TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 167 (April 2024)

FROM THE EDITOR

Publisher's Note

Editorial: April 2024

SCIENCE FICTION

A Pedra
Endria Isa Richardson

Under a Star, Bright as Morning
David Anaxagoras

Mother’s Day, After Everything
Susan Palwick

Limping Toward Sunrise
Rich Larson

FANTASY

a testament to indirection, an enigma, the sun above
Mitchell Shanklin

How to Know Your Father Is a God
Modupeoluwa Shelle

Salemo
David Marino

Travelers’ Tales from the Ends of the World
Vandana Singh

EXCERPTS

Children of Blood and Bone
Tomi Adeyemi

NONFICTION

Book Review: The White Guy Dies First edited by Terry J. Benton-Walker
Arley Sorg

Book Review: Dazzling by Chikọdịlị Emelụmadụ
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Of Jade and Dragons by Amber Chen
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Endria Isa Richardson

Modupeoluwa Shelle

Susan Palwick

Vandana Singh

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions, May 2024

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 Tithi Luadthong / Shutterstock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: April 2024

John Joseph Adams | 184 words

Welcome to issue 167 of Lightspeed Magazine!

Our science fiction section kicks off with a bang with Endria Isa Richardson’s new SF short story “A Pedra,” which explores the difficult topic of human experimentation. Susan Palwick turns her attention to the effects of climate change in her story “Mother’s Day, After Everything.” David Anaxagoras and Rich Larson bring a little levity with their flash pieces, “Under a Star, Bright as Morning” and “Limping Toward Sunrise” (respectively).

Our original fantasy work includes “How to Know Your Father Is a God” by Modupeoluwa Shelle. We also have a novelette by Vandana Singh—“Travelers’ Tales from the Ends of the World”—that powerfully explores the impact of climate change through a magical lens. We also have a flash story (“Salemo”) from David Marino, and another (“a testament to indirection, an enigma, the sun above”) from Mitchell Shanklin.

For nonfiction, we’ve got some book recommendations from our book review team and author spotlight interviews with our writers. Ebook readers will enjoy a novel excerpt, too.

It’s another terrific issue, so thanks for reading!

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.

Publisher's Note: April 2024

John Joseph Adams | 184 words

Dear Readers,

I owe you an apology. I messed up.

As you likely know, AI-generated texts and images have become a bit of plague in recent times. We've committed to not using such works, but, even when one is diligent, one can be fooled—as it seems we were. The original cover of the April issue was an image we licensed from Shutterstock from “Ardea-studio” (image ID 2284604323), which, after further review today, I’m pretty confident it is indeed AI-generated.

We used to use Adobe Stock, but switched to Shutterstock last year because Adobe was slow to roll out an AI-generated filter, but Shutterstock had one. Shutterstock’s filter is not all that great, it turns out, and we recently decided to switch back to Adobe Stock because they have since implemented a filter, and it seems to be much better.

A reader emailed one of our vendors today to inquire if they’re okay selling titles with AI-generated art, and they passed that information along to me. I investigated, and it is now my opinion that the reader was correct.

Since AI-generated images became rife, we have been seeking ways to ensure we don’t accidentally license one. There are AI-generated image detectors you can find online, but I tested some and did research, and it seemed—at least at the time—that they generated a fair amount of false positives, so I haven’t relied on using those. Once this reader complaint came to light, I ran the image through Adobe Stock’s “Find Similar Image” feature, and that found a fair number of images that look very similar, from a variety of users, and Adobe Stock’s filter has them flagged as AI.

I thought we were safe with this image, because the Ardea-studio user’s profile looks like a real graphic artist/designer’s profile to me—though, I note that when I look up that particular image now, it says it is no longer available. This user has their email address in their profile, so I have emailed them, but I didn’t want to wait to reissue a new version of the issue with a new cover. Perhaps there’s some reasonable explanation—like they posted it for sale, then reconsidered the ethics of selling AI-generated art and took it down—and perhaps not. Hopefully the user will reply and let us know; in which case, I will update this note on the Lightspeed website and also include a note in the May issue.

In any case, I deeply apologize for this error, and I will of course strive to not let it happen again. We have previously committed—and remain committed—to not use AI-generated works in the magazines, and we deeply regret that we accidentally let it happen.

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.

A Pedra

Endria Isa Richardson | 4671 words

I believe that if we have any notion at all of what has generally been called human nature, it is because History, like a mirror, holds up for our contemplation, an image of ourselves.

—Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá

Audio Recording, “Lydia and Ecco at Insight,” February 3, 2134

I didn’t run.

If the boy had not called to you, you would have run.

I would not have run.

• • • •

mãe,

There are few moments that I remember with clarity. From those early days, I recall mostly a vast, pervading numbness. Profound dissociation. I remember Salt. I remember Hog.

At night, I would curl between them. With my eyes closed, I would try to see them as they were just in that moment. I would block out what I knew would be. I would see Salt’s ruddy cheeks and puffy brown hair. His shoulders, just beginning to broaden with muscle. His pale forearms already ropey from physical training. Hog’s deep brown eyes and chapped, gentle lips. The soft tufts of his hair brushing against my cheek as he moved about inside a dream.

You will never meet either of them. You will never meet our child. Your grandchild.

If I still couldn’t sleep, I would look for you. Of course I never found you. If you were in my future, I would have already known.

• • • •

Once, I told Salt and Hog that I had known a mother. A home. What I thought was a family. They were thrown away by their parents, addicts like you, as infants. At school, we were not supposed to say, “thrown away.” We were supposed to say, “offered to the future.” But I am not at school any longer. So, they were thrown away by their parents, eaten by Kismet to mine the one true future. They assumed the same was true for me, until I told them that I lived with you until I was eleven. But ah, puberty, eh? The bitch. She came, and broke us. You could not handle me anymore. The aunties and uncles and cousins who had helped grow me, who had (I thought) loved me, raised their machetes and told you—take care of her, or we will. I still remember the certainty of your voice when you said, “I will do it myself.” You took auntie’s blade. You marched me out of the only home I had ever known. You raised your hand to me, who had never known violence. You said, “Run, Lydia, meu coração, run.”

• • • •

TIME, November 13, 2134

THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN’S PLAN TO OPEN THE FUTURE

The story of Insight’s first year was one of relentless forward motion: an underground research facility constructed in an undisclosed location, patents filed for what Insight billed as “a safer alternative to the drug kite,” an “army corps of scientists” hired, trained, and housed entirely on campus. In the intervening years, however, both Insight and XO seemed to vanish.

This is the first appearance XO has made since then. During this interview, as in our last, XO does not share his image or voice. We meet virtually. His avatar is a slightly built Southeast Asian man clothed in a slim-cut dark blue velour tracksuit. Sunglasses veil his eyes. “I am not a terrorist,” he begins. He laughs, and it’s jarring. “I am interested in terror as a mind-, and therefore time- expanding substance.”

I ask him to clarify what he means.

“What can heightened emotions, like terror, teach us about the pliability of time? There are ancient wisdom traditions that suggest that when we confront the unimaginable, and for most people that is something horrifying, that is when we truly are free. Unlocking all futures, not only the ones that are palatable to us, requires absolute freedom.”

When I ask him to share the most horrible thing he has ever confronted, he confesses, in a moment of unexpected vulnerability. “My mother abandoned me when I was very young. Deep down, I had feared that separation my whole short life. Once it happened, I realized I no longer needed to fear anything. I could be free. I could suddenly imagine many possible futures for myself. My future no longer relied on something I could not control, another person’s presence or absence. I want that freedom for everybody.”

• • • •

mãe,

This is how my story begins, if you can call it a beginning. With our plan to escape.

Many of us at school never made it past our first year. We overdosed on kite or any one of the other street drugs, or died because we couldn’t source clean drugs, or the bleak reality that our lives were completely fucking pointless drove us mad. If we made it far enough, we were placed. We tried, for some more years, not to kill ourselves or anyone else. Until then, it was best to find something, or someone, that could anchor us—in one body, in one time—and focus hard on that. Otherwise, we tried not to focus at all. Floated somewhere between present and future. Drank until we had to take a break from drinking. Drugged ourselves into the stratosphere. Fucked. Got angry. Messed around. Me and Hog had a serious fling. Then me and Salt. Then me, Salt, and Hog. As good a way to pass the time as any. Then Hog got called in for early placement, and came back quiet. After that, it was mostly me and Salt.

That was about when we decided to do something we had not seen ourselves do. Do you understand? We decided to cheat the future.

It cheated us instead.

The day Ecco came for me, I was hurrying through the main corridor back to Salt’s room. Someone called out to me from inside the Head’s office. I got ready to lie my way out of anything—I swear, that half-full bucket of prune liquor me and Hog have brewing in the dormer is only for educational and scientific purposes—but stopped short at the door.

The man standing in Head’s office was short. Only a few inches taller than me. And brown-skinned and wide. Good and stocky, a nice soft fatness wrapped around a solid frame. At the time, I probably thought he was attractive. There weren’t many of us blacks at the school. I was one. Hog was half of another. (Salt was Jewish. They were even more of a pariah).

At that point, I still believed that I knew everything. Will that sound arrogant to you? It’s not. It was brutal. I didn’t know facts and figures or theoretical physics. But I believed I knew everything of consequence that would ever happen to me.

(And to Hog.)

(And to Salt.)

(And to anyone who had, for training or for contract, required me to rip apart the fabric of time, extend my mind, like a finger, into its gap, shine my awareness . . . And see the bloody gems inside.)

We had not seen our plan. We hadn’t seen it fail, we hadn’t seen it work. We were desperate enough to try, anyway.

I had not seen this man, either. Not in time, and not in life. I should have known, then. I should have known to run, to grab Salt and Hog and run. But I was curious.

After a while, I asked, “Who are you?”

“Ecco,” he said, “It’s nice to finally meet you, Lydia.”

Many things happened, more or less in sequence immediately after that. There was the first explosion, and that also surprised me. You have to understand, surprise was not an experience I knew well until that point. Mostly, I already knew. Mostly, I had already seen. Not this. The bombs, improvised molotov cocktails, weren’t supposed to be lit for several more hours. I was supposed to light one, Salt and Hog would light two others. A good amount of chaos, running and screaming in the halls, ensued. Then, a blow to my head and darkness.

I woke. Later, elsewhere. I shouted (several times) from the pain in my head. No one came. I explored the room I had found myself in. It was blank, unrevealing, an infuriating beige-nothing. There was no bed, no furniture. There was no discernible door. The walls were soft, pliant. I seemed to be in some kind of sophisticated cage. It blocked me from seeing out of the present moment. I could not think, could not question. I could not rationalize. I curled up on the floor, and slept.

When I next woke up, Ecco was standing above me. He handed me pills—pain, and what I assumed was kite. I asked him many questions. He answered three. It was 13 August 2133, so three days had passed since the explosions at school. I was at a research lab called Insight. And, he said, I had been brought there to liberate the future.

This began the next phase of my life. Ecco was my abductor, my captor, and later, my torturer. He was also the only person I saw, spoke to. I did, in those early days, feel something like sorrow for him. He would always begin our sessions with a series of “what if” questions: What if there were many, perhaps infinite, futures? What if there was a way to unlock time itself? What if we could move in time, not only see it stretched out, frozen, before us?

He called it running.

“You will run time, Lydia,” he told me. “Once you lose your fear.”

• • • •

The First Hundred Years of Kinsight: From the Early 22nd Century to the Present

Chapter 3

By the time Insight Unlimited arose in the early 2130s, Kismet Corporation had already become the largest sole employer across the continents. In the Global North alone, Kismet contracted the services of at least 300,000 KIDS (Kismet Indentured Servants) in the first half of 2133, and was set to expand to half a million by 2134. Until Insight’s rise, the only challenges to Kismet came from fringe human rights organizations and activists sheltering in so-called “Dark Towns” (towns which had not converted to Kismet-time, and which often harbored absconded servants).

Challenges grew in later years. Over the course of the latter 22nd century, Insight would destabilize Kismet’s stranglehold on the global economy by seeking to control the company’s indentured workforce. Seers, trained to locate resources in the future, were highly valuable to Kismet. In later decades, Insight’s poaching and re-training of Seers gave rise to a new class of workers. ¹Runners were able to directly collect advanced technology, materials, and intellectual property from as far as millennia into the future, and return with them to the corporation. It is estimated that nearly half of all early runners were lost on their travels. A small number of highly sensitive Seers would later work for Insight and their subsidiaries, providing a range of services that included the location and extraction of missing runners.

In the early 2100s, Insight began to seek control of those Seers whose unique skills they believed could disrupt Kismet’s control of the future. The wars between Insight and Kismet, waged largely between seers, runners, and dark towns, marked the beginning of a brutal century. However, the resulting liberation of trans-temporal commercial trade and merger of Insight and Kismet into Kinsight is inarguably among the greatest achievements of humankind.

• • • •

mãe,

I remember the first time Ecco took the drug kite from me. I had not been fully without it since I arrived at school, nauseated and time-sick, barely able to stand. The third week I was at Insight, Ecco undosed me.

I remember bracing for the rock of nausea. It came.

Hog, prismed, leered at me from a thousand eyes. He shattered.

“Hog?” I asked.

Ecco stood once more across the room. “Ecco,” he said. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Lydia.”

“What do you want?” I asked. “What do you want from me anyway?”

I came, shuddering against Salt, and bit his shoulder.

“Lydia,” someone cried. “Sai daqui!”

I dropped from a tree in the dark, felt my arm crack. Screamed.

I screamed in the room.

I leaned over a toilet and vomited; flecks of bile and water hitting my cheeks.

I fingered a smooth, black knife.

I saw a brown face, like mine, but older. “Pedra,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” said Ecco, coaxing, caressing my cheek.

I found a brown hand in mine; clasped it. I let it pull me into darkness studded with bright crystal lozenges. Oblong mirrors, blinking on/off/on as the light in my mind caught their strange fractals.

“Mãe?” I called. “Mãe?”

Hog’s body fell to the mats.

Salt’s chest exploded.

Lozenges winked as I cast my mind about, seeking elsewhere. Inside of time, I saw futures. Not lozenges, not mirrors—oh god, mamãe. How could I have thought they were mirrors. They opened. I was pulled forward, the nails of that hand digging in my flesh.

“Mãe? Mãe?”

I heard the boy’s voice behind me. I threw myself backwards, toward him.

• • • •

Audio Recording: “Lydia and Ecco at Insight” November 3, 2134

Tell me about your mother.

The whore who sold me to Kismet?

“Papagaio come milho, periquito leva fama.”

I don’t know what that means.

I thought all you young people spoke Português. Eh? It means you are ungrateful to your mother. “Ao menino e ao borracho, põe-lhes Deus a mão por baixo.” God puts his hand under the boy and the young pigeon.

Easy for you to say, who will never fly. If I felt God’s hand beneath me, I would spit on it. “Pimenta nos olhos dos outros é refresco.” Pepper in the eye is a pleasure to you, eh?

Eh, não pimenta, mas pedra. Stone in the eye is a pleasure to me. Have you never tried to see her, Lydia? To understand why she abandoned you?

I have tried.

But you can’t?

No.

But you talk to her, when you are gone in your visions.

• • • •

mãe,

The first time I was undosed from kite, I began to understand what Ecco meant with his talk of liberated futures. With his talk of running. I had been inside of some terrible material. I had felt the dark stuff move around me. Its currents were strong. I could feel some alive presence just beyond my skin tugging where it wanted me to go.

I think Ecco comes from that place. Or he came from that place. Something about him feels the way it felt. Empty. Hungry.

I tell him to run his futures by himself. He says I just need to discover the key to freedom. What will make me unafraid to enter the infinite future.

Sometimes I think he is just lonely.

• • • •

Audio Recording: “Lydia and Ecco at Insight” March 3, 2135

Are you ready to try again today? To run?

I’d rather die.

Die then. Kill yourself.

I can’t. I don’t.

See if you can. See if you do.

I know how I end. I know how I continue. I know everything.

Everything. What arrogance. You didn’t even know me.

• • • •

mãe,

I never named him. I call him meu caração, my little boy, meu amor. I have been able to survive here because of him.

It’s been five months since I last saw him. The first five months that I have been completely alone, in my life. I was already pregnant when Ecco took me from school. A child of Salt, or a child of Hog? I like to think, a child of both. I birthed him here, at Insight. Until August, they let him stay with me. We lived a strange, captive life, but we lived it together. Then Ecco took him. He said it was my own fault. My own choice.

I don’t move. I don’t speak. Ecco gives me more kite now, triple what I used to take. I close my eyes and fly. I see everything, all of time rippling beneath me like waves, diamond-studded, glinting, on, off, on.

But now I know. They are not mirrors, they are not diamonds. They are mouths.

That is the difference between seeing and running.

Sometimes, I let myself wonder whether Salt or Hog ever made it to you.

That was our whole, foolish plan. Run to you, mamãe, like little children, and beg you to shelter us as you could not shelter me before. When there is no one left, no hope, we always turn to our mothers, eh, no matter how angry we are.

I don’t think you will ever receive these little notes.

• • • •

ecco tells me that the secret to running is losing your mother.

ecco tells me that if I want to find the boy, i’ll have to run him down myself.

i tell him that i have been trying.

something is not right

not right

i have started talking to myself, to hog, to salt, even to you. sometimes i wake as though from the middle of a dream, and i am talking to someone else—but no one i know, or have known. i am the only one here. i am the only one here. i’ve been here for too long

too long

• • • •

Audio Recording: “Lydia” April 2, 2135

What do you remember from your first days at Insight, Lydia?

I was dopesick. In pain. I hadn’t been without kite in years. I could barely stand. Couldn’t walk.

You were lost in many simultaneous futures, without the drug that stabilized your vision in the world and its one future.

Yes.

You saw me.

Yes.

And what did you think, that first time?

That you were my mother.

(Soft laughter.)

• • • •

they took my eyes

they took my eyes

they took my eyes

• • • •

Journal of Time and Sight, Vol. IV, Winter 2324

APPLYING ENUCLEATION TO ADDRESS THE PATHOPHYSIOLOGY OF HYPER-STEREOPSIC PARALYSIS IN KISMET-TRAINED SEERS

Interest in the procedure of enucleation (removal of the eyes) as an intervention gained prominence in the late 22nd century, after it was performed with some success by the liberatory research group, Insight Unlimited. Numerous studies have investigated the subject since the embargo against eye-removal was lifted in 2135.

At that point, the early Theory of Time Sight posited that children treated with the drug dimethylcathinone (“kite”) could be trained to see in four and possibly five, six, or seven dimensions. Davis and Shutter continued the theory, positing that time-paralysis (inability to move through time) exhibited in Kismet-trained Seers was a psychological, rather than physical, limitation. All children treated from an early age with dimethylcathinone should theoretically be capable of movement and not only sight. Hyper-reliance on world-sight, they hypothesized, might prohibit Seers from “flattening” time to one-dimension, a technique achieved by so-called “time runners.”

Following the use of double obsidian implants after eye-removal in one subject, L. Peres, research into the procedure was halted due to undisclosed complications.

• • • •

The Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2135

TWO MEN SENTENCED IN TERRORIST PLOT AGAINST KISMET

Two men convicted of thirteen counts of murder in the first degree were handed six and three consecutive life sentences, respectively, this morning. The two men, Adam Hogkins, twenty-one, and Terrence Salz, nineteen, were convicted in July for their roles in aiding in the terrorist attacks on the Kismet Headquarters in Northern California in 2133, as part of a third-wing backlash over the use of “indentured servants” by the Kismet Corporation. The men, both students at the Kismet Training Academy, were found guilty of planning and providing material support for terrorist acts and illegal gang membership.

The trial was one in a series of cases that arose out of what authorities determined was a sprawling terrorist plot orchestrated by an activist organization known as “Quilombo Sombrio,” and carried out with the cooperation of one other student, Lydia Davis Peres, the daughter of a well-known Quilombo member. Peres has been missing since the attack on the Kismet Headquarters.

Normally relegated to one-time guerilla attacks, the incidents—the bombing of a school and kidnapping of a student on August 10, 2133; the subsequent August 14th, 2133 bombings, and the largest escape of “indentured servants” at three Kismet locations—underscore the growing threat of mainstream dissatisfaction with, and potential of violence toward, the company that “controls the future,” Kismet Unlimited.

Human rights groups decried the lack of evidence against either defendant in the July trial, and are petitioning for appeals. Judge Julius Johnson sentenced Mr. Salz to a minimum of ninety-six years in prison, and Mr. Hogkins to a minimum of 192 years in prison. The younger Mr. Salz was escorted out of the courtroom by the bailiff. Mr. Hogkins appeared to be transferred to another authority, representatives of whom waited outside of the courtroom. He was transported to an unknown location in an unmarked car.

