.

I say this because too many people get caught in the comparison game, reading published work and having that sinking sense you could never write something that good yourself. I’ve fallen into this trap too, even with my own work! Sometimes I’ll reread something I wrote, and think, How did I ever write this?, forgetting how much the story sucked in its first draft and how much I struggled to get the words down, forgetting the critiques from my writing buddies, the rounds of revision, the editorial feedback, everything that goes into making a published story look its very best. A published story is the final iteration of many attempts to produce it.

But you can never write a good story if you don’t write a bad draft to begin with. There are no shortcuts through the Wall of Suck. Only by going through the Wall of Suck will you ever level up your craft. And in fact, this is what the Wall of Suck is good for, because like I said, all published writing is an optical illusion. There are really only iterations of the writing, as you carefully chip away all the bits of stone to unveil the masterpiece beneath.

So my advice would be not to fear the Wall of Suck. Write your story as badly as you have to in order to finish it. Embrace the Wall of Suck. It’s ultimately your friend.

What are you reading lately?

I’ve been on a nonfiction kick recently. I really loved Accountable by Dashka Slater, which examines an incident where a bunch of teen boys made a racist Instagram account featuring their Black female classmates. I thought it was a great piece of journalism about racism, social media, and all the levels at which this group of people grappled with the fallout—on individual, community, and institutional levels.

Somewhat related, I also just finished a pair of books on power, ethics, and justice. One, Corruptible by Brian Klaas, goes into what power does to people and institutions, and why the people who would make the best leaders just don’t seek positions of power. The other, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? by Michael Sandel is a book about moral philosophy and the ethical basis for various systems of justice.

Speaking as a genre writer, I love dipping into nonfiction because of how much it can inform all the worldbuilding we need to do as part of our work. I don’t know how my current round of reading will eventually make its way into my stories, but creative cross-pollination has always given me the best ideas. I’m excited to see what comes out of this latest batch of thought-provoking books.

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

Ooo, I know! Can we have a unicorn boom in adult fiction? Serious, philosophical unicorns, a la Peter S. Beagle and Tanith Lee? Let’s bring back unicorns!

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: Sloane Leong

Laurel Amberdine | 489 words

How did “A Saint Between the Teeth” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story was inspired by the ecology of animals like the olm, a unique cave-dwelling salamander, and the honeypot ant. One of my favorite things to do in speculative stories is interweave non-human lives, ecologies and cultures into our human ones. The metaphors, conflicts and emotions that crop up from that exciting friction when you bring together human and non-human cultures and biologies always excites me. As someone whose ancestry is also mixed and whose cultures are vastly different, I always find it fun to write about culture clashes and characters finding new insight in one another as they try to bridge the gap of their limited perspective.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this?

I wrote this story while at Clarion West back in 2022 where you aim to write a story a week during the duration of the workshop. By the time it was this story’s turn to manifest, it just flowed out of me! Usually it’s not the case, I feel like I get hung up on details and especially language but the urgency and energy of the workshop helped me move past that quickly.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Some current writerly inspirations are Simone Weil, Shelley Jackson, Louise Erdrich, Livia Llewellyn, and Alejandra Pizarnik.

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

I’d love more ambiguity in fiction, particularly towards its themes and its sense of morality. I feel like this is an issue in most fiction I’ve read recently, short and long; there’s an insecurity in a lot of fiction from what I think is due to the hostile cultural climate towards art. A lot of writing ends up feeling fabular or almost like a therapeutic diagnosis and I think a fear of the reader is definitely at the root of this. A fear of the work being misunderstood. Personally, I think ambiguity is a generative space, a space to play for both the author and the reader. More ambiguity, less didacticism.

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

I’m working on my dark Pasifika fantasy novel, two new collaborative graphic novels and editing the second volume of my illustrated BIPOC horror anthology, Death in the Mouth: Original Horror from the Margins. I also had a new novella come out through Interzone #296 called “With the Blade as Witness,” a visceral indigenous adventure following a tribal mech pilot trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic planet. You can also find more of my work on my website sloanesloane.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Ben Peek

Laurel Amberdine | 254 words

How did “Shadow Films” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I like films. Sometimes, when I watch a film I try and figure out what the extras are saying in the background. It’s usually with films I’ve seen before. I’ve worked as an extra before so I know it’s mostly nothing, but once you start thinking about this, it takes you places.

Where are you in this story?

Nowhere. Or everywhere. It’s that kind of story.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I like weird things, but I don’t really stress the genre side of things. Most likely I ended up here by accident. There’s probably a petition being circulated to throw me out, or something.