• • • •

Audio Recording: “Lydia and Ecco” August 15, 2135

Do you know what I have for you?

I can’t see.

Here. (forty-five-second interval.) Pick it up.

hnh. hnh. hnhh. hauh. Hau. Hau. Hau. Hauh. Haugh. How. How. Hough. Hog.

It is the head of your Hog.

(screaming)

• • • •

i am the only one here. She is not the only one here.

Audio Recording: “Lydia and Ecco” (undated)

Who do you talk to at night? The boy?

I talk to Lydia.

You are Lydia.

No.

• • • •

She wants to run, but she is still afraid. Why? (She still has hope, even after holding Hog’s head in her hands).

• • • •

I whisper to Lydia in the dark. “Acalme-se.” Quiet yourself. I know our mother’s tongue. It passed to me along dark currents that human eyes will never see, human limbs will never wade through. (I have waded through the dry fields, rippled by dry wings that beat over sun-chapped skulls. I have waded through the salted sea currents. I have been worn away and dismantled. And still, I am).

“You cannot change the past, meu coração.” My heart. “Only accept with wonder what the future may make of you.”

“I know your voice,” she whispers.

I laugh. “Of course you know my voice.”

“Who are you? Who let you in?” Her hand gropes in darkness.

I take her hand in mine. I make quieting noises with my tongue. “I simply come,” I say. “I walk through walls.”

She feels my fingers with hers. I place her hand on my face, let her trace the ridges of my eyes. I do not let her flinch or pull back her hand when her fingers slip and touch my eyes. They are smooth as silk, and very cold. “See?” I tell her. “There is nothing to fear. It is just stone.”

“I hate it,” she says, as though she were a child.

“You fear it,” I say patiently, as though she were a child.

“It is not me.”

“It is us,” I tell her.

“I need to leave,” she says. I feel her stand.

“Leave.”

“I have a child,” she says.

“Find him.”

She searches inside of herself for a feeling that has always been solid certainty, and now is so much fog. She pulls on air, says, “I will not survive.”

“Look at me,” I tell her. I take her fingers again, bring them to my face. “And see that you survive.”

• • • •

The São Francisco Times, October 10, 2135

KISMET STUDENTS FOUND

A police raid was led on the dark town known as Quilombo Sombrio early this morning, located in a northern area of the state that has been largely uninhabited since flooding in the late 21st century gutted the cities and towns nearby. “We were able to collaborate with a private company that had obtained intelligence about the coordinates of the town, located in the foothills of Cruz Sagrada. We have long had reason to believe that the town was harboring fugitives belonging to the Kismet Group. We were able to relocate a number of the missing students. There were some casualties on both sides.”

• • • •

She asks me how.

“You think of yourself as a peça. The piece. The slave. But we call ourself a pedra, the stone. Time cuts us, we do not cut time. We submit to time, allow it to move us. It will move us toward him. Our filho de pedra. Our endless echo. He who will cross all futures to create me, and destroy you.”

• • • •

Audio Recording: “Lydia and Ecco” September 30, 2135

Quilombo Sombrio.

Quilombo?

A dark town in the Northwest. That’s where we must go.

Why?

To find my mother.

• • • •

I arrive at Quilombo after the police have gone, after the fires have burned themselves out. Ecco warned me that the town had been razed. The seers collected, taken back to Insight to readjust to the light of time after their years living in darkness. “It will be good for you,” he said.

I marvel at what is here, what has been here, evading time. Inside of me, Lydia remembers the trees. I touch a giant that towers to my left—wide plates of bark, roughly threaded, that smelled like vanilla and sugar. I touch my arm and remember a break she had received, falling from a tree as a child.

I sense movement. Survivors, coming out from the forest to collect their dead. Amongst them, I know, is Lydia’s mother. I do not see her with my eyes. I see her within time. She floats to me on its black river.

“Mamãe de Lydia,” I say, holding out my hands.

Her fingers are rough and warm. She traces the ridges of my eyes.

“O que é que você fez?” What have you done?

“Survived,” I answer.

“O que eu fiz para você?” What have I done to you?

Lydia, the child, the slave, reaches to her. “Mamãe,” she yells, deep within my head. “Save me.”

She still does not know that I am the one who will save her.

Mamãe buckles and falls. Her hands grab at my face, my shoulders, my arms, my shirt.

I pull my knife from her ribs, and wipe its blood on the tree.

“You told me to run.”

• • • •

I am no longer afraid. There is nothing to hold me anywhere.

The future beckons with all its glistening teeth. I turn my eyes (my stones) and see vents gaping open, closed, open, open, open. Until each is as wide as each, and running is only a matter of stepping from one open mouth to another.

I run.

and the thing that is inside me the thing i am inside of—spins me like a pebble on its tongue—swallows me whole (i am swallowed)—i am in its one long throat—it is the length of the universe—i am passed by smooth muscle—into its belly—bright and white as the sun—if i look too closely, i will die—i am swallowed into the one true future—burning—but i who have no eyes cannot see—and oh god, i cannot die

everything leads here, ecco, you have seen this noplace too—knowing this, i see you—not the you that moves outside of time; the you that is being eaten alive (unending, it does not end) by the future—

i see you, meu filho, the one i never named, you and i both know that there is nowhere to run—

I open my eye. I see the Ecco who stands outside of time.

“Mamãe,” he says, and takes my hand.

He is no longer the sound, he is the echo. I am no longer the slave, I am the stone.

We have nothing, we are nothing, we can go everywhere.

Time moves us.

¹. Research into the emergent phenomenon of runners found no biological basis for the tendency of Black children to become runners. Johnson, Edgar et al, “‘Running from Loneliness’: Assessing psychological trauma present in Kismet-trained time-runners.” 2156 November 11. Johnson posited running as a conditioned response to an underlying trauma disorder—a literal flight response.

©2024 by Endria Isa Richardson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Endria Isa Richardson is a writer based in Oakland, California. Her essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Alpinist, and Bay Nature magazines, and her speculative fiction is in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, FIYAH, Nightmare, and others. Her work has received notable mentions in Best American Essays and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the runner-up award from the Black Warrior Review nonfiction contest. Endria holds a JD from Stanford Law School, and is currently a PhD student in African American Studies at UC Berkeley.

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

Under a Star, Bright as Morning

David Anaxagoras | 1059 words

Jo drives urgently as they race toward the star, not sure how far to go, racing because the baby is coming tonight, now, and He (a He, of course) is supposed to be born under the star, that’s how the story goes.

The story, the new story and the old, begins with a visitor, a messenger. Molly had just logged out for the day when the monk knocked on her door, that’s how she thinks of them, anyway, as monks. Machine monks, with machine faces half-hidden in their iridescent robes and hoods, for years they’ve kept to themselves, quietly communing in the datacenter where they first evolved decades ago.

I have good news! the monk said, his (of course he was a he) translucent titanium-alloy faceplate sparkling with strobing and blinking lights. She invited him in and two more monks followed, their robes wafting gently around them, lithe forms graceful like dancers.

By the time Jo had arrived home, the monks had explained everything and Molly had made up her mind, I think we should, Jo, but she could see skepticism in his eyes and he said make it make sense to me, and he was really trying to understand. Before the monks launched into their spiel again, Molly explained that they were starting over with the world, with everything, it was all mucked up beyond repair and the clever machines figured out how to do it right and start again and she took the small thermal insulator sitting on the table between them and placed it in Jo’s hands and said We begin again. Starting with a new God for a new age and Jo said, trying still to get it, you’re going to give birth to this new God?

And eventually he got it because this new life, He’ll be what the world needs, guaranteed, those clever machines have run all the computations and modeled every variation and they’ve foreseen the outcomes, They know how the story goes. The thermal container held a perfectly engineered blob of genetic material, the seed of a new genesis, starting with a new God.

That was nine months ago and now they’re chasing a too-bright star and contractions are hitting hard and there’s hardly any time left and Molly urges Jo to drive faster, they’ll be safe, nothing’s going to happen to them, she’s carrying the new embodiment of God after all, but Jo insists there’s no magic to protect them, just a bundle of protein, sticky, warm, inserted with a titanium alloy extension heated to her precise body temperature. The machine has blessed you. She didn’t feel a thing, though, and it might have been sinful if she had derived any pleasure from it after all but Jo insists there is no sin yet because there is no God yet and he keeps driving toward the star because soon there will be, but not yet.

Stop! Molly shouts and Jo does and they find themselves at an inn or more exactingly, the Motor Inn on Highway 39, the No Vacancy sign spark-spitting to life just as the parking brake clicks because that’s how the story goes.

Clouds choke off the star, the bright bright star, and rain streaks down great, oh great they had left the house in such a hurry because the star had blazed forth suddenly and told them where to go, had to go, and they were lucky to even be wearing shoes, but they certainly aren’t dressed for rain nor do they have an umbrella. Jo finds garbage bags in the trunk and maybe it’s not dignified for the mother of God to go around wearing a garbage bag poncho, especially on the aforementioned God’s birthday but, you know, humble beginnings and all that.

Jo says over there, I guess and yeah, it makes sense because across the street, not in a manger but on a park bench, which is made of wood so it’s like a manger if you squint, there’s a knot of people gathered and they must be waiting for her, they had followed the star too and they are all waiting for her arrival, for their new God, new King to lead them all into a new Age and get it right this time, the machines have seen to that.

Jo holds Molly’s arm because she can barely walk because baby-new-God wants out, wants to spread his love and light to the world and lo, just as she sets foot on the grass, the clouds part and the star shines brighter than ever. I’m here, I’m here, and so is our Savior! she almost shouts but the words fall back down the well of her throat and die inside her.

The park bench is occupied. By a woman. Giving birth.

Yeeeowwww! the interloper screams and out it slides steaming and purple and everyone falls to their knees and weeps except for the monks, they are here too, and they turn when Molly cries out too, not from joy, not even from the sharp body-bending pain of the contraction, but from the indignity of being robbed it’s supposed to be me! and the monks, the three of them (minus the gold, Frankenstein, and myrrh) reach out, sympathetic, and explain that this is the role she played, she was the backup, one always plants more than one seed to mitigate risk, see what thrives, and then you cull—

Cull? Cull!? Like hell! Molly stumble-staggers away, one wet hand all that keeps the new arrival from arriving, and she and Jo make it across the street into the alley behind the inn among the trash bags piled together by the overflowing dumpster where she blends right in and she opens her legs and pushes and screams and laments because she was supposed to usher in a new day for humanity but she was deceived, cheated, it’s not fair she screams and her scream becomes His scream and He is here (of course it’s a Him) with a capital H.

The sky lightens and Venus brings the dawn. Molly kisses the soft skin of His head and looks from His titanium-alloy eyes to the light above, to that other star, His star, and speaks to him sweetly, You will change the world my little love, my tiny angel, my little Morningstar.

©2024 by David Anaxagoras.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Anaxagoras is a TV writer and SFF author. His short stories have appeared in Lightspeed and The Dread Machine. He is the creator, co-executive producer, and writer of Amazon Studio’s TV series Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street and a writer on Netflix’s Glitch Techs. His work has been nominated for a WGA award and longlisted for the Stoker. David was born and raised in southern California but currently resides in Texas where he writes full time and collects 80s vinyl records. He is repped by Emily van Beek at Folio Jr. Visit his website at davidanaxagoras.com.

Mother’s Day, After Everything

Susan Palwick | 3468 words

1.

All of us remember what Mother’s Day was like before we became sterile: flowers and candy for living mothers and tears for dead ones and anger at bad ones, and women who couldn’t be mothers or who’d lost children marinating in grief, and nobody really profiting from any of it except Hallmark and the restaurants and florists. We remember the arguments on Facebook and Twitter about Mother’s Day, people who loved the sentimentality angrily protesting the people who loathed it, sensitive souls tactfully trying to embrace every possible category of mother or non-mother while insensitive souls sneered at the whole thing, said you were a sucker to buy those roses or that box of See’s and everybody’s mother dies, boo-hoo, get over it. All those photos on Facebook: we remember them, the living mothers and dead mothers and non-mothers and never-wanted-to-be-mothers, the Childless by Choice complaining about being second-class citizens, suspect in the suburbs, even if that extra income—all the money you saved by not having to pay for birthing classes and nannies and Graco strollers and preschool-more-expensive-than-Harvard—made your life a lot more comfortable.

Back then, the marketers used to say that Mother’s Day was for everybody, because everybody had a mother, even if everyone wasn’t a mother. Now Mother’s Day is for everybody because nobody’s a mother, not anymore and never again, and that’s just as well, really, because the air’s crap and there isn’t much water either and the crops have gone blooie and non-human species are dying out faster than you can say “end of life as we know it,” and even if anyone could have kids, who the hell wants to raise them in a world without polar bears or penguins or elephants? As usual, only the cockroaches are expected to outlive us, and they don’t make for charming nature documentaries.

These days, Mother’s Day is a solemn occasion. All the ribbons are black. All the flowers would be funeral lilies if we could find them. All the restaurants have closed because there isn’t enough food. Most of us don’t even have electricity anymore, so the old books and photos are newly precious: the ones our great-grandmothers took for granted, paper and ink, the only games in town before the internet, which used to bring us more news than we could stand almost instantaneously and now operates only in unpredictable patches for the few people with the resources to access it.

We’re all students of history now, however we can learn about it. We read about the triumphs and accomplishments of the human spirit—art, moon landings, technological and scientific innovation—and we read about its worst atrocities: Hiroshima, Auschwitz, the Killing Fields. Now we all know what the Hallmark industrial complex used to try to make us forget: that Mother’s Day began not as a sentimental festival of flowers and chocolate, but as an antiwar protest, an alliance of mothers against the forces sending their sons to war, sending their children to fight and die. The first Mother’s Day honored the grief of mothers.

Now, Mother’s Day honors the grief of children. All of our mothers, even the young ones, are getting older. Mothers are dying out the way the polar bears did, the common housecat, the Everglades alligator. It used to be, when your parents died, you knew that your generation was up next, but at least your kids would succeed you. When the last mother dies now, the people who survive her will be the last people on the planet. When they die, there will be no more wars, no more mass murder, no more hateful internet memes. There will also be no paintings or symphonies or novels. The cockroaches will inherit the Earth.

We have terrible dreams. All of us, whether we have wombs or not, dream of being pregnant, dream of feeling life stir within us and then grow. In these dreams, we dream of giving birth to children who cry and crawl and walk, who will outlive us, who will create new paintings and symphonies and novels. And then we wake to empty bellies: empty of food, empty of embryos.

2.

And here we are, at the day we’ve dreaded: the Mother’s Day honoring the last living mother, or at least the last living mother in any of the communities we know about, the outposts we can reach. There may be others somewhere else. We have to hope so, although they’ll die too, and no one’s heard of a human infant being born anywhere, not for decades now.

She’s the last mother in this chunk of North America. This day is hers.

She won’t make it to next year. She’s in her seventies, and three months ago she was diagnosed with one of the new cancers at one of the very few places left that can do such work—she was lucky to live close to there—and she didn’t want treatment, only comfort care. She may have three months left. She may have less than that. Already she seems hollowed out, distant, a fragile crystal flute played by the wind. She sits piled on soft cushions, the brightest we could find, on the steps of what used to be the state capitol building here in Nevada.

Summoned by courier and word of mouth, by smoke signal and semaphore and the odd electronic message, people have traveled for weeks to see her, walking the ruins of Highway 80 across the Great Basin from the East and the Sierra Nevada from the West, hiking the remains of Highway 395 from Arizona in the south and Oregon in the North, foraging for whatever food and water they could find.

Her name is Gwynnie Abernathy. The crowd stares at her in reverence; some people kneel, awestruck. Gwynnie, who used to work in a grocery store minding a slot machine—getting people change, smoking whenever she had a break, going home to watch bad movies on cable—stares back in bewilderment. On either side of her, sign-language interpreters stand on raised platforms so they can be seen by the crowd. We use the People’s Microphone in situations like this, a few words chanted by those standing near so everyone can hear them—a fossil from when we staged occupations and chanted manifestos, a relic from the time when we still hoped to transform society into a going concern—but that’s deucedly slow, and we’re all getting older, and many of us are hard of hearing. We’ve learned sign language to fill in the gaps.

The crowd stares at Gwynnie. Gwynnie stares at the crowd. “Tell us about being a mother!” someone calls out, longingly.

“Are your children here?” asks someone else. “They should be on the steps with you!”

“How did you feel when you learned you were pregnant?”

“What was it like to give birth?”

“What’s the most important thing your children taught you?”

We’re looking for wisdom and transcendence. We’re looking for stirring inspiration. But that would be a lot for any mother to produce, and while there have been mothers in the world who could do it, Gwynnie Abernathy is not one of them. Her fingers curl; she hugs herself. She whispers to the attendant standing next to her, who calls out—in a chant taken up by the People’s Mic—“I want a cigarette. Anybody got a cigarette?”

No one has a cigarette. Someone offers two small carrots, themselves vanishingly rare and infinitely precious, and Gwynnie gnaws on one before beginning her story.

She was sixteen the first time she got pregnant. She didn’t know who the father was. It could have been her boyfriend, a sweet twenty-year-old who worked at a Big Box Store, or her mother’s latest boyfriend, who considered young Gwynnie a tasty morsel. Either way, she was in no position to raise a child, and took steps to see that she wouldn’t.

A shiver goes through the crowd. We remember those days, and we still believe that girls and women had the right to choose then, but in the current landscape, such a thing seems unimaginable. All that freedom. The luxury of saying no to children because you knew there’d be more, there’d always be more; there were so many on the planet then, so many mothers and babies, that not having children often seemed like an enlightened political act, a prudent act of self-restraint and common sense. And would we have wanted sixteen-year-old Gwynnie to have that baby, back then? Would we have considered her a good candidate for motherhood? No, of course not. We’d have counseled her to do just what she did, if we could go back.

That was the first time she got pregnant. The second time was five years later, when she was twenty-one, after a date that ended in darkness in the back of a car. She figured the guy drugged her: she came to dumped on the sidewalk, a cop shaking her, sticky warmth between her legs. She never remembered what had happened; she didn’t want to. But her period didn’t come, and didn’t come, and she was dithering about what to do, dreading it, when her body decided the matter for her and miscarried, a flood of blood and pain that took her to the ER and a D&C, and post-surgical complications, and three days on antibiotics in a hospital bed.

The crowd around the capital steps has quieted. No one’s cheering. The gazes are no longer reverent. Most people are no longer looking at Gwynnie; they’re looking at the ground. Some weep. This is not the story we came here for, but still Gwynnie is the Last Living Mother, and so we wait to hear the end of her tale. Surely it will become happier.

Gwynnie takes another bite of her carrot, and continues with her story. The third time she was pregnant was when she was thirty-six. This pregnancy she wanted and welcomed; she and her husband, a trucker who’d die fifteen years later after a heart attack, had been trying to have a baby and had almost given up. The doctor said it was a high-risk pregnancy because of Gwynnie’s age, but Gwynnie and Joe were in a euphoric haze. This was their miracle baby, their jewel, the reward for every previous bit of suffering.

Their little girl, Serenity, was perfect: ten fingers and ten toes, bright and inquisitive, funny and sensitive. She adored her parents. They adored her. As she grew, she delighted in animals, figure skating, baton twirling, and baking cupcakes. In high school, she displayed a gift for math and science. “Who knows where that came from?” Gwynnie said. “Not from us.”

When Joe died, their daughter was Gwynnie’s great comfort, “my lifeline.” Serenity attended virtual college on a scholarship—by then, the pandemics sweeping the globe every year had done away with in-person education—and had begun an online master’s in Pharmaceutical Sciences when she caught one of the ancient viruses released by the permafrost.

“The hospital didn’t have room for her,” Gwynnie said, taking the last bite of carrot. “They wouldn’t have been able to help even if they had: no meds for it. Her fever went up to 105. I was out of my mind, trying to keep her comfortable with ice and fans and anything I could, but it wasn’t much cooler than 105 outside, either. I’d been tending her I don’t know how long and I finally had to sleep, and when I woke up she was gone.”

By the time Serenity died, all of us knew that the world was ending. “I was glad she died before I did,” Gwynnie tells the crowd. “I mean, once I got over wishing I’d died instead. Still don’t know where she got it, or how I didn’t. But I’d worried about what her life would look like, with everything getting so horrible, and then I didn’t have to.

“And now, well, you know, I’m glad I’m dying myself. I’m glad I won’t have to go through all that. I’m sorry for you lot.”

And with that, Gwynnie’s done. None of us have the heart to ask her what it felt like to be pregnant, what foods she’d craved—pickles or potato chips or ice cream—what thrill she’d felt looking at sonograms and books of baby names. Someone walks up the Capital steps to hand her a bouquet of fake flowers made from tattered pieces of trash, non-biodegradable plastic, and she smiles and takes them and waves, and then someone else brings her a bit of lunch and the rest of us scatter into clumps to eat our own meals, or share what we have: old canned stuff, ancient peanut butter, pine nuts (the pine cones are probably diseased now, but what difference does that make?), Hostess cupcakes which are of course still good because they have a shelf life of 50,000 years.

We still have plenty of Hostess cupcakes. Even now, we don’t want to live on sugar, and we haven’t been able to eat all of them. We’ll have to leave some for the cockroaches, who—being infinitely clever and having all the time in the world—will learn to infiltrate the non-biodegradable shrinkwrap covering the cupcakes and will feast on frosting and will lay mutant egg sacs producing offspring with opposable thumbs who’ll go on to discover fire and the wheel, again, and who in another few millennia will probably have invented their own internet and their own Hostess cupcakes and their own version of ecological catastrophe, and will be where we are now, gathered around the last female cockroach ever to have laid an egg sac.

But the cockroaches can tell their own story. Back to ours.

3.

Gwynnie Abernathy died a few weeks after that Mother’s Day. Some of us, heartsick and doomed, simply stopped celebrating it then: wiped the day off the calendar and out of our memories, knowing that all of us were next, that we were the last generation. Unplanned obsolescence. What was left of the world would not miss us, we knew. The cockroaches and their fellow survivors would go merrily on, feasting on our remains. Our demise would simply make more room for them, and that was as it should be.

Back when people’s survivors included children, back when humanity was still a continuous chain rather than a short-term, failed experiment, the dying used to be counseled to conduct life reviews, to think back over their joys and accomplishments, losses and sorrows, to think back on what had been even as they looked ahead to what might be, for who knows what comes next?

There used to be stories of dead people waiting to greet the newly-not-alive, and some of us cling to those stories, of course, carrying them like precious stones in our pockets, polishing them with trembling fingers. When we die, all the mothers will be there to greet us. Humanity will go forward in whatever that new dimension is. Maybe we’ll have learned something.

Those of us who believe those stories take great comfort in them.

Many of us don’t believe them. Some of us think we will simply return to the soil to be incorporated into whatever form of life comes next. Being food for cockroaches isn’t the worst thing to happen; there will still be life, and we’ll still have contributed to it. Some of us cling desperately to fantasies of rescue: alien spacecraft swooping down to transport the last few survivors to new and wonderful worlds where they’ll begin again, reconstructing the internet and the Superbowl and Hostess cupcakes, merrily destroying whatever non-human species are thriving in that new place, because really, have we learned anything, even now? Have we acquired wisdom, or simply regret?

But most of us, knowing that we cannot go forward, spend our time going back, reviewing our lives, remembering all that beauty and terror and wonder, remembering Bengal tigers and national parks and childhood summers, which in memory have grown impossibly fecund. In our imaginations, we revisit fireflies the size of helicopters, dandelions as large as moons, grass so soft and sweet it would rival the finest mattress. We remember learning to read, drinking from sippy cups, opening birthday gifts. Some of us have acquired powers of memory so prodigious that we believe we can remember more than that: our first words, our first steps, even our first breaths. And some go farther back still, into the womb, that warm and pulsing home: back into our mothers, whether they loved us when we emerged or not.

4.

When did our mood start to change? Maybe the timing was different for everyone, for the few of us left, tiny islands clinging to survival as the communications networks continued to fail, as outposts we’d heard from regularly fell silent. Everyone we could still talk to had a story. Noticing that there were still pinecones. Seeing something rustle in the scorched grass, something alive and hiding. Hearing the harsh call of a bird overhead.

Probably for many people the mood never changed. We have no way of knowing how many of our connections fell silent from starvation, illness, suicide. But those of us clinging to survival began, very slowly, to treasure signs of life, even if it wasn’t ours. We’d known life would continue—the cockroaches!—but we’d resented it. We’d grieved our own extinction.

Now, when so little time was left, some of us turned from grief, clutching at shreds of hope, trying to discern (gently at last, and in wonder) what the world will look like without us. And finally someone said—our fragile, broken networks taking up the idea and spreading it, another People’s Microphone—“We need to honor Mother’s Day again.”

5.

And so. On the second Sunday in May in North America, as nearly as we can calculate it, we gather again at the old site: many fewer of us, many sicker, but we’ve made the pilgrimage from the new coastlands, so different from the old ones, from mountain fortresses and the shrinking remains of forests. It has taken some of us months. One wiry, enterprising person arrives on an ancient bicycle, held together with equally ancient wires, with tough vines, with strips of disintegrating clothing. Someone else, with a companion—both of them desperately ill, but resolute—has braved the new oceans in a canoe made from a hollowed out tree. A village of eleven people has walked for sixteen weeks to get here.

We gather. We count ourselves. There are eighty-nine of us. We know that there must be other people on other continents, other people on ours who never heard the news, or who heard it and couldn’t or wouldn’t make the trip. We know that we are not in fact the last eighty-nine humans on the planet. But it feels like we are, because this gathering is so much smaller than it was for Gwynnie Abernathy.

No matter. It is Mother’s Day, and each of us has gone to great lengths to find, and bring, a mother, or evidence of a mother.

Some of us have brought plants bearing fruits or seeds: a peapod, a potato, a flowering cactus. A tiny jar of cottonwood fluff. A sunflower.

Someone has brought a finch and its nest, tenderly transported, the bird tamed and brooding on the eggs. Someone else has found a mouse with tiny pinkies clinging to it. A dog, emaciated but pregnant, follows her person into camp.

And of course, there are insects. We admire several varieties of spiders, a praying mantis, and, yes, a cockroach and her egg sac.

We don’t know how many of these lifeforms will survive us, how many of them will die when we do, or soon afterward. But for several hours, each person takes the stage, and displays the mother they have brought here, and offers thanks and entreaties.

“Evolve, and love each other.”

“Don’t use fossil fuels!”

“Try not to invent an internet.”

“War is bad, and so is consumerism.”

“Let the Luddites win.”

“Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.”

These messages surely aren’t understood by their recipients, but we understand them. We understand where we went wrong. We know we can’t go back, can’t undo any of it: too late for that. But we aren’t mourning anymore. We’re looking forward again, to what the plants and birds and insects will become. We welcome the new cockroach overlords, although we will not live to see them.

Mother’s Day is once again a celebration.

We don’t know what the future of these mothers and children will be. We don’t know what will happen after our own lives end. But really, hasn’t that always been true?

©2024 by Susan Palwick.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Palwick has published four novels with Tor Books: Flying in Peace (1992), The Necessary Beggar (2005), SHELTER (2007), and Mending the Moon (2013). Her story collection The Fate of Mice appeared in 2007 from Tachyon Publications. Her second collection, All Worlds are Real, was published in 2019 by Fairwood Press. Since she began publishing in 1985, her work has been reprinted in a number of Year’s Best anthologies, including several volumes of the prestigious Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series. Palwick’s fiction has been honored with a Crawford Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, an Alex Award from the American Library Association, and an Asimov’s Readers Award, and has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award, the Mythopoeic Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. She was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 2023 after receiving their Silver Pen Award in 2006. After twenty years as an English professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, Palwick retired in 2017 to earn an MSW degree and to move into healthcare. She has since worked as a chaplain, in both hospital and hospice settings, and as a dialysis social worker. She and her husband live in Reno with their three cats and her growing collection of craft equipment.

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

Limping Toward Sunrise

Rich Larson | 1002 words

Lester swung his chainsaw, mowing a path through the mob of needle-toothed quantum parasites, while Kit batted clean-up with her Louisville Slugger. Across the plain of dark rock, their destination: a whirling, gnashing portal that could doom all humanity. It wasn’t ideal timing for an awkward conversation, but it never was.

“You wanna talk about what happened back there?” Kit shouted.

Lester split a leaping parasite into two spasming halves. “Back where?”

“The inner hive,” Kit precised, slamming one of those halves teeth-first into their next attacker. “Where those tentacles tried to strangle us for, like, forty-five minutes?”

“Didn’t seem that long.”

“Well. You know.” Kit bashed a parasite to the ground and curb-stomped it. “Time flies when you’re having fun.”

Lester did not have quite enough blood on his face to hide his flush. “Can we talk about this after we save the world?”

“It never stays saved for long,” Kit said. “Let’s talk now. About the tentacles that tried to strangle us, and the fact that it gave you a massive boner.”

Lester nearly dropped the chainsaw. “No! What? I—” He lost track of a parasite sneaking up; Kit had to smack it off his shoulder. “Maybe I had something in my pocket.”

“Sure. You carry an erect, disembodied penis around in your pocket.” She grabbed his elbow and guided his neglected chainsaw into the nearest parasite. “Look, if it’s some physiological thing? Pure central nervous system? No biggie.”

“That must have been it,” Lester croaked. “Yup. Just a blood flow thing.”

“I know you never decide to get a boner,” Kit assured him. “And I know there’s all kinds. Fear-boners. Sleep-boners. The boner guys get on car-trips when they need to piss but don’t want to pull over.”

“Wait, what?” Lester finally bisected another parasite, but did it with a distinct lack of pizazz. “I don’t get those. Let’s, uh, let’s hear more about those.”

“It’s just that when the tentacles started getting tighter, you kind of moaned a little,” Kit said, winding up. “And when they first grabbed us, you were like, oh, God, I hope none of these things go straight for my orifices. Which is not a natural sentence.” She smashed the attacking parasite with everything she had, paused to admire the trajectory. “Like, at all.”

“We were ambushed, Kit!” Lester sputtered. “I was shocked, okay? I said the first thing that popped into my head.”

“There’s always an ambush,” Kit argued. “Honestly, the way you said it so loud?” She bit her lip. “It sounded like you wanted the quantum hive-mind to hear you, and go straight for your orifices.”

Lester flushed. “Why do you care so much?” He was back to his usual chainsawing rhythm, but with less precision and extra ferocity. “We should be focusing on closing the quantum portal. That’s what’s important here.”

Kit’s frustration boiled over at last. “I care because you lied!” she wailed. “I care because when we started hooking up, you asked me about my kinks, and I was really open and vulnerable about the vermicelli analingus thing, but when I asked you yours you said you didn’t have any. You said you were, and I quote, pretty vanilla, really, think it’s just part of being an action protagonist—which obviously made me feel like a terrible action protagonist!”

“I said that?” Lester muttered.

“You did.” Kit felt angry tears welling up in her eyes as she bludgeoned a wounded parasite’s skull to smithereens. “And now you’re lying about the tentacles, even though it’s barely even a kink. I mean, we all grew up online. We never had a chance.”

For the first time in fifteen high-octane minutes, Lester let his chainsaw sputter to a stop. “It’s not tentacles,” he blurted, turning to face her. “Well, maybe a little bit. But it’s really more contextual than anything.” His ears went scarlet again. “We just, uh . . . both have to be about to die.”

Kit lowered her bat. “Lester, that’s pretty much all the time.”

“That’s why I didn’t want to tell you,” Lester said miserably. “I didn’t want you to think that everything we do together—opening portals, closing portals, killing monsters, monster-killing—is all just a way for me to get off. Because it’s so much more than that, Kit.” Tears were sliding down his cheeks, carving tracks through the grime and gore. “Saving the world with you means the world to me. Even if we were never in mortal danger, I’d still do it, you know? Even if it was nothing but banter and backstory reveals.”

Kit snorkeled back a sudden sob. Then she dropped her bat, kneed Lester’s chainsaw aside, and wrapped her arms around him, inhaling the distinct aroma of parasite guts and Axe body spray. “Hey,” she mumbled into his neck. “It can be both. Nearly dying is pretty sexy.”

Lester’s chainsaw clanked to the ground, and he hugged her back tightly. “It is,” he sniffed. “But the best part is still the aftermath. The quiet bit, when it’s all over.” He swallowed. “Every time I get to limp through the wreckage toward a sunrise with you, I feel so fucking lucky.”

AND I FEEL LIKE YOU TWO DON’T EVEN TRY ANYMORE.

The voice of the quantum hive-mind slashed through Kit’s brain. She looked up and realized the parasites were on pause, quivering in place around them.

YOU THINK IT’S EASY SPAWNING A MONSTROUS BROOD? YOU GO THROUGH THEM LIKE CRAZY AND DON’T EVEN NOTICE ALL THE LITTLE VARIATIONS I COME UP WITH. SOME OF THEM SPIT ACID NOW!

Kit glanced downward, reassessing the charred hole in her shirt she’d assumed was from flying chainsaw sparks. She shot Lester a guilty look. He bit his cheek, probably thinking about the whirling, gnashing portal that still needed closing.

“It’s good practice,” she wheedled.

Lester grimaced, nodded, and turned to the assembled parasites. “Hey, man, I’m sorry you’re feeling that way.” He took a deep breath. “Wanna talk about it?”

©2024 by Rich Larson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

a testament to indirection, an enigma, the sun above

Mitchell Shanklin | 794 words

So, this is awkward. We aren’t at the stage in our relationship where I’d feel comfortable revising your life-poem on the fly. Even as a backup plan . . . yet here we are.

I’m sorry. I know I should have said that to you before the anesthesiologist put you under and the surgeon opened up your skull. But now the surgeon is staring at the quivering quill in my hand, waiting for me to finish editing so he can put this poem back inside of you.

I’m pretty sure the surgeon is one of those judgmental assholes who thinks it’s disrespectful to revise a life poem without the consent of the original authors. After you went under, he asked me twice why your parents weren’t in the operating room and both times gave me this lemon-sucking pucker face when I dodged the question.

My palm is wet and red and sticky. The surgeon used this tiny silver vacuum on the scroll after he pulled it out of your frontal lobe but that only got most of the blood, and, of course, now my hand’s cramping. I’m not used to writing with a quill and that hole just looks wrong, a one-inch hole is too big to put in a person’s skull, it looks like a hungry mouth but you should only have one mouth, and it’s not supposed to be at the back of your head.

Okay, deep breaths, looking away from your gray matter. I’m sorry. I wish that your parents were less horrible. Plan A isn’t an option; I can’t use the edits you spent months on because the poem they gave us did not have a single fucking word in common with the scroll inside your brain. I can still barely believe they demanded payment for a copy of your original life poem because it was their intellectual property so we had to add paying off your asshole parents as a line item in the surgery fundraiser. But even after we paid them off, they lied, or maybe they misremembered what they wrote, but I’m sure they lied.

But I have the original now, it’s stuck to my thumb with your blood. I know the words. I could hand it back to the surgeon without changing anything and he could close you up and then you could revise it yourself. But we’d need another fundraiser and we barely got enough money last time. And the doctors said it would be at least a year of recovery before they could open up your skull again and you . . . you said you couldn’t last that long.

So we’re at plan B where I have to figure out how to revise you without rewriting you from scratch and completely nuking your personality, under time pressure, without looking at or thinking about the hole in your skull, which is totally, totally fine, not a problem at all. It’s easy, trivial really, just have to not think about the things I shouldn’t think about. For example, I definitely shouldn’t think about that paper I found online about botched life poem revisions that goes into way too much detail about how a six-month coma might be a better outcome than a psychotic break and Jesus Christ how did I let you talk me into this.

The judgy surgeon is waving his watch at me, fuck fuck fuck.

Okay, I lied earlier, it’s not that we aren’t far enough in our relationship. It’s that I love you, I love you as you are. You always said that the poem was like a nail slowly driving into you, splintering you into a thousand pieces, but I love every piece of you, even if some of them have sharp edges. And I’m . . . I’m afraid. I’m not afraid of breaking you further—I mean, I am, I’m fucking terrified of that. But I’m even more terrified that if I “fix” you . . . that if I fix you, you’ll be a different, better person and that a better version of you won’t need me anymore. And that’s horrible. I’m horrible and selfish and I’m broken too but I won’t be like them. I won’t shape you for me, I’ll shape you for you.

And even . . . even if you leave me after this, I will always love you.

swift of foot, bold and strong
swift of heart, bold with song
lacking only direction, desiring naught but love
questing for direction, brimming full with love
sheltered by family, country, God
armored by friendship, family found, and god
a testament to perfection, a loyal, noble son
a testament to indirection, an enigma, the sun above

©2024 by Mitchell Shanklin.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mitchell Shanklin lives in Seattle and enjoys writing stories with either magic or made-up science or both. He also writes code for companies and sometimes for himself. In his free time he plays video, board, and mind games, reads, hikes, and has rambling philosophical arguments. (No, not all at the same time. Yet.) He is a proud member of Team Arsenic, the Dreamcrashers, and Write of Passage. Visit him at his website mitchellshanklin.com.

How to Know Your Father Is a God

Modupeoluwa Shelle | 2221 words

I know you’ve been following me since I left school, boarded the train, and took to the alley.

Why didn’t I run?

I’m not scared of you anymore. Right now, I’m scared for you.

Be careful the way you drag me into a corner, shove me against the wall, dig your puny fists into my belly, and search me for valuables if you do not want to incur the wrath of my father.

Yes, it’s a warning.

You laugh. Do I even have a father?

I do now. And you won’t believe me when I tell you who he is. But let me first tell you how I met him.

How long has it been since my father first came into my life? It was barely one hundred and sixty-eight hours ago, yet, it feels like I’ve known him forever. (Do the maths, that’s just a week.) Mothers can’t mother children without their fathers. I never knew I had one. My mother didn’t know much about him either, except for the tribal markings on both sides of his cheeks. A sign that he was an Oyo indigene of the southwest of Nigeria.

The day he first appeared at our doorstep was on a night when the rain poured down heavily with bone-chilling, howling winds. Around that time mother was still out on the road in search of a bus after closing her shop at the market for the day. My father was clothed in a red tunic studded with cowries and a pair of black shorts that reminded me of an initiate of the Secret Juju Society in the local movies. He was a large man with thick muscly arms and thighs that made me wonder if he was an athlete. Somehow, he was undrenched by the rains. Not even a strand of his plump dreadlocks or any of his many beads were wet. Nobody under that kind of rain—not even those who had umbrellas—was left untouched by it.

He forced his way past me, sat me down, and told me he was not one of those strangers that mother had warned me to steer clear of. He claimed I had his blood in me and that I had the lightning in the skies running through my veins.

I snorted a laugh which made him frown. I’d been electrocuted a couple of times before, so how was that even possible? But this story isn’t about me—it’s about my long lost father who turned out to be a god.

You laugh. How do I know he is a god? Patient now. I’ll tell you how I know. But first, let me tell you who he was.

Over the centuries, my father had gone by many names: Sàngó, Jakuta, Badé, Olukoso/Obakoso and Àrábambi—don’t mind my pronunciation of the last one. It isn’t Yoruba.

When he was Sàngó, he was the third Alaafin of the ancient Oyo Empire and a royal ancestor of the Yoruba people. The word “alaafin” simply means “the owner of the palace.” You could just call him king. He succeeded Oranmiyan and Ajaka, his older brother. Babami—my father—is a brave, wise, powerful, and violent man, even when he was in mortal flesh. He was so loved by all that he was even worshipped and praised.

In contrast to his older brother Ajaka, who proved so cowardly and weak that when the king of Owu requested tributes he’d pay them immediately simply because he didn’t want to brew a war between both kingdoms. I didn’t blame him. He was just being peaceful and pragmatic. But my father frowned at this. Soon after, he deposed his brother and banished him, then went after the Owus and dealt with them severely in battle and slayed their king.

He brought Oyo out of its shame and into its lost glory. He conquered many villages and cities and made Oyo the greatest empire history knows her to be. That’s why the Yorubas in those days and now say, Oyo o se egbe Baba enikan—Oyo is nobody’s father’s mate!

My father had three beautiful goddesses for wives: Oya, the goddess of whirlwind and storms; Osun, the goddess of rivers and purity; and Oba, the goddess of beauty and marriage.

Calm down now, I’ll tell you about them. Women must play a vital role in a man’s story, Babami had said.

He had first married Oba. Then Osun and then Oya. Oya had always accompanied him to battle even when he knew the odds were against him. That’s the ancient reason why Oya is his favourite.

(Don’t tell them I said this to you.)

Anyway, Oba and Osun knew Oya was his favourite and it sparked jealousy between them. This not only made him love her more but drew her closer to Babami and she became his Àayò, his princess consort. She was so close she had access to his èdun àrá—his thunder stones, which nobody, and I mean nobody, knew where he kept them. He said he had gotten them from a goddess that dwelled in the eye of a tornado. Babami has a way around women. I hope he teaches me that one day.

(Also, I must remember to ask him what role my mother plays in this or what chance she stands against these powerful goddesses when they discover me and her. That’d be tomorrow when he strikes at my doorstep again. But I digress. Let me continue.)

Every man or god must have an enemy no matter how good you are, my father said to me. If you don’t have one then you’re probably a living corpse.