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

I’m honestly not too bothered about trends. All I really want is good books to be published.

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

I’m writing a new novel. I’m waiting for my hearing to return. I’m writing a new short story. Who knows how those things will go. Also, I have a new book coming out called The Red Labyrinth. Please buy it because no one else will.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: David Anaxagoras

Laurel Amberdine | 810 words

How did “We Shall Not Be Bitter at the End of the World” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story grew out of a writing process I was experimenting with last year where I would write each morning to a prompt nonstop for ten minutes. The idea was just to gather a little more raw story material to work with. I also should confess that I was looking for an excuse to write longhand and make use of my modest collection of fountain pens and inks.

It took me a little while to find writing prompts that worked for me and my purposes. I eventually found a list of prompts in an old book I had on hand about writing flash fiction. They were simple, along the lines of “write about a plan” or “write about something big.” I only stuck with this plan for about 2 months, but several short stories leapt out of the daily practice, including this one.

The prompt for “We Shall Not Be Bitter at the End of the World” was: “Write about something that hasn’t happened yet.”

How do you write about something that hasn’t happened? I thought about feelings of anticipation or even apprehension. Because of the times we’re living in, I wrote the opening sentence “We’re all waiting for Wormwood” (which was also the original title of this story). I think, at least subconsciously, this was a riff on the joke wishing for an apocalyptic meteor to just hurry up and end it all. Before I had gotten to the end of the page, Bigfoot had shown up to challenge Big Pa to a rock-lifting contest.

(For my fellow fountain pen enthusiasts, the original prompt was written with a Dragonet Sapphire Nahvalur Schuylkill with a fine nib using my favorite sheening ink, the very reliable Nitrogen Royal Blue by Organic Studio. This ink has an amazing reflective red sheen that feels very alive. My notebook of choice for the writing prompts was a lined A5 Clairfontaine My Essential, which takes any kind of ink I throw at it like a champ.)

Where are you in this story?

I am very much the twelve-year-old in this story. Not because I’ve ever had a birthday party like this one, but because I wrote this story as an act of self-comfort. It seems we’re living in End Times that stubbornly refuse to end. And I desperately wanted to see if I could find some comfort at the end of the world.

So I gave myself a birthday party and invited all my favorites. This story is a love-letter to my 1970s paranormal pop-culture infused childhood. If you’re an old Gen Xer like me, then killer bees, Easter Island, and UFOs will be very familiar to you. It’s impossible to overstate how ubiquitous these things were, especially Bigfoot. Basically, if it was an episode of In Search Of . . . I tried to squeeze it in. Sadly, some things get only a passing mention, and I had to leave a lot out altogether. There are also a few real things from my childhood—like my mother’s go-to block party shish kebabs, and my stepdad’s aversion to mushrooms. I think some of the carnival folk wandered over from a Ray Bradbury story. The story ultimately was just about everyone vibing and being together. In the end, you just want to be with the people you love.

I did feel comforted after I wrote this story, and I hope everyone who reads it also finds a moment of peace. I think I was fair and didn’t cheat, which is why the tale is also very sad and bittersweet. It might be too late for them, but it’s not too late for us. That’s the ultimate hopeful note. It’s not too late, not yet. Let’s not wait for our own funeral to come together.

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

My agent is patiently waiting for my middle-grade novel and I’m deep into the first draft. Then I have several more long-form ideas circling the runway: more middle-grade, a weird western series I’m aching to write, a fun take on mythology. I’m all over the map with genre and age categories, but to me it’s just about telling a great story. Also, I’m a very impatient writer and a little bit of a glutton. I want to write it all and right now.

Those interested can find more of my stories right here in Lightspeed, and visit my website at davidanaxagoras.com to see what else I’ve been up to.

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, February 2024

The Editors | 233 words

Coming up in February, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Everdeen Mason (“Scarlett”) and Phoebe Barton (“But From Thine Eyes My Knowledge I Derive”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Companion Animals in Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight” from Stewart C. Baker and “The Pearl Captain” by Christopher Rowe.

Plus, we have original fantasy by P H Lee (“A Sojourn in the Fifth City”) and Wen-yi Lee (“What Becomes of Curious Minds”). We also have a flash story (“Further Examination and Capture of Candle Skulls Associated with the Baba Yaga”) from Mari Ness, and another (“An Elegy for the Former Things”) from KT Bryski.

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: Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Alex Irvine, Adam-Troy Castro, and Endria Isa Richardson.

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

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

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

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Bluesky

bsky.app/profile/lightspeedmagazine.com

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

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 Lightspeed and/or Nightmare, 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 Lightspeed and Nightmare 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)

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)

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.