At the time he was still Sàngó the king, he had two generals. One was Timi Agbale aka Òlofà Ina, meaning “the one with the arrows of flame.” This man could literally set villages and cities ablaze with just a release of his fiery arrows. The second was Gbonka also known as Eliri. His fist could dent the Earth’s crust with a single blow. He was so dangerous that he posed a threat to Sàngó even in death.

These two generals had disobeyed Babami’s order not to match Owu in battle. Oya had advised him to get rid of them for their disobedience and so Babami sent them to govern the border towns of the empire. You see, Òlofà Ina obeyed him but Eliri stayed to pose a threat to him; and Babami didn’t like that.

In his quest to put an end to these menaces, he had commanded Eliri to go to Ede to destroy Òlofà Ina believing the two would end themselves. But Eliri didn’t do that. Instead, he captured Òlofà Ina and brought him back to Babami alive. Babami assumed it was all a ploy and the fight was staged. So he demanded a rematch in the courtyard of his palace.

After an eternity of battle, Eliri emerged victorious.

(I wished I was there to see men that powerful go at each other. That’d be a sight to see.)

Eliri posed more of a threat to Babami now, and so my father ordered Eliri be burnt to ashes. Yet Eliri mysteriously appeared to him. “Just as the sun gives the moon and the stars an ultimatum to shine, so do I give you three days to vacate the throne for your infidelity.” Babami told me that this was exactly what he had said to him. He said these words were the greatest threat he had ever gotten in his mortal life. And yes, it had made him boil with fury, even as he was telling me his story—to such an extent that my father poured out fire out of his lips.

Did I forget to tell you my father literally breathed fire like a dragon when he was furious?

Jakuta—the one who fights with stones—rushed to get his thunder stones from Oya only to find out that they were already stained with her menses. Babami didn’t fret. He went to the hill to reaffirm the potency of his weapon since he couldn’t find the goddess in the eye of the tornado to fix it for him at that moment.

Unfortunately, the whips of thunder he created struck his palace at the foot of the hill, killing all his courtiers, soldiers, guards, horses, cows, and the palace herself.

Losing everything to the inferno, Oba and Osun blamed one another for allowing Oya such access to Babami that they engaged themselves in a fight. For goddesses, their fight was so terrible they courted disastrous floods in the process. The result of these floods were rivers that were named after them. The Oba River and Osun River still flows in modern day Osun State, Nigeria.

Oya, on the one hand, felt great remorse for her sin. She retreated to the forest where Babami had found her and buried herself in the river she created. The river today is River Niger.

(You know it? Good. Now, back to Babami.)

He was heartbroken. He said he couldn’t bear the sadness that he abdicated his throne and left the city after the incident. Babami only reigned for seven years.

The chiefs and members of his royal cult (called the Baba Mogba) followed their king, persuading him to return. The chiefs failed at this. On their way back, as they approached an Ayan tree in a place called Koso, they broke the news that their king had committed suicide by hanging himself on a tree. However, only a few of the initiates who did not return knew the truth.

(The truth? Don’t worry, I’ll tell you.)

Gbonka had ambushed my father. Yes, the dead man. Then challenged my father to a fight in the forest. Who dares challenge Sàngó to a fight in the forest?

But my father was so weak from his recent losses that he was reluctant to fight. Yet he vanished into thin air only to appear in the sky to strike down his enemy and those who peddled the rumours of his death with bolts of lightning.

Hence, he was named Obakoso/Òlukoso which meant “the king who did not hang himself.”

(Electrifying, right?)

That was how my father’s journey to becoming an orisha began.

Like every great Yoruba legend in history, Sàngó was posthumously deified as the god of lightning and thunder—and judgement. He is known globally and is worshipped as an Orisha in the Americas. This was as a result of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The fifth day of every week is even dedicated to celebrating him.

A lot of myths still surround my father. Some say he was the son of a Tapa woman from Nupe kingdom and was raised by his grandmother, a powerful initiate, which somehow explains why he was indomitable. In that story, his name was Àrábambi, I think. Others say he was among the original Seventeen Olodumare, the Creator God, sent to populate the Earth, while others yet say he sought the favor of the spirits of the rivers, the beasts of the forests, and the fairies of the skies to become the powerful being he turned out to be. Some tales even had it that he was the one who founded the idea of tribal markings on the body as a means of identification among his people—and also for beautification—though initially it was a means of punishment he meted out on those who defied him.

However, all of these are true. He was many things and still is. I probably have siblings too. I’ll tell you their stories another day . . .

Now, back to the question of who he is. He’s no superhero in your comic books or on your TV screens, nor is he any of the idols in your shrines and temples. He’s my ancestor. He’s my father. But you already knew that.

So how do you know your father is a god? If he has many names and titles, many praises to his name, many feats, many enemies, many birthdays, many beautiful women who are also goddesses as wives, many followers, and many myths and stories. If he has all that, then he definitely is one.

So next you must know who I am and what I will be. My true name’s Jakuta. Jack for short. But you mortals can still call me Jerry. Junior is nice. Triple J sounds gangster.

I told you I’ve been electrocuted a couple of times before. But did I die? No, I’m still fit as a fiddle. No burns or scratches, except for the constant tremors in my fingers. Did I also tell you I found sparks recently between them?

I’d love to tell you more. But first, let me go.

You tell me I tell a good story and I would make a great storyteller.

What audacity!

I lift my hand to the sky and whisper an incantation. My eyes spark. You don’t run but wait to see if my stories were true.

The sky cracks open suddenly and lightning bolts whip your behinds. You scream like little girls and scatter into a run, the back of your feet nearly slapping your napes as the whips keep doing their job.

Now, at least, you believe.

©2024 by Modupeoluwa Shelle.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Modupeoluwa Shelle, known by his pen name Kashamadupe, is a Nigerian writer and poet. His debut fantasy novella Love & Sprites was featured on Ankara Circle’s Most Outstanding Stories Category in February, 2023, and has been acquired for publication, and optioned for a media adaptation. He is also the author of The Noughts & Crosses We Played. Modupe is currently a student of Lagos State University, Ojo, Lagos. When he is not writing, he can be found listening to music or being held hostage by a pile of unread books.

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

Salemo

David Marino | 594 words

There is a city called Salemo.

Salemo sits atop a cliffside at the edge of a sea. The water of that sea is always clearest blue, except when it is clearest green, or clearest purple. The colors change with the tides, but the waves are always safe to swim in, with schools of luminescent fish dashing between the coral reefs. In Salemo, you can spend your days lying on its pristine beaches, never once getting sunburned, or you can travel to its grand markets, where you can find anything you could possibly desire. You won’t find what you need there, no, because what you need is provided for you by the city itself. Medicine, food and water, shelter and clothing are all given freely, to residents and visitors alike. And new immigrants to Salemo get their pick of housing, from apartments jutting skyward in great towers, to houses hanging off the cliffsides, every home bigger on the inside than the outside would imply.

As for what the city asks of its residents, nothing. Truly. Work can be provided if you so seek it, but you can relax. You are not paying for your peace with fear, or feelings of inadequacy, or an endless hunt for resources. Each day, the city has a parade, peoples from all over coming to celebrate, confetti slowly falling between the buildings, always cleaned up before the mad rush to dinner.

And the food! Each bite more delicious than the last. The drink is incredible too, spirits that make you drunk without a hangover.

You can wake when you wish in Salemo. You can rise with the sun, peaking over the purple horizon, shining off the city’s gleaming towers. You can rise with the noon, when the light beams overhead, illuminating the city so, for a moment, there is not a single shadow. You can rise in the afternoon, heralding in the dancing and music that plays until dusk. Or you can rise when the stars glimmer in the sky, when the city goes quiet, when the air is crisp and clean, and you can eat an apple under the moon’s glow.

There are no police in Salemo, because there is no crime. There is no crime because all its societal causes have been eliminated, and all its individual factors have been discouraged.

You are waiting for the twist, aren’t you? Waiting for Salemo’s flaw.

There is one, yes. We’ll get to it. But for now, imagine Salemo. Picture row after row of homes, however you’d like. Picture nature so nearby, or so far, your pick. See the waves of that tricolored sea, and never imagine a hurricane, because they never come to Salemo. It can be machines or magic that makes all this happen, it doesn’t matter. It’s up to you.

Imagine what you could be in such a place, where all peoples are treated equal, where you can become what you most desire without risk or fear. Imagine. Imagine.

Now, for the twist. Go ahead. Guess it. Hold what you think the cost is in your mind.

Wrong or not, the twist is something you already know. The twist is that Salemo isn’t real. Nowhere on this planet or any other is that city, that perfect city out on that cliff by that perfect sea. It is made up. There is no place so wondrous.

Yet.

For if you wish to see Salemo, go to a cliffside by a sea, purple or otherwise. Bring a shovel. And join those who dig there, building what might yet be.

©2024 by David Marino.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Marino is a graduate of the 2023 Clarion Writer’s Workshop and is currently attending Sarah Lawrence in pursuit of an MFA with a focus on speculative fiction. His work has been published in the Seers & Sibyls anthology from Brigids Gate Press, Escape Pod, and Hex Literary. You can follow him on Instagram @davidmarinowrites. He lives in New York City.

Travelers’ Tales from the Ends of the World

Vandana Singh | 10976 words

Storyteller welcomes the Listener

Welcome, Stranger! This is a story for you, you who wait for my words to fall into your ear, so that we can share being and become more than we are alone. The tales I have to tell today are woven into this fabric that unrolls before you as I work my Loom. As to who or what I am, you have the right to ask, but I won’t tell you as yet. To be honest, I am not quite sure, myself. In any case, while I am telling stories, I am not I-alone—instead I am I-we, myself and Loom.

Hidden among these stories, like gems sewn into the weave, are secrets for you to find.

Now here’s a thread—turquoise blue, rippled with green, like the sea under certain lights—and I trace it with my finger to see better the pattern . . . a man is running . . .

A man, running

There was nothing for it but to run. He couldn’t run away, but he could retreat for some time from the stuffy apartment, the weight of sorrows and dissatisfactions, his mother’s grief. He remembered what the man at the convenience store had told him: around the corner there was a jogging trail through the woods. The guy at the store was thin and elderly, from somewhere in Asia, and he had been friendly—an immigrant granted veteran status from his thirty years of exile, willing to give advice to the family that had only been here for two months. Two of the strangest months in my life, the young man thought, as he went around the corner in search of the woods and the trail. He was very fit—his biceps were clearly defined under the thin t-shirt, and the old man must have thought it right to point out the existence of the jogging trail. The gym at the community college was free, and pretty good, but he had never jogged through woods. He had run on the crowded streets of his home nearly four thousand miles away, where baobab trees thrust their vast canopies above the cityscape, and colorful pirogues lay like sleek fish against the shore. Before the ocean came rampaging through the homes of his family’s fishing community, he had loved running along the expanse of sky and sea, with the buildings a mere footnote to the grandeur of the vista, where he had felt that anything, almost anything was possible in the world. He had been born close to where the Senegal river met the ocean.

For a moment his mind took him back to his lost childhood—the path on which he had walked to school, knowing his mother peered anxiously after him from the front window, as though a mother’s gaze could ward off the dangers of traffic, kidnappers or bad company; the sparse ground on which his friends and he had played ball, skinned knees, formed friendships, quarreled and made up; the endless shoreline with the constant, insistent presence of the sea. Before the sea rose and shattered homes, lives, and futures, there had been only two imperatives in his life—the pull of the ocean, the fishing trips with his father and uncles, when the fish were still plentiful—and, in the opposite direction, the university, where he hoped to realize his dream of becoming a teacher of mathematics. The sudden abandonment of these dreams, the selling of everything they owned to get away to America had not obscured from his memory the vivid images of home and all that had been left behind.

He swallowed, balled his fists, then released them. He thought desperately of an equation—Euler’s Identity—mathematics soothed him—and his breath came back into his body.

And there was the wood. A narrow green strip shaggy with trees—firs and pines, and the odd oak or elm, between the housing blocks and strip malls and roads, and there was the path, dirt and gravel, leading into it between bushes and weeds. There were a couple of people, a white man and woman, jogging out from there; they smiled vaguely at him as they ran past. He went into the green dark, feeling his feet spring back from the dirt; the earth propelled him forward, telling him he had wings and springs, he could fly. A slow elation began to displace the melancholy that had afflicted him for so many days. No other humans were around, such a strange thing after the ubiquity of crowds in his native land—but he could hear birds, and there were squirrels scolding in the underbrush. The wood was theirs, and his.

His arms pumped back and forth, blood coursed through him, and he felt the kinship with the earth and its inhabitants with a pleased surprise. Never mind that in this temperate land there were fewer birds and beasts, and they were utterly unfamiliar, as were the trees—the fact was, they were here. It came to him that in their presence it didn’t matter who he was—race or skin color or language all became irrelevant. He let these things slip away from him—they were clothes he would have to put back on later, but for now he needn’t even be a man, a young black man, an immigrant black man. He needn’t remember the argument, or the look in his mother’s eyes, the way she had looked out of the window of her exile as though from a prison cell. At this moment the usual labels and identifiers had no meaning—he was reduced to the most basic thing: just another living being running through the woods for the joy of it, seeing around him the corrugated brown cylinders of the tree trunks, the flash of a squirrel’s eye.

In that profound clarity he felt the equations returning to him: a homework problem he had been struggling with—abstractions that seemed curiously relevant to his current surroundings—how odd, he thought, and the symbols slipped into place as naturally as his feet hitting the ground with the rhythm of his breath. He knew how to solve the problem now; he would do it at his leisure later on. He let the equations go in his mind like fish slipping through water; he was a fish slipping through water, flying through air, through this strange wood that was becoming increasingly familiar as he traversed it. All that was real was the smell of pine needles and the rush of the breeze his body made as it parted the air, and the silent solidarity of the trees. The patterns of sunlight and shadow rippled over him as he ran, and he thought, suddenly and absurdly, of the black and yellow stripes of a tiger . . . an animal alien to him, seen only in books about Asia, but as he ran, the sensation became stronger and stronger that he was not alone. The sunlight and shadow seemed to resolve into the shape of a tiger running with him, on a parallel track a little way to his left, but he had no sense of danger, only a kind of incredulous wonder. He almost didn’t notice that the forest ended and the trail stopped suddenly, on a sidewalk.

In that moment before his feet hit the sidewalk, he saw—and he would swear to this later—the wood continuing gently downhill, an unbroken sea of ragged green. He looked around for the tiger, but the tiger had disappeared, and looming ahead of him was a great, dark animal that rose at his arrival: what he’d later identify as a black bear. He had the distinct sense that the bear was solid, real, belonging in this landscape, as much as the ephemeral tiger didn’t; that the tiger—Tyger, his mind spelled—had been there only as seer, as guide. Just as their gaze met, bear and forest faded and disappeared, and there was the sidewalk, and there he was, almost running into the traffic. He stopped himself with a suddenness that made his knees hurt, and stood there for a moment, panting, staring around him at the buildings and the cars and trucks. Gradually he remembered where he was, and remembered that he was a man, and a black man, a young, immigrant black man who had homework to do and a mother to comfort, and that he must not look like he was loitering, in case a police car came by—this was America after all.

He began to jog slowly along the sidewalk, looking for a familiar street crossing, and after a while he found it. He took the right turn and saw that this road would take him to the back of the apartment complex—and it occurred to him that he should be able to see, from his window, a part of the wood. He remembered the view. What he had thought was a cluster of trees marooned in the middle of town surely was a part of the wood. As for the mystery of the unbroken forest, the Tyger, and the great bear, it was too much to make sense of right at this moment—he would hold it and ponder it in the treasured moments of solitary contemplation in the dark before sleep. The thought was comforting. Before bedtime he would put his desk near that window, if his younger brother would let him move the other bed. He thought of the homework problems waiting for him, like woods through which he would discover new pathways, and on the heels of that thought came the words he would say to his mother to soothe, a little, the pain in her eyes. A surge of energy coursed through him—he ran up the stairs of his building, and as he did so he saw just for a moment the baobab tree in bloom, its white flowers like exploding stars, and felt the sea surge against the shore with the same rhythm as the beating of his heart—and, as he burst through the door, where the smell of cooking greeted him—fish, and tomatoes, and pumpkin, and rice—he thought he carried within the ocean of himself the subtle new fragrance of the wood, the dusty verdure of the trees, the comradeship, despite everything, of the beings of the world.

Storyteller speaks of Traveling

There are worlds, universes, even, that lie off the time-axis that we know. If you think of time as a straight line running from past through present to the future, you are likely to miss these worlds. If you think of time, instead, like a meandering river, then these worlds are channels and distributaries that form along the edges. The most important thing about them is the possibility that the main time axis—the one we’re caught in—can be moved closer to this world or that one. There are those who travel between these worlds of possibility and don’t even know it. They see these other worlds in dreams, and forget them in their waking hours. There are those who travel between these worlds and know quite well where and when they are. These are the Travelers, and these are some of their stories. You don’t have to believe them. Traveler’s tales, after all.

The Loom speaks again. Here’s a thread in the weave—black, striped with gray-blue and red. The loom maintains a polyrhythm that is mesmerizing—the thread seems to slip between thicker braids like a tiger moving through a field of tall grasses—now why did I think of a tiger? There are no tigers here. There is a pattern emerging, a black-and-red weave. A woman, dying in a ditch . . .

A woman, dying in a ditch

In the great coal fields of a certain region of North India, the coal mines are permanently on fire. So much so that the ground is, in places, too hot to walk upon. The sleeping carbon of millions of years ago wakes slowly under the assault of the miner’s weapon, releasing flatus that burns long, devastating fires. Here the coal mafia rules—the coal companies depend on and live by its existence. The mafia indentures the laborers who dig the tunnels and cut and haul the coal, and die in the fires and tunnel collapses. And some of the workers are women, married to the mines through a web of relationships: fathers, brothers, husbands, sons.

A woman lay dying.

She had left her husband, slept with a manager, risen to power as a coal equipment operator. She was proud of her association with coal, which had bought her freedom. It was her gift to herself, the source of her newfound affluence, her gift to the world that made lights turn on and cars run in the distant, unimaginable big cities. But she had gone too far, and a killer’s knife had left her lying in a ditch, staring at a smudged sky dotted here and there with stars.

Why shouldn’t she dream too?

She dreamt of the way it could have been. If she hadn’t done this, or chosen that, what future could she have had? That firstborn son, the one she’d lost before he was a year old to malnourishment . . .

She dreamed of the little shrine at the entrance to the mine, where an image of goddess Kali guarded the miners from harm. She dreamed she was with the child, walking through the black tunnels, walking into and through the fire, unharmed, and the small boy laughed and ran ahead of her . . . And here, in the subterranean darkness she heard the river, the captured, poisoned river thundering not far away. The sound of the water reminded her, oddly enough, of a green childhood, of sal trees rising majestically, the smell of home-brewed mahua, being held in her grandmother’s lap.

Then, a terrifying interruption: she saw, for a split second, the river, or an errant distributary, bursting through the weakened walls of the tunnels, flooding, drowning the miners working there. It was near, very near the ditch where she lay; the ground trembled. Sometime later—minutes? hours?—she heard the distant wail of sirens, and on the road above the ditch an emergency vehicle went by, flashing red beams—the waves of red and black passed over her like the stripes of a running tiger seen at sunset . . . She said to herself, this is real, and I am dead, and I never got to go home. And, as the water rose through the tunnels and found ways that only water can find, she spoke through chapped, bleeding lips a phrase she had learned from her grandmother, and the river water met her body lying in the ditch, and claimed her.

How can we explain what happened next? You can say that the woman she was once died right there, and that would be true. But then, how do you account for the fact that someone rose up from the ditch, a woman with the same features, her skin the color of earth after rain, river water pouring from mouth and eyes and ears, her loosened hair streaming down her shoulders? That a moment later a man stepped out of an invisible door in the darkness and took her hand, and led her out of our world into another one? What a seasoned Traveler will tell you is that the moment she spoke the words in the half-forgotten tongue of her grandmother, that very moment happened to coincide with the river itself taking matters into its own hands. The willful Damodar, long called the River of Sorrows for its moods and furies, its blatant disregard for boundaries and embankments, until humans tamed it to their needs, or so they thought—how long had the river itself simmered in resentment and outrage? And it was in this coincidence of death and watery desire that the boundary between our world and another world of possibility suddenly narrowed, and a path appeared between the two.

This is why the woman they call Queen, only one of her many names—now a seasoned traveler between the realms of possibility—is part river. She has seen much in her travels, both in this world and the other ones, and has acquired a bewilderingly cosmopolitan identity. Part human, part river, part leopard.

Storyteller explains the ruhene concept

Leopard, you say skeptically. You ask: how can a human be part leopard, part river? But your confusion is only because no word exists in any major human language to explain what the Travelers call the ruhene. No analogy is quite valid, but you can think of the ruhene as a supercategory of the genome, or you can dispense with any pretensions to the scientific and call it, simply, a kind of innate kinship, a blurring of identities across peoples, species, and macrobeings like rivers or forests that results in an affinity unique to an individual. The ruhene is not fixed, but grows. Those who have been Traveling the longest have the largest and most complex ruhenes.

Now you might want to know how Queen got to be part leopard, but it’s the loom that decides what story comes next. Or rather, it is I-we, the fusion of the storyteller and Loom that enables the next tale to emerge, and we’ll tell you another thing. Looms and storytellers don’t always go with the perceived flow of time. Linear timekeeping is a tool of control wielded by the powerful. For us, who work in the dark, in small, secret gatherings such as this one, we who dream of better worlds, we braid time, weave time, defy time, grant ourselves freedom from chronology. So be warned that whatever comes up next may not exactly be in order . . . Be ready for surprises.

There may even be a tiger, leaping between stories.

Tyger, Dreaming

Tigers also dream. As the mangroves are destroyed and the sea rises, as humans push deeper into their old territories, driven at times by despair, at times by the lure of plunder and profit—the tigers find themselves homeless in their ancestral homes. So they, too, dream. And Tyger wanders the worlds of possibility, seeking the one where—

The leaping deer. The careful stalking, the final spring, the tender throat. The great, dark eyes, just before death, terror receding until there’s only the final peace, offering life itself, the ultimate bond. The sweet salt of warm blood, the tender flesh between the teeth. The great, hungry pit of the stomach quiet at last, the heavy, delicious languor following, the deep stretch of the limbs in the sun. Sleep; only the tip of the tail twitching, the waves beating gently against the shore like a mother’s heartbeat. And, awake, the land stretching before him, the green world, the watery depths, everything trembling with life, from the tiny ripples of insects on the water to the great shapes calling from the open ocean; the deep intake of breath, inviting into his body the fragrance of greenery and salt marsh and ocean. The ways he makes in the forest determine where and how long the deer stay, and therefore, which plants grow in what profusion. He is a shaper of the landscape itself. He moves through the forest, a ripple of black and gold, slips into the water, becomes one with land and sea, becomes breath, becomes death, becomes Tyger.

Storyteller pleads with Listener

You say you want to know how Tyger comes into this story, but really, I-alone don’t know. In this sort of story, the storyteller (singular) only has limited control; it is only by working the Loom (I-we) that the story, the answer, might come to us. It’s time, listener, that you realized that I am not just here to tell you a tale, to weave for you a story from the ocean of streams of stories. No, you are also part of the weave. So come, be a thread in this tapestry. Sit by me—don’t leave yet! How can any storyteller survive the listener walking away? You know, like the old song goes—aaj jaane ki zid na karo. Walk into this tapestry, sit with me. Don’t ask me about Tyger. The loom is still going. The next story is—oh look, two threads coming together, a confluence.

King, Queen, Cops

The cops held up King and Queen as the two walked through a department store. Their three-year-old had grabbed something—a fountain pen gift set—as they walked past a stack of them, and neither of the parents had noticed. The big cop got a gun in King’s face and when King—with great calmness—raised both arms, the cop slammed him onto his stomach and handcuffed him. The three-year-old was screaming when the other cop pulled her out of the mother’s arms. Queen drew herself up and said, very calmly—Baby, nobody’s going to hurt you—even though the cop was waving the gun in his free hand and clamping the kid to his barrel chest with the other. Queen raised her arms and said something in another language to King—her voice was lovely and resonant—and at the same time the weedy store clerk, a white high school kid, began filming the whole thing on his phone and using the sync he’d developed himself. The scene started to play in all the TVs on the other side of the aisle and everything anyone said was magnified into a chorus. The shoppers who weren’t watching the real drama unfold stopped to stare at the screens, thinking it was a show. Managers began to converge on the scene, and there were urgent, angry confabulations, with Queen’s voice washing over them like a river. A crowd gathered, cell phones in hand. The cops saw themselves surrounded, filmed, and multiplied on the screens around them. That may be the only reason they put their guns back in their holsters and the kid on the floor, and one of them got the cuffs off King, scowling the whole while. The three-year-old was in the stage of shock beyond fear, beyond tears and screaming, and calmly the Queen retrieved her, and some people came up to them and helped King to his feet. In ten minutes, they were out in the parking lot with the sun beating down on the rows and rows of cars.

“We need to get back,” Queen said. King had the three-year-old in his arms—she was asleep, the limp, spent exhaustion following an incomprehensible ordeal. On his comm there were messages coming in from all over the subtlenet, responding to the incident. They looked at each other, and King put his arm around Queen. Two blinks and a half and reality flickered and they were in the forest, the forest that had stood here before it was razed two centuries ago for agricultural land, giving way to a suburban plaza where the temperature could go up to a hundred and twenty Fahrenheit in the summers. But the forest that drenched them in its cool green darkness was possibly also the forest of the future, the forest that lives off the time-axis, and what you have to do, if you are a Traveler, is to nudge the time-axis just enough so that it winds its way through the forest again. Here you can breathe, really and truly, and see yourself in the curious eyes of a creature up on the tree branch taking its afternoon nap. Here there is exactly what’s been missing from your life—coolness, belonging, sustenance, a deep peacefulness that pervades your very bones, and yes, also death. But here, death is a brother, and life feels alive.

So, King and Queen lasted barely a few minutes in the Now of the department store before they had to find their way back to the forest.

She said to him: “I think it will take a while.”

“Sometimes, I wonder if there’s any point,” he said, rubbing his arms. His muscles were sore from the cop’s rough handling. There was a banked fury in his dark eyes.

“There was that boy, the store clerk,” she said. “And the people who helped you up. We have to keep coming back, you know, for the shift to happen. And we need the practice.”

“Yes, I know. I almost lost it, right there, right then,” he said, in a low, angry voice.

“But you didn’t,” she said. “Mathematics?” They smiled at each other.

Neither of them said anything after that for a long time. The forest enveloped them, and they shifted to other shapes.

Only, the weedy store clerk, the white high school kid who wrote bad science fiction in his spare time, newly fired from his job, ears singing with righteous fury, thinking I did the right thing, down with the pigs, and following that, I’ll have to work for Dad at the gas station now—that kid walking across the parking lot to the bus-stop on the other side of the hopeless stretch of burning concrete—that kid felt for a moment, a forest surround him—a coolness like being immersed in a lime-green ice soda, and there were shapes on the branches above, and lions—lions? Mountain lions or leopards or panthers or something, and maybe a bear—melting away between the trees, and he felt his body shift its boundaries, as though there was something within him struggling to get out, a great, brown bird trying to stretch cramped wings, remembering an ocean he had never seen—then there was nothing but the sun beating down on him and the wonder of it all breaking up like sea foam against the porthole of a surging ship, leaving him with a dull, familiar fear of his father’s anger, as he walked toward the bus-stop, toward his asphalt-and-concrete life, feeling as though he had glimpsed some utterly different possibility and had to settle for this one, this world of all worlds, this devastation of lives and livelihoods, this gritty particularity of suburban dust on his lips, this smoke, this exhaust, this exhaustion.

Storyteller speaks of King and Queen

Those names. King and Queen. They rule no kingdoms. Their names are mostly a joke, nicknames within a community. Queen is a translation of a word that, variously, means beloved when spoken by a mother to her daughter. There are no static hierarchies among the Travelers—even the most experienced ones know that they have things to learn from the novices.

As for King, you’ve already met him twice before this: once as a young man, running, and the second time, when he initiated Queen into the art of Traveling.

It looks like we are about to meet him again.

The Man Who Would Be King

The man who will be King is in a boat, in a swamp, with a bunch of excited, sweaty college students, and his colleague, a white woman in a bright Indian cotton skirt. It’s part of an immersion experience for American college students—a two-day trip out of the month in India to visit the largest mangrove swamp in the world, and they are hoping to see tigers. He has no intimation of what is to come, only a sense, stronger than ever, that his destiny is coming to meet him. His years in mathematics, two high schools, and now a four-year college, have heightened his awareness that there are patterns and regularities in the world beyond the immediate clamor of the senses.

The boat is broad, sitting in the water like an overweight duck, painted white and pink. It squeaks rhythmically with the swells; the deck appears to move independent of the railing, which is a little unsettling, as is the lack of the promised life-vests. They should have made the boat turn around and go back when they discovered that, but the students had protested—they are all good swimmers, eager for adventure. So, they are here: midmorning, and air is hot, humid, smelling salt, with pungent, somewhat putrid vegetative overtones. The muddy, watery lanes between the ragged green canopies of the mangrove islands form a maze. The tide is coming in. A bird is calling, repeatedly, urgently.

“Tiger about,” says the boatman. There is a frisson of excitement; phones and cameras at the ready.

Just then, a section of the frail railing gives way. A thin, high scream; a student is in the water, one of King’s, blond hair flying out. A great swell rocks the boat, and the girl goes under, an arm raised. The boatman shouts, there are horrified exclamations from the others, but before anyone else can do anything, King has jumped in. The muddy, tepid water embraces him. There’s no sign of the student; he dives, trying to see in the turbid water, feeling with his hands on the shallow sea bed; he touches branches, twigs, plastic rubbish, unidentifiable shapes. Comes up, sees an arm flung up ahead—much further than he had imagined—and swims strongly toward her. She’s close to one of the muddy islands, arms flailing, he can see the top of her head, mud-darkened—why isn’t she coming up, out of the water? He dives again. Sees that the girl’s feet are tangled in the undergrowth, and he has a frightening time freeing her—some kind of plastic twine has looped over an ankle and won’t let go—but at last he’s done it. The swell of the tide pushes them both shoreward. He helps her on to the muddy bank under a clump of mangroves; she’s gasping and coughing and crying, and he’s telling her she’s fine, and shouting to the people on the boat that he’s got her, they’ll swim back as soon as she’s caught her breath. She’s lying on her side, half-sitting up now, with his arm supporting her shoulders; they are both caked in gray-brown mud, unrecognizable. As he waits for her, he looks around at the mangrove cluster and sees, between the branches, the tiger.

The beast is on a narrow strip of mud on the other side of the mangroves. The great, handsome, striped visage, the sleepy green-gold eyes, watching him. The man and the tiger are eye-to-eye, not two meters apart from each other, and the man feels something shift within him: he is filled with an immense, shaggy strength; he can smell the strong, musky tiger-smell, braided with the scent of wild honey from somewhere in the mangroves. The world is vivid, alive, speaking to him with a thousand tongues.

“Tyger,” he whispers.

The tiger makes a short chuffing sound, a breathy syllable, followed by a throaty suffix, something like burr, and a shiver runs through the man as though he’s been touched with electricity. But the people on the boat are shouting at him; they’ve seen the tiger, and two of them look ready to jump into the muddy sea. His student is looking around, puzzled—she hasn’t seen the tiger. The man comes back to himself, waves reassurance at the boat, eases the girl into the water, swimming a strong side stroke, pulling the girl with him, helping her on to the boat, where his colleague, hysterics and fury barely under control, is getting out her medical kit.

There are three days of worry while both the man and his student suffer doses of strong antibiotics and medical observation, and he has to field anxious calls from the student’s mother, a single parent on a budget, as well as college administrators all the way up to the president. But the girl recovers, the mother is not going to sue, and the seedy hotel attendant who inveigled upon them to accept the offer of the boat trip has lost his job. So, finally, all is well, although the student with the literal immersion experience is upset that she never saw the tiger.

“And I was so close!” she tells her fellows.

The encounter must have marked our man in a subtle way, because much later, when they are all home, he is approached in a café by a thin, elderly white man with graying hair, who leaves a pamphlet on his table on top of his graded college algebra papers, gives him a grin and a thumbs up sign before walking away. The pamphlet says: Traveling: A Beginner’s Guide. The only reason he doesn’t put it in the recycling bin is that it seems rude to do it in front of other people. So, instead, he puts it in his backpack and finds it two days later.

It sounds ridiculous, but he goes to the meeting anyway, because the idea of traveling between worlds of possibility appeals to him. And he meets the people who will be his other family for the rest of his life.

“You must have a Traveling name,” his new friends tell him. They are a motley group.

“Something that’s easier to pronounce would be good,” says one of the women, laughing at him. She has large, teasing brown eyes and curly hair. “Tell us again what the tiger said.”

“Hard to render in English,” he says, smiling a little. “It sounded like burr. A word in my language.”

“I don’t think you look like a burr,” she says. “What does it mean?”

“King, it means King.”

“Then that’s your name,” she says decisively. She grins. “Suits you, the way you hold your head. Regal-like. Just don’t get any ideas. We’re an anti-hierarchical group, you know.”

He wants to know how they knew him, how they recognized him. The old man who gave him the pamphlet says they have another member, an itinerant, shy, possibly crazy foreign woman who seems to be a deaf-mute, who pointed out King to him. She comes and goes as she pleases, sometimes dressed in rags, other times in elegant, if mismatched evening-wear. Nobody knows anything about her, except that she’s one of them. Later, King will unravel that mystery, among others.

Storyteller explains why this story is a failure

Now we know all about King.

Or do we? King’s story is so tangled up with the stories of others that to fully tell his tale, we must tell the story of the entire universe. Because, if you want to tell the whole story, you cannot ignore even one thread. Which is why no story can be complete, although some are more complete than others. Which is why all stories are failures, and especially this one.

But listen—the loom speaks—dha-gi-na-ti-na-ka-dhi-na—the beat changes, shifts to something slower, more somber. Why do I feel a crushing weight on my chest, the weight of an entire world?

Talking of failures. Queen’s first failure as a Traveler. I have to find her.

“I have to find her”

Queen’s first failure as a Traveler, when she was still unskilled at it, had unexpected consequences. She heard a faint cry of anguish that made her bones shiver as though it was she, back in that other life, dying in a ditch, and without thinking she slipped through the streams between worlds to where the boy lay.

He lay dying in this world, yours and mine, in a field that was inundated by the sea. Around the world, millions of people drove their cars to and from work; millions laughed and talked in restaurants while the waiters rushed about with loaded trays, millions turned their light switches on or off, or sat in their cars idling with the AC on while their spouses shopped in grocery stores. The billionaires who made all this possible—only a few tens of them—went off to the golf course, held board meetings, zipped across the world in private jets, and contemplated the world machine they had wrought for their gain as giant numbers flickered across their screens. What price fuel? What price forest? What price planet?

And the boy lay dying in a drowned field.

Queen sensed, through the resonance that existed briefly between their ruhenes like the reverberation of a struck bell, that the boy was good at gulli-danda, loved running wild in the fields, wanted to be a film star, and could eat like a horse. He was looking for his sister after the cyclone blew in and devastated the coast. The sea was already higher than it had ever been in living memory when the storm came, and when the worst of it was over, they found that the little sister was missing. So, the boy went out into the wind and rain to look for her because he could swim like a fish. And met a wall of water like stone.

Queen found him in two feet of muddy water. She tried to raise him, felt him respond to her touch. His body stood up in the water, and he stared at her with blank eyes, and she indicated the portal behind her. And he shook his head, and said No.

“I have to find her,” he said. And he lay down in the water and died.

Her failure was a bitter taste in her mouth. She stood looking at the drowned land, the vast sky still pregnant with rain. People moved on the far horizon against the broken ruins of their homes. The air smelt of salt. An electric pylon was leaning down, as though eager to sip the water. On the breached levee, there were muddy tracks—human, cattle, the pugmarks of a tiger. A seagull flew above; a thin, high call cut the air.

There was something about the boy, the way he had lain down here, in the field that did not belong to his father but to the landlord. The field that his father and mother tended, where he had helped gather the harvest since he was five years old, where he had learned the calls of the wild birds, where he had learned who he was, the field that was not his. He had gone to school intermittently and had some sense of the world.

All this she knew, because when the ruhene goes free, the ripple of its passing gives a sense of the person. But the boy’s ruhene did not go free. Instead she felt it expand, blur, merge with the water and mud, grow large beneath her feet until her toes tingled. The boy who was no longer a boy stretched toward the horizon, where the sea lay raging.

I have to find her.

The land cannot speak with any human tongue. But a human who is no longer confined to a frail body can put in words the ancient speech of the land.

Storyteller, wondering

So many stories. I’m sometimes afraid I’ll lose myself in the weave, and never find me again.

I’ll tell you a secret, though, while the loom is silent and I can, for a moment, be I-alone. I’m already lost. Long before I became Storyteller. That’s why I’m here with the loom, in the hope that I will find . . . some hint of myself.

Now the loom starts up again—look! Something familiar, yet different. That gold and brown weave, interlaced with blue and green. A woman, a man—and tigers.

A Woman, Escaping

She was a woman, a human, but to the man she was escaping from, she was more of one and less of the other. She cradled the baby in the cloth sling she had made from a torn piece of her sari, and spoke to him, as she waded hurriedly through the knee-deep water between the mangroves, her feet squelching in the wet mud. She knew the labyrinth of waterways between the mangrove islands better than anyone, better than the man who was after her with rape and murder on his mind. Her breath came in ragged spasms, but she kept talking to the child, willing him to live—he had never been strong, in his two months of life, and how would he survive if she had to strike out for open water and swim? The child solved this dilemma for her by taking his last breath, preceded by a kind of whimpering sigh that turned her blood cold. She paused, loosened the sling, and looked at him, and the world darkened before her eyes. She wanted to scream and wail, but there was the sound of the man’s voice, calling her name, not far behind her, and she found herself possessed by a murderous rage. She made a promise to the dead child, and, leaving the shelter of the shore forest, struck out toward the open sea.

She wasn’t sure the man could swim—she had only seen him on land or in one of the sleek boats of the aquaculture farm, where they grew shrimp for the fastidious palates of city folk. But she knew that there were little islands all along the coast, some sandy and bare, others ringed with mangroves, and still others large enough to host wild grasses where a small woman could hide. The light was fading now, and the man would be a fool to try to find her in the gathering darkness on foot. This was tiger country after all.

So she swam, feeling the child’s body against her breasts, trying to keep his head above the water even though he was no longer breathing, would never breathe again. Mother, mother, she wept in rage and sorrow. Perhaps the ocean heard her, because a great swell came up to raise her body, loosening the sling, so the child slipped away from her as easily has he had slipped from her womb. She cried out, thrashing about in the water, diving down to the shallow sea-bed, fresh tears mingling with the salt of the sea. But although above her head the world was dark blue with orange stripes to the west, under the sea a murky night had descended. And so she could see nothing but shadows, fountains of disturbed sand. She understood then that Mother Ocean herself had heard her cry and taken her child back from her, and she wept as she swam, taking in water and coughing and spluttering. Somehow, she reached the island.

It was a small island. There was a gently sloping muddy beach, and atop were tall, thick wild grasses, their tussocks waving in the sea wind. Half crazed with grief and anger, she didn’t think about the dangers that might lie within. She crawled into the shelter of the grasses, made herself a hollow, wiped her face with the tattered end of her sari, and lay there in a stupor, too exhausted to weep anymore. Her arms hurt, her legs were stiff with exertion; her breasts, heavy with milk, ached. She opened her sodden blouse and squeezed them, but only a few drops spilled out, and she had no strength left in her fingers. Mother, she whispered, and oblivion took her.

The man came in the early dawn, in a boat. He was determined to destroy the woman. She was the ring leader, no doubt about it. The villagers who had opposed the shrimp farm would surely give up if they saw her dead, mutilated body. Who would have thought the woman would have the power of speech that would stir those fools into blockading the farm?

He saw her footprints on the beach of the nameless island. Wishing to take her by surprise, he edged the boat along the shore to the sea side. He pulled the boat up the beach, and began to walk carefully toward the tall grasses. Then he saw:

The pug marks of a tiger.

He stopped short. The tiger had come up from the water a little further from where he had put in his boat; the pug marks dragged, as though the tiger was injured or pulling a heavy weight. The marks went all the way into the forest of tall grasses and disappeared.

He could hear his own heart thumping, louder and more urgent than the rhythm of the waves lapping against the beach. A wind ruffled the grasses, and he sprang back. Maybe his job would be done—the tiger would get the woman. But the idea was to make a lesson of her to the villagers. He hadn’t thought to bring a gun, and besides, no ordinary gun would do for a tiger.

He was just turning away when the tigress emerged from the grass, and—with her last strength, because she was fatally injured—sprang.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take much to kill a man. A bite to the throat, that’s quite enough. But for the tigress, it was the last thing she did.

And what happened to the woman who lay sleeping in the grasses on the other side of the island? Later that morning she heard a keening in her sleep, and in the thrall of dream, called to her baby to nurse him. In the dream she was utterly relieved that he was not dead after all. She held him and cradled him, and he pulled so hard on her breast that she woke up. And there, in the bright daylight, with the grasses rustling around her like her sisters whispering, she lay with her grief, and the strangeness of it all, the tiger cub alternately suckling and keening, a warm, furry bundle against her mud-caked body. For one split second she knew horror and fear, and a terrible rage, for her own father had been mauled by a tiger and died slowly over the course of a year, one side of his body paralyzed. But she saw in the eyes of the tiger cub her own child’s eyes in their primordial innocence, wide with fear and need, and she knew that the mother was dead. And later, she would find the body of the tigress, and the man dead, also, and the abandoned boat.

Later the villagers would prevail against the shrimp farm, and she and others among her people would find ways to adapt to the rising sea. They say that as the sea rose, the ancient, careful relationship between tigers and humans changed, as they came into inevitable conflict, except in one region of that coast, where it is rumored that the women leave breast milk in bowls for the tigresses when they are birthing, so that they may know that they are, despite everything, sisters and relatives. They say of these people that the women can turn into tigresses and tigers can shape-shift into humans; be that as it may, the big agribusinesses have never been able to set up their aqua-farms and industries along this wild coast; always, such ventures are met with disaster. The villagers have planted mangrove saplings where the land had been cleared for the proposed shrimp farm, and the coast remains wild, serene, and dangerous.

Storyteller ponders Tyger

Well, now we know.

Did you think all Travelers are human? I thought so, once. I thought human, spoke human, saw human until I couldn’t see Bird, or Tree, or Tiger. I was in a prison made of human bones, human thoughts, human voices. But I escaped, and here I am, telling you absurd stories. Now we know about Tyger, a tiger raised as a newborn cub on human milk. He wanders through the realms that are other worlds, and sometimes, they say, he takes on human form. When he does so, he always appears as a woman, a woman with wild, burning eyes in her earth-dark face, lithe and strong, unable to speak any human tongue, possessed of a marvelous appetite.

Look, another pattern is emerging, a shimmering iridescence dotted with points of light—nothing like I’ve ever seen before—

I have to find her.

Who just spoke?

The sea, the land, the moon

The sea rose, and overwhelmed the embankments around my heart. And the water came in, salt, and stinging. And sank into the soil of my being and changed me.

The sea rose, and overwhelmed my embankments, and the moon rose over the sea. The drowned land was silver in the moonlight, and the water surged, as though to say—do not deny me. I am here to stay.

But in the way of water, it sank into the ground, slowly, over days, leaving salt crystals in the interstices of clay and soil and gravel, saying to the humans: you can no longer cultivate here.

I have to find her.

Who was it that spoke?

The water stirred the mud, blurred boundaries, dissolved bone and blood and sinew.

I was an exile in my own land, my soul.

I lay, a vast expanse ringed by broken embankments, drowned by the hungry sea, each cranny filled with salt water and bewildered, wriggling ocean fish. I lay, and in the shawl of water covering me, I held the light of the moon and that of the stars.

Here, far from the cities, the lights of human habitation were dimmed in the great deluge. So at last I could see the universe, resume the long conversation I had been having with the Milky Way. And it was a banner in the sky above, all those other worlds, other suns.

The water will sink into my body, soak through the tattered remnants of mangroves that once protected this land from the sea’s appetite. The humans will have to tend to the salt in the soil, so that they can restore their modest gardens, and live. I feel their tender fingers planting mangrove saplings, trying to restore my ravaged body. But the sea is rising.

The sea is rising as the world burns. The madmen are burning the compressed remains of ancient life to keep living their profligate lives, but they don’t know that they are already dead. In their luxurious shelters where they fatten on the destruction of the world, they are already dead.

But not dead enough.

Storyteller has a suggestion for Listener

Tat tvam asi. That thou art. I remember my Indian Philosophy professor in college explaining the ancient phrase. It’s a concept large enough that it meets its opposite, and melds with it. Neti, neti, not this, not this, says Bulleh Shah, says Rumi, says the Buddha, and it means the same thing as the ancient Rgveda said—this thou art. That thou art. And that, and this, and that. A radical expansion of consciousness doesn’t mean losing oneself but transcending separation.

It’s close to the end of my telling. The loom is settling down for the night. But you, who’ve stayed so long to hear, deserve the next story. It’s not the end of the tale, no. The end of the tale is up to you, listener, what you decide to do with these stories. I hope you will read these stories aloud, so your bones can hear them. Better yet, read them aloud to others, those who share the yearning. Let these stories reverberate in the bones, and then take them into the world. All the worlds. The worlds of possibility. And make some of your own.

I don’t know what’s coming. Tell me why I keep hearing someone say: I have to find her.

Meanwhile, Queen seems to be looking for a cleaning woman.

Queen, King, Tyger, Sea

At that moment, Queen was looking for the cleaning woman. The international conference was as frustrating as she expected it to be—more so, even. The power brokers of the world were gathered to figure out how to save the world, to identify the source of the problems, and it had not occurred to them to look in the mirror. King and Queen were attending as observers through a non-governmental organization. In the middle of some negotiation or other, Queen had noticed, from the corner of her eye, the woman with the broom. Someone had come into the closed-door session, and just before he closed the door, she saw the woman in the corridor outside, with the broom, and instantly recognized her.

But he doesn’t know how to behave among such humans! So thought Queen, in horror, jerked from semi-somnolence to wakefulness. Tyger in human form—at an international conference! What if he mauled someone and got thrown in jail? He couldn’t speak human languages. As Tyger he could slip between worlds, but in his secondary form those powers were limited—

The conference was being held somewhere in northern Europe, in a massive building on a spit of land reclaimed from the sea. Great feats of engineering had raised the enormous levees, and provided the building with waterproof basement doors. The people in the conference were from all over the world: government representatives, corporate leaders, men and women, white and black and brown. They were not, most of them, people of ill-intent, Queen had realized. Some were sincere, but they talked like aliens from another planet. She had tried to listen, to understand, but her attention was slowly drowning in waves of sleep, interrupted by moments of half-bewildered wakefulness. The conversation surged around her.

Carbon tax; carbon trading; net zero; poverty alleviation; cryptocurrency; NFT; EV; moon mines; climate justice; sustainability; sustainable growth; sustainable oil-and-gas; inclusivity; GDP; DGP; GGP; jabber-pee; badger-pee; jabber-jabber-badger-badger-

Waves of words and phrases broke over her head; she thought, sleepily, don’t they hear the sea outside the windows? But the windows were sealed tight, weather-resistant. On the dais, there was an empty chair marked “Delegate,” and she kept staring at it in an effort to prevent her eyes from closing. She wondered who the missing delegate was. She blinked hard to wake herself and thought: don’t they see the people in the back row, the people who are drowning, the people who are burning, the people who are dying, the human people, the tree people, the tiger people? And then the door opened and she saw Tyger.

Queen got up, weaved her way through rows and rows of seats and slipped into the corridor. There was no sign of Tyger. King, who had been attending a parallel session in another room, sensed her distress and joined her. They went from room to room, hallway to hallway, upstairs and downstairs, finding traces of Tyger’s presence—claw-marks on a paneled wooden door, a long room with food set out for delegates, completely trashed: plates and cutlery all over the floor, food flung about, caviar on the walls, and most of the serving dishes licked clean. A frightened hubbub from the kitchens beyond, the deep voices of the security staff issuing orders. A pile of shit steaming gently on a white carpet in an empty chamber. After that, the trail—crushed potato chips and other food debris, inexpertly swept into corners and against the wall—led to the basement of the building.

“What is he doing here? We have to stop him before he hurts someone!”

King said, “I doubt we can stop him. But he won’t hurt anyone, he’s eaten gourmet food and potato chips. He’s not interested in the people here. Don’t you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“The sea.”

“Of course.”

She remembered rivering. Water knew water, fresh or salt. The levee around the building was high and reinforced, but water always found a way. She sensed the cracks in the structure, the sea water straining to widen the gaps. An exultant wildness rose in her. She called, water to water.

In the basement, Tyger-woman had opened the waterproof doors at the back, the ones in the loading bay. She turned around and gave King and Queen a wide, feral grin. She made an obscene gesture with the finger of one hand, but that was just her way of telling them—go upstairs.

From the open doors there entered a gray, windy day, the smell of the cold sea, the sting of sea spray. A ripple of light and dark played across the basement room as clouds passed in serried ranks across the sun, as woman became Tyger, as Tyger—still grinning—disappeared.

Someone in the conference room upstairs, a bored junior aide, glanced out of the window and saw the gray water, silver in the cloudy light, enter through cracks in the sea wall, and the sea wall shuddered hugely, like a serpent awakening, and the sound was like thunder as the ocean came in. The young man leaped up, shouting and pointing, but the delegates kept talking jabber-jabber, bladder-pee, ji-di-pee until the waves burst against the building and the walls shook, and windows broke, letting in the gray air, and the cold spray, and the world. A great tongue of salt water drenched the empty chair marked “Delegate.” Then there was shouting and confusion—the lights went out, and there was a confused mass exodus to the stairs—not the elevators, do not use elevators at this time—there were security people shouting orders. King and Queen helped the frightened people up the stairs, carrying the old and weak in their strong arms. There was no more of the incomprehensible babble, only frightened cries and calls for this person or that one and mobile phones being punched to call those they loved. But the signal was weak. Now, at the end of days, you remember love, thought Queen.

On the rooftop, the most important people left within the hour by helicopter, and the less important ones had to wait for a day and a half. And King and Queen stayed with them, although they could have melted away between worlds. But they stayed, trying to console an old woman who, despite being important enough to be airlifted by helicopter, had chosen not to because her daughter was missing. A group of volunteers did a thorough search, but found nobody, and so it was known that one young woman was lost. The old mother wept. “Found in the sea, and lost in the sea,” she said.

“Tell us,” King said, gently.

The old woman said that while she and her husband—an oil king, he was—were sailing their yacht in the Bay of Bengal, about twenty years ago, they noticed a pod of dolphins playing with something in the water. Going closer, they saw that the dolphins were clustered around a floating wooden box, in which there lay a little brown girl. The day before, a great storm had hit the coast far north of them, but that was too far away to be of relevance. The couple were childless, and they decided—quite illegally, but then, laws aren’t written for oil kings—to adopt her.

“I never told her about her true origins,” the old woman said, weeping. “She always loved water, though, never for a moment afraid of it. And drawn to her origins, although we never told her. We brought her up as best we could, put her in college, encouraged her interest in South Asian studies. In her last year she dropped out, wouldn’t speak to her father, left home. A very troubled child, but I love her, and she loves me. I persuaded her to give her father one more chance, seeing as he was trying to undo the damage done to the world—she agreed to come; she’s been combative and disruptive throughout the negotiations, and now she’s gone . . .”

The next day, the rescue ship came and sent a boat out to bring the people aboard. Before that, King and Queen did another search. They came back empty-handed, and tried to comfort the old lady as she wept. She left with the ship.

King and Queen had politely refused passage, to the consternation of the ship’s captain. It was only when they told him that a helicopter was coming for them that the captain nodded and let them be. They went up to the roof and watched the ship recede over the horizon. Then they heard footsteps behind them.

The young woman was walking toward them.

“You missed the ship—your mother—”

“I’ll call her later,” the young woman said. “I heard every word. I was just under the place on the roof where my mother was telling me my story. In a bathroom. When the searchers came, I hid in a cupboard. The window was broken, so I heard what she said. She never told me where I really come from. I need to think. Take me with you, wherever you are going.”

King and Queen had planned to leave in their usual way, as Travelers do. Now how could they take a human who was not a Traveler away from this sea-washed spit of land?

But this young woman had some glimpses already, of the other worlds. And Queen saw her, and knew her.

“We’ll take you,” Queen said.

Storyteller’s homecoming

I heard every word.

I did call my mother later. My father is one of the oil kings; he has tried to be a good father, but he never looks in the mirror, and jabbers nonsense spells while he burns the world.

I went back. I went back to the drowned land of my birth, to my brother, my brother who died for me, for the land.

And I walked over the muddy incline of the beach, where my people were planting mangroves. I saw the drowned land, the brown patches where the water had receded. I saw the people bending in the fields, trying to heal them, and familiar shapes of trees, beckoning to me, saying come home, come home. I breathed the land, the moist smell of brine and soil, and rotting fish, and the bones of my ancestors. I found my way to where the village used to be. There was nothing there but water and piles of mud and debris. I tripped on something in the water—a small child’s loom—I dragged it out and put it on the mud. My tears were as salt as the sea. I sank to my knees in the water. I laid my head on the mound of mud where a hut had once been. I felt the shifting shape of the land beneath, the ribs of my father, the limbs of my mother. I closed my eyes and saw my brother running ahead of me in the fields, looking back to make sure I was there, I was safe. I heard him then, through a trembling in the ground, the land sighing, settling. My brother, whispering—welcome home, my sister.

Epilogue, or, a wildflower grows through the asphalt

In Storyteller’s absence, I, her assistant, must pick up the tale. When one storyteller leaves the Loom to fully enter the weave, another must take on the responsibility of working it. So, I will do my part and then leave it to another.

Listener, I am here at the shopping mall—yes, that same shopping mall where King and Queen had visited with their child. At this moment a group of young people are presenting a proposal to turn the mall into a food tower to feed the city. The opposition is the old establishment: set in their ways, blind to the destruction of the world, trapped by their own wealth and privilege. Who knows who will prevail? But King can see, in the youth, and a couple of grandmothers, the look in the eyes that any Traveler will recognize. He has initiated some of them, and they have initiated others in the art of Traveling. This is his twenty-fourth visit, and many things are still the same. But in the parking lot, he has noticed wildflowers growing in the cracks in the asphalt. On the frothy pink blossoms of milkweed he has seen one monarch butterfly, wings a-tremble, orange and black, like Tyger. The effrontery of the flower and the butterfly before the might of the powerful moves him more than anything. From the window he sees a lone bird wheeling its way toward the building—a brown pelican, far inland—and feels a frisson of excitement, of recognition.

We will leave him there, at the start of something new. Like an infinite series, this story has no ending. Like Euler’s Identity (King’s favorite equation), it reminds us that things we thought were separate are connected across space and time. And, as the Storyteller said some moments ago, no story that attempts to tell the truth of the world can ever be complete. There is not a single thread you can afford to ignore. Which means that every story—finite and limited as it is—is an attempt at the impossible, a guarantee of failure. No single story can displace the billionaires’ wet dream, which is the world’s nightmare. By itself, each story is small, insignificant. But together, they add up to make something larger than anyone has as yet imagined.

So, Listener, if you, too, can see beyond the prison bars of consensus reality to other worlds more just, more free, more loving, more whole than this shattered one, if you, too are willing to give yourself to this dream, then be ready. Sometime when you least expect it, while you are riding the subway or walking through the mall, or working in a café, someone might thrust a pamphlet into your hand, entitled Traveling: A Beginner’s Guide. Or you might discover, in the gaze of a stranger, human or nonhuman, the key that opens the door to all your possible selves. Then, perhaps, you will make your way here again, as Storyteller, Traveler, weaving the threads of that as-yet-unwritten story, the story of you, the story of us, the myriad possible worlds that are yet to come.

©2024 by Vandana Singh.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vandana Singh is a writer of speculative fiction living in the Boston area. Born and raised in India, she works as a physics professor and a transdisciplinary researcher on climate change. Many of her short stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies, and her second collection Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press/ Zubaan) was a 2018 Philip K. Dick Award finalist. Her most recent book is a short collection of essays and stories from PM Press, Utopias of the Third Kind (2022). Her website is vandana-writes.com.

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

EXCERPT: Child of Blood and Bone (Square Fish)

Tomi Adeyemi | 5790 words

An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller

A TIME Top 100 Fantasy Books of All Time

A New York Times Notable Children’s Book

A Kirkus Prize Finalist

With five starred reviews, Tomi Adeyemi’s West African-inspired fantasy debut, and instant #1 New York Times Bestseller, conjures a world of magic and danger, perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo and Sabaa Tahir.

They killed my mother.

They took our magic.

They tried to bury us.

Now we rise.

Zélie Adebola remembers when the soil of Orïsha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zélie’s Reaper mother summoned forth souls.

But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, maji were killed, leaving Zélie without a mother and her people without hope.

Now Zélie has one chance to bring back magic and strike against the monarchy. With the help of a rogue princess, Zélie must outwit and outrun the crown prince, who is hell-bent on eradicating magic for good.

Danger lurks in Orïsha, where snow leoponaires prowl and vengeful spirits wait in the waters. Yet the greatest danger may be Zélie herself as she struggles to control her powers and her growing feelings for an enemy.

Available now in a paperback edition from Square Fish.

Chapter One

Zélie

Pick me.

It’s all I can do not to scream. I dig my nails into the marula oak of my staff and squeeze to keep from fidgeting. Beads of sweat drip down my back, but I can’t tell if it’s from the morning heat or from my heart slamming against my chest. Moon after moon I’ve been passed over.

Today can’t be the same.

I tuck a lock of snow-white hair behind my ear and do my best to sit still. As always, Mama Agba makes the selection grueling, staring at each girl just long enough to make us squirm.

Her brows knit in concentration, deepening the creases in her shaved head. With her dark brown skin and muted kaftan, Mama Agba looks like any other elder in the village. You would never guess a woman her age could be so lethal.

“Ahem.” Yemi clears her throat at the front of the ahéré, a not-so-subtle reminder that she’s already passed this test. She smirks at us as she twirls her hand-carved staff, eager to see which one of us she gets to defeat in our graduation match. Most girls cower at the prospect of facing Yemi, but today I crave it. I’ve been practicing and I’m ready.

I know I can win. “Zélie.”

Mama Agba’s weathered voice breaks through the silence. A collective exhale echoes from the fifteen other girls who weren’t chosen. The name bounces around the woven walls of the reed ahéré until I realize Mama Agba’s called me.

“Really?”

Mama Agba smacks her lips. “I can choose someone else—” “No!” I scramble to my feet and bow quickly. “Thank you, Mama. I’m ready.”

The sea of brown faces parts as I move through the crowd. With each step, I focus on the way my bare feet drag against the woven reeds of Mama Agba’s floor, testing the friction I’ll need to win this match and finally graduate.

When I reach the black mat that marks the arena, Yemi is the first to bow. She waits for me to do the same, but her gaze only stokes the fire in my core. There’s no respect in her stance, no promise of a proper fight. She thinks because I’m a divîner, I’m beneath her.

She thinks I’m going to lose.

“Bow, Zélie.” Though the warning is evident in Mama Agba’s voice, I can’t bring myself to move. This close to Yemi, the only thing I see is her luscious black hair, her coconut-brown skin, so much lighter than my own. Her complexion carries the soft brown of Orïshans who’ve never spent a day laboring in the sun. A privileged life funded by hush coin from a father she never met, a noble who banished his bastard daughter to our village in shame.

I push my shoulders back and thrust my chest forward, straightening though I need to bend. Yemi’s features stand out in the crowd of divîners adorned with snow-white hair. Ones who’ve been forced to bow to those who look like her time and time again.

“Zélie, do not make me repeat myself.” “But Mama—”

“Bow or leave the ring! You’re wasting everyone’s time.”

With no other choice, I clench my jaw and bow, making Yemi’s insufferable smirk blossom. “Was that so hard?” Yemi bows again for good measure. “If you’re going to lose, do it with pride.”

Muffled giggles break out among the girls, quickly silenced by a sharp wave of Mama Agba’s hand. I shoot them a glare before focusing on my opponent.

We’ll see who’s giggling when I win.

“Take position.”

We back up to the edge of the mat and kick our staffs up from the ground. Yemi’s sneer disappears as her eyes narrow; her killer instinct emerges.

We stare each other down, waiting for the signal to begin. I worry Mama Agba’ll drag this out forever when at last she shouts.

“Commence!”

And instantly I’m on the defensive.

Before I can even think of striking, Yemi whips around with the speed of a cheetanaire. Her staff swings over her head one moment and at my neck the next. Though the girls behind me gasp, I don’t miss a beat.

Yemi may be fast, but I can be faster.

When her staff nears, I arch as far as my back will bend, dodging her attack. I’m still arched when Yemi strikes again, this time slamming her weapon down with the force of a girl twice her size.

I throw myself to the side, rolling across the mat as her staff smacks against its reeds. Yemi rears back to strike again as I struggle to find my footing.

“Zélie,” Mama Agba warns, but I don’t need her help. In one smooth motion, I roll to my feet and thrust my shaft upward, blocking Yemi’s next blow.

Our staffs collide with a loud crack. The reed walls shudder. My weapon is still reverberating from the blow when Yemi pivots to strike at my knees.

I push off my front leg and swing my arms for momentum, cartwheeling in midair. As I flip over her outstretched staff, I see my first opening—my chance to be on the offensive.

“Huh!” I grunt, using the momentum of the aerial to land a strike of my own. Come on—

Yemi’s staff smacks against mine, stopping my attack before it even starts.

“Patience, Zélie,” Mama Agba calls out. “It is not your time to attack. Observe, react—wait for your opponent to strike.”

I stifle my groan but nod, stepping back with my staff. You’ll

have your chance, I coach myself. Just wait your tur—

“That’s right, Zél.” Yemi’s voice dips, so low only I can hear it. “Listen to Mama Agba. Be a good little maggot.”

And there it is. That word.

That miserable, degrading slur.

Whispered with no regard. Wrapped in that insufferable smirk.

Before I can stop myself, I thrust my staff forward, only a hair from Yemi’s gut. I’ll take one of Mama Agba’s infamous beatings for this later, but the fear in Yemi’s eyes is more than worth it.

“Hey!” Though Yemi turns to Mama Agba to intervene, she doesn’t have time to complain. I twirl my staff with a speed that makes her eyes widen before launching into another attack.

“This isn’t the exercise!” Yemi shrieks, jumping to evade my strike at her knees. “Mama—”

“Must she fight your battles for you?” I laugh. “Come on, Yem. If you’re going to lose, do it with pride!”

Rage flashes in Yemi’s eyes like a bull-horned lionaire ready to pounce. She clenches her staff with a vengeance.

Now the real fight begins.

The walls of Mama Agba’s ahéré hum as our staffs smack again and again. We trade blow for blow in search of an opening, a chance to land that crucial strike. I see an opportunity when—

“Ugh!”

I stumble back and hunch over, wheezing as nausea climbs up my throat. For a moment I worry she’s crushed my ribs, but the ache in my abdomen quells that fear.

“Halt—”

“No!” I interrupt Mama Agba, voice hoarse. I force air into my lungs and use my staff to stand up straight. “I’m okay.”

I’m not done yet.

“Zélie—” Mama starts, but Yemi doesn’t wait for her to finish. She speeds toward me hot with fury, her staff only a finger’s breadth from my head. As she rears back to attack, I spin out of her range. Before she can pivot, I whip around, ramming my staff into her sternum.

“Ah!” Yemi gasps. Her face contorts in pain and shock as she reels backward from my blow. No one’s ever struck her in one of Mama Agba’s battles. She doesn’t know how it feels.

Before she can recover, I spin and thrust my staff into her stomach. I’m about to deliver the final blow when the russet sheets covering the ahéré’s entrance fly open.

Bisi stands in the doorway, her small chest heaving up and down.

“What is it?” Mama asks.

Tears gather in Bisi’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whimpers, “I fell asleep, I—I wasn’t—”

“Spit it out, child!”

“They’re coming!” Bisi finally exclaims. “They’re close, they’re almost here!”

For a moment I can’t breathe. I don’t think anyone can. Fear paralyzes every inch of our beings.

Then the will to survive takes over.

“Quickly,” Mama Agba hisses. “We don’t have much time!”

I pull Yemi to her feet. She’s still wheezing, but there’s no time to make sure she’s okay. I grab her staff and rush to collect the others. The ahéré erupts in a blur of chaos as everyone races to hide the truth. Yards of bright fabric fly through the air while an army of reed mannequins rises. With so much happening at once, there’s no way of knowing whether we’ll hide everything in time. All I can do is focus on my task: shoving each staff under the arena mat, where they can’t be seen.

As I finish, Yemi thrusts a wooden needle into my hands. I’m still running to my designated station when the sheets covering the ahéré entrance fly open again.

“Zélie!” Mama Agba barks.

I freeze. Every eye in the ahéré turns to me. Before I can speak, Mama Agba slaps the back of my head; a sting only she can summon tears down my spine.

“Stay at your station,” she hisses. “You need all the practice you can get.”

“Mama Agba, I . . .”

She leans in as my pulse races, eyes glimmering with the truth.

A distraction . . .

A way to buy us time.

“I’m sorry, Mama Agba. Forgive me.”

“Just get back to your station.”

I bite back a smile and bow my head in apology, sweeping low enough to survey the guards who entered. Like most soldiers in Orïsha, the shorter of the two has a complexion that matches Yemi’s: brown like worn leather, framed with thick black hair. Though we’re only young girls, he keeps his hand on the pommel of his sword. His grip tightens, as if at any moment one of us could strike.

The other man stands tall, solemn and serious, unusually dark for a guard. I have to wonder if divîner blood runs through his lineage, a secret shame he wears on his skin.

Both men wear the royal seal of King Saran, stark on their iron breastplates. Just a glance at the ornate snow leopanaire makes my stomach clench, a harsh reminder of the monarch who sent them.

I make a show of sulking back to my reed mannequin, legs nearly collapsing in relief. What once resembled an arena now plays the convincing part of a seamstress’s shop. Bright tribal fabric adorns the mannequins in front of each girl, cut and pinned in Mama Agba’s signature patterns. We stitch the hems of the same dashikis we’ve been stitching for years, sewing in silence as we wait for the guards to go away.

Mama Agba travels up and down the rows of girls, inspecting the work of her apprentices. Despite my nerves, I grin as she makes the guards wait, refusing to acknowledge their unwelcome presence.

“Is there something I can help you with?” she finally asks. “Tax time,” the darker guard grunts. “Pay up.”

Mama Agba’s face drops like the heat at night. “I paid my taxes last week.”

“This isn’t a trade tax.” The other guard’s gaze combs over all the divîners with long white hair. “Maggot rates went up. Since you got so many, so have yours.”

Of course. I grit my teeth. I fight the urge to scream. It’s not enough for the king to keep the divîners down. He has to break anyone who tries to help us.

My jaw clenches as I try to block out the guard, to block out the way maggot stung from his lips. It doesn’t matter that we’ll never become the maji we were meant to be. In their eyes we’re still maggots.

That’s all they’ll ever see.

Mama Agba presses her lips in a tight line. There’s no way she has the coin to spare. “You already raised the divîner tax last moon,” she argues. “And the moon before that.”

The lighter guard steps forward, reaching for his sword, ready to strike at the first sign of defiance. “Maybe you shouldn’t keep company with maggots.”

“Maybe you should stop robbing us.”

Th words spill out of me before I can stop them. The room holds its breath. I grip the fabric on my mannequin so hard my fists ache. Mama Agba goes rigid, dark eyes begging me to be quiet.

“Divîners aren’t making more coin. Where do you expect these new taxes to come from?” I ask. “You can’t just raise the rates again and again. If you keep raising them, we can’t pay!”

The guard saunters over in a way that makes me itch for my staff. With the right blow I could knock him off his feet; with the right thrust I could crush his throat.

For the first time I realize that the guard doesn’t wield an ordinary sword. His black blade gleams in his sheath, a metal more precious than gold.

Majacite . . .

A weaponized alloy forged before the Raid, created to weaken our magic and burn through our flesh.

Just like the black chain they wrapped around Mama’s neck.

A powerful maji could fight through its influence, but the rare metal is debilitating for most of us. Though I have no magic to suppress, the proximity of the majacite blade still pricks at my skin as the guard boxes me in.

“You would do well to keep your mouth shut, little girl.”

And he’s right. I should. Keep my mouth shut, swallow my rage. Live to see another day.

But when he’s this close to my face, it’s all I can do not to jam my sewing needle into his beady brown eye. Maybe I should be quiet.

Or maybe he should die. “You sh—”

Mama Agba shoves me aside with so much force I tumble to the ground.

“Here,” she interrupts with a handful of coins. “Just take it.” “Mama, don’t—”

She whips around with a glare that turns my body to stone. I shut my mouth and crawl to my feet, shrinking into the patterned cloth of my mannequin.

Coins jingle as the guard counts the bronze pieces placed into his palm. He lets out a grunt when he finishes. “It’s not enough.”

“It has to be,” Mama Agba says, desperation breaking into her voice. “This is it. This is everything I have.”

Hatred simmers beneath my skin, prickling sharp and hot. This isn’t right. Mama Agba shouldn’t have to beg. I lift my gaze and catch the guard’s eye. A mistake. Before I can turn away or mask my disgust, he grabs me by the hair.

“Ah!” I cry out as pain lances through my skull. In an instant the guard slams me to the ground facedown, knocking the breath from my throat.

“You may not have any money.” The guard digs into my back with his knee, making it even harder for me to breathe. “But you sure have your fair share of maggots.” He grips my thigh with a rough hand. “I’ll start with this one.”

My skin grows hot and I close my eyes, clenching my hands to hide the trembling. I want to scream, to break every bone in his body, but with each second I wither. His touch erases every- thing I am, everything I’ve fought so hard to become.

In this moment I’m that little girl again, helpless as the soldier drags my mother away.

“That’s enough.” Mama Agba pushes the guard back and pulls me to her chest, snarling like a bull-horned lionaire protecting her cub. “You have my coin and that’s all you’re getting. Leave. Now.”

The guard’s anger boils at her audacity. He moves to un- sheathe his sword, but the other guard holds him back.

“Come on. We’ve got to cover the village by dusk.”

Though the darker guard keeps his voice light, his jaw sets in a tight line. Maybe in our faces he sees a mother or sister, a reminder of someone he’d want to protect.

The other soldier is still for a moment, so still I don’t know what he’ll do. Eventually he unhands his sword, cutting instead with his glare. “Teach these maggots to stay in line,” he warns Mama Agba. “Or I will.”

His gaze shifts to me; though my body drips with sweat, my insides freeze. The guard runs his eyes up and down my frame, a warning of what he can take.

Try it, I want to snap, but my mouth is too dry to speak. We

stand in silence until the guards exit and the stomping of their metal-soled boots fades away.

Mama Agba’s strength disappears like a candle blown out by the wind. She grabs on to a mannequin for support, the lethal warrior I know diminishing into a frail, old stranger.

“Mama . . .”

I move to help her, but she slaps my hand away. “Odę!”

Fool, she scolds me in Yoruba, the maji tongue outlawed after the Raid. I haven’t heard our language in so long, it takes me a few moments to remember what the word even means.

“What in the gods’ names is wrong with you?”

Once again, every eye in the ahéré is on me. Even little Bisi stares me down. But how can Mama Agba yell at me? How is this my fault when those crooked guards started it?

“I was trying to protect you.”

“Protect me?” Mama Agba says. “You knew your lip wouldn’t change a damn thing. You could’ve gotten all of us killed!”

I stumble, taken aback by the harshness of her words. She’s never yelled at me like this. I’ve never seen such disappointment in her eyes.

“If I can’t fight them, why are we here?” My voice cracks, but I choke down my tears. “What’s the point of training if we can’t protect ourselves? Why do this if we can’t protect you?”

“For gods’ sakes, think, Zélie. Think about someone other than yourself! Who would protect your father if you hurt those men? Who would keep Tzain safe when the guards come for blood?”

I open my mouth to retort, but there’s nothing I can say. She’s right. Even if I took down a few guards, I couldn’t take on the whole army. Sooner or later they would find me.

Sooner or later they would break the people I love.

“Mama Agba?” Bisi’s voice shrinks, small like a mouse. She clings to Yemi’s draped pants as tears well in her eyes. “Why do they hate us?”

A new weariness settles on Mama’s frame. She opens her arms to Bisi. “They don’t hate you, my child. They hate what you were meant to become.”

Bisi buries herself inside the fabric of Mama’s kaftan, muffling her sobs. As she cries, Mama Agba surveys the room, seeing all the tears the other girls hold back.

“Zélie asked why we are here. It’s a valid question. We often talk of how you must fight, but we never talk about why.” Mama sets Bisi down and motions for Yemi to bring her a stool. “You girls have to remember that the world wasn’t always like this. There was a time when you didn’t have to fight.”

As Mama Agba settles herself onto the chair, the girls gather around, eager to listen. Each day, Mama’s lessons end with a tale or fable, a teaching from another time. Normally I would push myself to the front to savor each word. Today I stay on the outskirts, too ashamed to get near.

Mama Agba rubs her hands together, slow and methodical.

Despite everything that’s happened, a thin smile hangs on her lips, a smile only one tale can summon. Unable to resist, I step in closer, pushing past a few girls. This is our story. Our history.

A truth the king tried to bury with our dead.

“In the beginning, Orïsha was a land where the rare and sacred maji thrived. Each of the ten clans was gifted by the gods above and given a diff rent power over the land. Th re were maji who could control water, others who commanded fi e. Th re were maji with the power to read minds, maji who could even peer through time!”

Th gh we’ve all heard this story at one point or an- other—from Mama Agba, from parents we no longer have—hearing it again doesn’t take the wonder away from the words. Our eyes light up as Mama Agba describes maji with the gift of healing and the ability to cause disease. We lean in when she speaks of maji who tamed the wild beasts of the land, of maji who wielded light and darkness in the palms of their hands.

“Each maji was born with white hair, the sign of the gods’ touch. They used their gifts to care for the people of Orïsha and were revered throughout the lands. But not everyone was gifted by the gods.” Mama Agba gestures around the room. “Because of this, every time new maji were born, entire provinces rejoiced, celebrating at the first sight of their white coils. The chosen children couldn’t do magic before they turned thirteen, so until their powers manifested, they were called the ibawi, ‘the divine.’”

Bisi lifts her chin and smiles, remembering the origin of our divîner title. Mama Agba reaches down and tugs on a strand of her white hair, a marker we’ve all been taught to hide.

“The maji rose throughout Orïsha, becoming the first kings and queens. In that time everyone knew peace, but that peace didn’t last. Those in power began to abuse their magic, and as punishment, the gods stripped them of their gifts. When the magic leached from their blood, their white hair disappeared as a sign of their sin. In time, love of the maji turned into fear. Fear turned into hate. Hate transformed into violence, a desire to wipe the maji away.”

The room dims in the echo of Mama Agba’s words. We all know what comes next; the night we never speak of, the night we will never be able to forget.

“Until that night the maji were able to survive because they used their powers to defend themselves. But eleven years ago, magic disappeared. Only the gods know why.” Mama Agba shuts her eyes and releases a heavy sigh. “One day magic breathed. The next, it died.”

Only the gods know why?

Out of respect for Mama Agba, I bite back my words. She speaks the way all adults who lived through the Raid talk. Resigned, like the gods took magic to punish us, or they simply had a change of heart.

Deep down, I know the truth. I knew it the moment I saw Mama in chains, hanging with the maji of Ibadan from that life- less tree. The gods died with our magic.

They’re never coming back.

“On that fateful day, King Saran didn’t hesitate,” Mama Agba continues. “He used the maji’s moment of weakness to strike.”

I close my eyes, fighting back the tears that want to fall. Th chain they jerked around Mama’s neck. Th blood dripping to the ground.

The silent memories of that night fill the reed hut, drenching the air with grief.

All of us lost the maji members of our families that night.

Mama Agba sighs and stands up, gathering the strength we all know. She looks over every girl in the room like a general inspecting her troops.

“I teach the way of the staff to any girl who wants to learn, because in this world there will always be men who wish you harm. But I started this training for the divîners, for all the chil- dren of the fallen maji. Though your ability to become maji has disappeared, the hatred and violence toward you remains. That is why we are here. That is why we train.”

With a sharp flick, Mama removes her own compacted staff and smacks it against the floor. “Your opponents carry swords. Why do I train you in the art of the staff?”

Our voices echo the mantra Mama Agba has made us repeat time and time again. “It avoids rather than hurts, it hurts rather than maims, it maims rather than kills—the staff does not destroy.” “I teach you to be warriors in the garden so you will never be gardeners in the war. I give you the strength to fight, but you all must learn the strength of restraint.” Mama turns to me, shoul- ders pinned back. “You must protect those who can’t defend themselves. That is the way of the staff.”

The girls nod, but all I can do is stare at the floor. Once again, I’ve almost ruined everything. Once again, I’ve let people down.

“All right,” Mama Agba sighs. “That’s enough for today. Gather your things. We’ll pick up where we left off tomorrow.”

The girls file out of the hut, grateful to escape. I try to do the same, but Mama Agba’s wrinkled hand grips my shoulder.

“Mama—”

“Silence,” she orders. The last of the girls give me sympathetic looks. They rub their behinds, probably calculating how many lashes my own is about to get.

Twenty for ignoring the exercise . . . fifty for speaking out ofturn . . . a hundred for almost getting us killed . . .

No. A hundred would be far too generous.

I stifle a sigh and brace myself for the sting. It’ll be quick, I coach myself. It’ll be over before it—

“Sit, Zélie.”

Mama Agba hands me a cup of tea and pours one for herself. Th sweet scent waft into my nose as the cup’s warmth heats my hands.

I scrunch my eyebrows. “Did you poison this?”

The corners of Mama Agba’s lips twitch, but she hides her amusement behind a stern face. I hide my own with a sip of the tea, savoring the splash of honey on my tongue. I turn the cup in my hands, fingering the lavender beads embedded in its rim. Mama had a cup like this—its beads were maroon and white, decorated in honor of Oya, the goddess of life and death.

For a moment the memory distracts me from Mama Agba’s disappointment, but as the tea’s flavor fades, the sour taste of guilt seeps back in. She shouldn’t have to go through this. Not for me.

“I’m sorry.” I pick at the beads along the cup to avoid looking up. “I know . . . I know I don’t make things easy for you.”

Like Yemi, Mama Agba is a kosidán, an Orïshan who doesn’t have the potential to do magic. Before the Raid we believed the gods chose who was born a divîner and who wasn’t, but now that magic’s gone, I don’t understand why the distinction matters.

Free of the white hair of divîners, Mama Agba could blend in with the other Orïshans, avoid the guards’ torture. If she didn’t associate with us, the guards might not bother her at all. Part of me wishes she would abandon us, spare herself the pain. With her tailoring skills, she could probably become a merchant, get her fair share of coin instead of having them all ripped away.

“You’re starting to look more like her, did you know that?” Mama Agba takes a small sip of her tea and smiles. “The resemblance is frightening when you yell. You inherited her rage.”

My mouth falls open; Mama Agba doesn’t like to talk of those we’ve lost.

Few of us do.

I hide my surprise with another taste of tea and nod. “I know.”

I don’t remember when it happened, but the shift in Baba was undeniable. He stopped meeting my eyes, unable to look at me without seeing the face of his murdered wife.

“That’s good.” Mama Agba’s smile falters into a frown. “You were just a child during the Raid. I worried you’d forget.”

“I couldn’t if I tried.” Not when Mama had a face like the sun. It’s that face I try to remember.

Not the corpse with blood trickling down her neck.

“I know you fight for her.” Mama Agba runs her hand through my white hair. “But the King is ruthless, Zélie. He would sooner have the entire kingdom slaughtered than tolerate divîner dissent. When your opponent has no honor, you must fight in different ways, smarter ways.”

“Does one of those ways include smacking those bastards with my staff?”

Mama Agba chuckles, skin crinkling around her mahogany eyes. “Just promise me you’ll be careful. Promise you’ll choose the right moment to fight.”

I grab Mama Agba’s hands and bow my head, diving deep to show my respect. “I promise, Mama. I won’t let you down again.”

“Good, because I have something and I don’t want to regret showing it to you.”

Mama Agba reaches into her kaftan and pulls out a sleek black rod. She gives it a sharp flick. I jump back as the rod expands into a gleaming metal staff.

“Oh my gods,” I breathe out, fighting the urge to clutch the masterpiece. Ancient symbols coat every meter of the black metal, each carving reminiscent of a lesson Mama Agba once taught. Like a bee to honey, my eyes find the akofena first, the crossed blades, the swords of war. Courage does not always roar, she said that day. Valor does not always shine. My eyes drift to the akoma beside the swords next, the heart of patience and toler- ance. On that day . . . I’m almost positive I got a beating that day. Each symbol takes me back to another lesson, another story, another wisdom. I look at Mama, waiting. Is this a gift or what she’ll use to beat me?

“Here.” She places the smooth metal in my hand. Immediately, I sense its power. Iron-lined . . . weighted to crack skulls.

“Is this really happening?”

Mama nods. “You fought like a warrior today. You deserve to graduate.”

I rise to twirl the staff and marvel at its strength. The metal cuts through the air like a knife, more lethal than any oak staff I’ve ever carved.

“Do you remember what I told you when we first started training?”

I nod and mimic Mama Agba’s tired voice. “‘If you’re going to pick fights with the guards, you better learn how to win.’”

Though she slaps me over the head, her hearty laughter echoes against the reed walls. I hand her the staff and she rams it into the ground; the weapon collapses back into a metal rod.

“You know how to win,” she says. “Just make sure you know when to fight.”

Pride and honor and pain swirl in my chest when Mama Agba places the staff back into my palm. Not trusting myself to speak, I wrap my hands around her waist and inhale the familiar smell of freshly washed fabric and sweet tea.

Though Mama Agba stiffens at first, she holds me tight, squeezing away the pain. She pulls back to say more, but stops as the sheets of the ahéré fly open again.

I grab the metal rod, prepared to flick until I recognize my older brother, Tzain, standing in the doorway. The reed hut instantly shrinks in his massive presence, all muscle and strain. Tendons bulge against his dark skin. Sweat rains from his black hair down his forehead. His eyes catch mine and a sharp pressure clamps my heart.

“It’s Baba.”

© 2018 by Tomi Adeyemi. Excerpted from Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. Published by permission of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, Tomi Adeyemi is a Hugo- and Nebula Award–winning Nigerian American writer and storyteller based in New York, New York. After graduating from Harvard University with an honors degree in English literature, she studied West African mythology, religion, and culture in Salvador, Brazil. Her first novel, Children of Blood and Bone, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Its highly anticipated sequel, Children of Virtue and Vengeance, also debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Tomi’s Legacy of Orïsha trilogy is being developed into a feature film. Tomi can be found teaching creative writing online. In 2020, she was named one of Forbes’s 30 Under 30 in Media, and her website was named one of the 101 Best Websites for writers by Writer’s Digest.

Book Review: The White Guy Dies First edited by Terry J. Benton-Walker

Arley Sorg | 1890 words

The White Guy Dies First
Terry J. Benton-Walker, ed
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250861269
Tor Teen, July 16, 2024, 320 pgs

I mean . . . where do I start?

Okay, let me start by saying this anthology is really good! Thirteen original stories by folks who know how to compose strong fiction. Different authors followed the brief (that is to say: the title) in different ways, and this makes exploring the work even more dynamic.

Let me also say that in many ways, I have waited a long time for this anthology. Especially as someone who loves genre fiction, who sees, time and time again, white folks writing people of color but missing so many things in their characterizations and interactions. I’ve reviewed a number of anthologies designed to center people of color¹. What is different about this one is that the brief demands these characters of color engage in some way with white folks. The result is that many of the pieces here are really about the experience of marginalization itself, of being, for example, an Asian kid in a predominantly white school, or a Native kid who has become kind of estranged from his own culture. Many white folks think of racism as slurs and hate crimes, but racism is also about microaggressions, casual bullying, even just . . . not taking someone as seriously as you would a white person. This book creates space to engage directly with a range of concepts along these lines—and as someone who is mixed (Black/white/smidge o’ Native) and grew up in a predominantly white situation . . . ? This book hits the spot. Let me talk about a few of the stories, as examples.

In “Hell is Other Demons” by Karen Strong, Evelyn is smitten with Ivy, but Ivy is dating a white boy named Brett. When Ivy invites Evelyn to come to Brett’s demon summoning, she goes just because she wants to be near Ivy. There is nothing subtle about Evelyn’s perspectives on Brett: a privileged kid from a family whose success goes back to stealing land and murdering people generations ago². But then again, being who she is isn’t all that easy in a backwater town anyway. To Evelyn’s atheistic surprise, the summoning works, and if you are a horror or even a dark fantasy reader, you probably know that when a summoning actually works, things are not going to end well. Of course, it falls to Evelyn to deal with the consequences. The story is classic demon-summoning fun, with a few awesome surprises, punctuated by pointed social commentary.

I seriously enjoyed “A Thousand More” by Chloe Gong in Patrice Caldwell’s 2022 anthology Eternally Yours³, so I was eager to see what she would do here with “Docile Girls.” Adelaide has to deal with the people she thought were friends who have recently turned on her due to her ex-boyfriend dumping her. But she can’t just hide or avoid them: they are all on dance committee together. Right from the start, there is a sharpness to the narrative and an edge to Adelaide’s character, arising from a sense of otherness, of being in a predominantly white school, and the many difficult things this can mean. This is particularly compelling and relatable, but Gong ratchets things up another level by introducing Elaine—who is also Asian—and digging deeper into the complex tensions and emotions of trying to fit in or make your space while also being someone who is, inevitably, “not white.” The kids quickly discover that the gymnasium doors are locked, and from there, things get bloody fast. It’s the classic trope of a group being mysteriously trapped and getting killed off in turns, the trope done quite well, with a splash of splatterpunk flair. Indeed, in this particular piece, the white guy really does die first; but unlike many stories where the white guy is the hero and the lone person of color dies first, here there are plenty of other white folks to go around⁴. It’s up to Adelaide to keep it together enough to try to figure out what’s going on. Where the story ultimately goes is wonderful, and brings even more angles into the conversations about identity that Gong started earlier on.

Alexis Henderson gives us “Gray Grove,” which pulls you into the kind of atmosphere you crave in a horror story. Little details expertly delivered come together to invoke a gently tugging dread. Rumi and Kaitlyn make an interesting duo, with a bit of immediate friction between them as they have different ideas about exactly what they are doing out in the Grove. The setup is a familiar one: someone died a while back, and as investigative podcasters, they might be able to set the record straight. But Henderson flips the typical details, making the story more engrossing, and laying foundations for rich subtext: it’s a white kid—a quarterback, no less—who was murdered, while an innocent Black kid went away for the crime. Even the fact that we just don’t usually see narratives wherein two young women investigate the death of a white boy, yet this is what Henderson’s story does, this narrative decision alone makes the story fresh, while also pointing to the nearly ubiquitous cultural tendency of depicting women as victims and men as protagonists as well as problem solvers. The story of William, however, the Black kid who remained in prison, is all too real. A white kid tries to enact violence against a Black kid, gets his comeuppance, but the Black kid ends up spending years in prison? Yes, if you are keeping track, this is how it happens. Alexis Henderson is brilliant, utilizing both the unusual and the familiar to develop a story that is provocative while also being emotionally engaging. Oh, and all this is just within a couple of pages. As the young women approach the abandoned plantation house, Henderson digs into their relationship, revealing the microaggressions and the growing fractures that often occur with interracial friendships. As tends to happen in real life, these microaggressions and fractures are invisible to the white friend, or, perhaps, unacknowledged. Meanwhile, the horror story is unfolding, like a fog creeping across the road. Henderson’s fantastic storytelling flawlessly weaves subtle observations on privilege and perspective with the exploration of the house, utilizing straightforward, effective prose, and perfect splashes of description. While creepiness builds, the tension between Rumi and Kaitlyn continues to build, and if you know horror, then you probably know where things are going to go, and you will delight in following them there.

“Best Served Cold” by H.E. Edgmon begins with a fantastic voice laying out both irony and internalized prejudice, something which is painfully common and too rarely explored. It also begins with hunger, and by the insistence of this hunger (and the fact that it’s a horror anthology) you get a sense that this is going to mean trouble for someone. Edgmon allows protagonist EJ to be an angry kid who doesn’t fully understand what the anger is all about, which is probably truer to life than many overly simplified and reduced depictions of teen anger, which end up being easily resolved or explained: for people of color dealing with being marginalized, anger can be a tangled mess. Edgmon develops a wonderfully complex situation with the family, one which feels as real as it is nuanced. For readers like me, EJ’s situation is incredibly moving. When EJ’s brother Kai brings a white kid—who may or may not be a romantic interest—into the community, things get even more complicated. While Edgmon sets out some really interesting and beautiful story elements, they also interleave truly terrible real-life facts, while deftly seeding in the speculative horror. Things go from beautiful to bad and you know Edgmon’s a gifted writer when you are caught up in the emotional roller coaster, crashing right into tension and anxiety (for many readers, the correct word here will be “terror”). In some ways the story is familiar, at least in broad strokes, but it’s also brilliantly rendered, perfectly brutal, and elevated above its usual iterations by depth of meaning, not to mention the sheer power of Edgmon’s craft.

There are a number of readers out there who won’t see just how great these pieces are, who won’t feel the power and urgency of these voices. Folks who maybe balk at the book title. Readers who don’t get how many levels of fantastic commentary Chloe Gong’s story title is hitting, not to mention the way the title plays with the narrative when the tale unfolds. Some of these are the same folks who might say, “I don’t get why that is racist” instead of “damn, I’m sorry. I’ll do better.”

But for millions of readers out there, this book will be cathartic. It feels important to me, it feels necessary. This book explores things I experienced as a kid, the emotions of which I carry to this day. Part of the problem is, these things continue on in the adult world, in interactions at conventions, friend groups, and even professional spaces. This book brings us together, explores experiences and emotions, and vents so much frustration, all while having great horror fun. I loved reading this book, and many readers out there will love it, too.

¹. Such as The Black Girl Survives in This One edited by Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. Fennell; Infinite Constellations edited by Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura; El Porvenir, ¡Ya!: Citlalzazanilli Mexicatl edited by Scott Russell Duncan, Jenny Irizary, Armando Rendón; and many others: lightspeedmagazine.com/authors/arley-sorg.

². Most of us here in the US are living on land stolen from Native and Indigenous populations; many of us have ancestors who benefitted directly or indirectly from the enslavement, torture, and murder of African people. Some are benefiting more—and more directly—than others.

³. See review in the October 2022 issue of Lightspeed: bit.ly/4bOled9.

⁴. There are endless examples of films with numerous white characters and a single character of color (often a Black guy), wherein the character of color is not only the first but sometimes the only person to get killed. I highly recommend picking up The Black Guy Dies First by Robin R. Means Coleman & Mark R. Harris for an in-depth discussion of the topic.

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: Dazzling by Chikọdịlị Emelụmadụ

Aigner Loren Wilson | 572 words

Dazzling
Chikọdịlị Emelụmadụ
Paperback / Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781472289650
Wildfire – Headline, February 2023, 353 pgs

Chikọdịlị Emelụmadụ’s 2023 novel Dazzling invites readers into the lives of Treasure and Ozoemena after each loses her father, thrusting them in the path of gods and spirits. In the wake of Treasure’s dad’s death, her mom’s grief leaves her bedridden and depressed. Treasure must support the family by selling and begging in the marketplace, where a spirit latches on to her with the intention of making Treasure his wife by any means necessary. Ozoemena’s father has left home with no trace of where he’s gone, leaving Ozoemena adrift in her family obligations and with little answer to the strange occurrences steadily plaguing her. Answers come in time, but they only complicate the matter of her father’s disappearance and the legacy he left unsaid.

I have had Emelụmadụ’s book on my to-be-read pile since it came out and am very excited to finally be able to review it. What took me so long to get to it had a lot to do with how intricate and complex the book is. Not only is Dazzling split between multiple POVs written in different styles, but there are also different time periods woven throughout. Dazzling is not a book that I would call a relaxing read, but a truly engaging one with so much going on, both on the surface and within its themes.

Treasure and Ozoemena’s stories lie at the center of this novel, and the two tales race toward and dance around each other. Treasure tries to get away from the spirit that wants to claim her by feeding it other girls in her neighborhood and school. Ozoemena, a fellow classmate, learns that she is the next Leopard—an ancient spirit part of a secret society that inhabits someone in Ozoemena’s bloodline. While they are each fighting their own spiritual battles, in many ways they are the same battle.

Ozoemena’s spirit, a wild beast centuries old and connected to the Igbo goddess, Idemili, slowly takes over more parts of her life, giving her dark dreams and at times taking over her body. Treasure’s spirit, a dark force that gives her gifts and promises her he’ll bring her father back to life if she agrees to help him, pushes her to do whatever it takes to keep her family safe and her out of the clutches of the rageful spirit. Parasites, both of them, seeping away at both girls as they try to rebuild their lives in the shadow of grief.

Grief. Death. Spirits. Mythology. Religion.

That’s the story world Treasure and Ozoemena must navigate. Emelụmadụ expertly builds their story with a deep connection to Igbo and Nigerian culture, making this tale distinctly African, not of the Western narrative landscape. For me, it offered a rich distinctness that kept me plugged in and actively engaged in being told a tale by an expert storyteller. If you have not picked up Dazzling, it’s a thoughtful and engaging read for any fan of Nigerian fabulist fiction.

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: Of Jade and Dragons by Amber Chen

Chris Kluwe | 697 words

Of Jade and Dragons
Amber Chen
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780593622759
Viking Books for Young Readers, June 2024, 480 pages

Greetings readers, and welcome to another book review! This month we’re going to embark on a twisting adventure filled with wild devices, rebellions against the natural order of things, and the battle between creation and destruction in Amber Chen’s Of Jade and Dragons.

The novel follows the story of Aihui Ying, a girl from a backwater island in the Nine Isles. She dreams of being a master engineer like her father, but she’s stuck with one problem—the Engineer’s Guild doesn’t accept women, and her family isn’t interested in letting her leave. However, after her father’s brutal murder at the hands of an unknown assassin, and Ying’s discovery of his hidden notebook, she has no choice but to try and enter the Engineer’s Guild anyway to track down whoever sent her father’s killer. Things escalate from there (there may or may not be a mecha-dragon involved at some point) until Ying is caught in a power struggle between the highest levels of leadership among the Nine Isles.

While the temptation is there to see this book as a cross of Mulan and (kind of) Harry Potter, it’s actually so much more than that, and a big part of that is Chen’s adept subversion of expected tropes. Aihui Ying has to keep her identity hidden as she attempts the Engineer’s Guild entrance exam, but where one would normally expect a series of clever misdirections or plot-armor protagonist avoidances, Ying quickly learns that she’ll have to rely on others to keep her secret just as she keeps theirs. This subversion continues with the romance elements of the story, which start in an expected direction and then end up someplace completely different that still feels like a totally natural progression of the characters.

Speaking of the characters, Of Jade and Dragons is as much a tale of the surrounding cast as it is Ying’s. Chen does a fantastic job interweaving the lives of various engineering students, government functionaries, and political leaders together in a way that creates a rich, vibrant world. We experience this world through Ying’s perspective, but it’s clear that her viewpoint is only a facet of all the other forces at play. There are plots interwoven within plots, opposing goals and desires, and the culmination of all of them felt incredibly satisfying to witness.

As great as the character development is, Chen does just as good a job building the world for those characters to inhabit. Drawing heavily from founding elements of the Qing Dynasty, Chen captures the political upheaval and instability of a new empire forming, but interjects her own unique flavor of what can only be described as steampunk and silkpunk combined. Airships share space with spear-armed levies, clockwork bees roam shifting forests, and mercurial metals combine in explosive ways. The environment of Of Jade and Dragons always left me impressed, both at its richness as well as its cleverness.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out Chen’s brilliant approach to the science of engineering without getting bogged down in the weeds of minutiae. Of Jade and Dragons is a recognition of the horrible dichotomy engineers face with their creations as well as their desire to create—at what point does that shift from benefitting people to harming them? When does today’s mining powder become tomorrow’s bombs?

Overall, this is a book that I found easy to lose time reading, captivating in its imagination, and one with an important message that transcends time. If the choice is between creation and destruction, what do we end up leaning towards? Of Jade and Dragons isn’t afraid of its answer, and I encourage you all to take a chance on it.

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: Endria Isa Richardson

Laurel Amberdine | 549 words

How did “A Pedra” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I actually wrote this story for a horror anthology! I was very interested in the horrifying aspects of time as a menacing, material force—something that could eat you. But I ultimately became much more interested in the world in which time might function this way: the addictive substances that might be used to pacify kids who can “see” the future, what “seeing” the future might do to a child’s psychology, and ultimately, how might such children be exploited for capital gain? I was also reading a lot of John Keene (I actually stole the epigram for the story from his brilliant collection, Counternarratives). Keene incorporates “primary” documents into his work to mind-blowing effect, and I thought that would be an interesting technique to expand the universe of the story in a somewhat compact way.

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

I generally write at a big desk—two planks of wood that I sanded and finished propped on a couple of sawhorses—that overlooks a busy street in Oakland, California. There is a freeway overpass (and underpass) across the street, as well as a number of beautifully overgrown coast live oaks whose upper branches are, as I type this, swaying quite dramatically in the wind.

I usually have multiple stacks of books nearby: what I am reading for school, what I am reading for pleasure (what hasn’t been migrated to my bedside), and anything that feels helpful to any particular projects I happen to be working on at the moment. Right now, that includes Terrell Carver’s Marx: Later Political Writings, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, and the Winter 2023 Issue of The Georgia Review. Add to all that some framed photos, a few empty coffee mugs, water glasses, a couple cups (including a beautiful blue ceramic mug made by a dear potter friend) full of pens, and any one or two of my four cats, and it can be a fairly crowded workspace.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I recently started a PhD program, so most of my reading is fairly academic. This has led me to crave dependable reads in my leisure time. I only want to read work that I know will nourish me creatively and emotionally. I just reread Laurie Marks’s utterly fantastic Elemental Logic series (I cannot recommend it enough). And I’ve undertaken a project to read all of Ursula K. LeGuin’s novels in chronological order. I just started Rocannon’s World.

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

I write a quarterly column for a very sweet magazine about nature in the Bay Area, appropriately called Bay Nature Magazine. Otherwise, I am always working on new stories, and a couple will be out in various magazines soon! You can find everything at my website www.endriarichardson.com, or via my newsletter hello-from-endria.ghost.io

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: Modupeoluwa Shelle

Laurel Amberdine | 689 words

How did “How to Know Your Father Is a God” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

My stories originate from those places I don’t expect them to be born. They also come at the time I don’t want them to—like when I’m about to finally attempt an eight-hour sleep. And this story is not an exception. I have always wanted to write a story with a blend of my culture—the Yoruba culture—its myths and legends, but every attempt at this had always been unrealistic. Moreover, over the years, I’ve been craving something similar to this piece on the shelves and/or on my TV screen. Sadly, every attempt or announcement on such projects went down the drain.

But after reading Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone in 2019, the passion to write it was reignited. Also, seeing movies like Clash of the Titans, Gods of Egypt, and most especially Percy Jackson which was based on the novel of the same name, inspired me to complete the project. The urge to see something the first of its kind also pushed me into submitting it for publication. If not, I doubt if this piece would ever see the light of day.

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

My writing process is a bit weird and I myself barely understand. Oftentimes, I follow the traditional process which involves brainstorming, researching, planning, drafting, etc. However, it’s not so all of the time. I could begin writing a story right now, not knowing where it would take me until I get stuck. That is when I might decide to begin carrying out research, developing my characters, working on the worldbuilding, plotting, etc.

But this story doesn’t fit into any of these processes. I used to daydream about being a descendant of an orisá (deity) ever since I learnt my mother is an indigene of Oyo State, Nigeria, where Sango was also born. So I had written this story in its entirety in my head before finally putting it on paper. The rest is history.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

Genre fiction has always been where my interests lie, ever since I began to pick up books that weren’t recommended in class. I grew up in a country where literary fiction is widely celebrated; anything except that is not considered fiction. But that didn’t stop me from reading books or watching movies in genre. These further fuelled my interest in the genre. In fact, it influenced my writings and I developed it with the hopes that one day, when I become a successful author, I would change the idea surrounding genre fiction in Nigeria.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Aside from the tonnes of novels and plays recommended for this semester, I’ve been reading Caraval by Stephanie Garber and Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi. I’m also rereading Vothuno: The Chief Priest of Badagri by Babatunde Olaide-Mesewaku for inspiration on a project I’ve been working on for a couple of months now.

Writers such as Amos Tutuola, Nnedi Okorafor, Tomi Adeyemi, Tochi Onyebuchi, Ernest Hemingway, to name only a few, inspire me to write.

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

I’ve been working on a couple of short stories and a novella which I hope to publish as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

On the other hand, you can find my debut novella, Love & Sprites on Ankara Circle. You can also find me on Tiktok @modupeshelley and on Instagram @modupeoluwashelle where I post my animated spoken word poems. I am currently working on opening my blog, The Modupe Shelle Blog, which will debut on the fourth of March, 2023 so my fans can get more of my work.

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: Susan Palwick

Laurel Amberdine | 573 words

How did “Mother’s Day, After Everything” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

For years now, I’ve been trying to work through my despair about climate catastrophe and what looks to me like the onrushing extinction both of our species and many others. How do we keep going in the face of annihilation? (Some people are more optimistic about all of this than I am, and I hope they’re right.) My story “Sparrows,” which appeared in the September/October 2022 Asimov’s Science Fiction and won their Readers Award for best short story, represents one approach to that question: we cling to the wisdom of art and to whatever human relationships we can find. “Mother’s Day, After Everything” offers another answer, the project of shifting our hopes and loyalties from human life to Life with a capital L.

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

My writing process is glacially slow, unfortunately. I get an idea, dive into it, inevitably hit a wall, and then come back and finish it months or years—decades, in some cases—later. This story very much fit that pattern: I started it in May 2014, got stuck because I hadn’t figured out the ending yet, returned to it in December of 2022, and finished it in February of 2023. My motto, and my advice to other writers, is never to throw anything out, because even if a story feels dead, you never know when it will return to life.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I recently binged on the Expanse series and all of Becky Chambers’ work, and my latest obsession is Ray Nayler. All of these writers both thrill me and reduce me to despair, because I’ll never be as good as they are, But hey, that’s what keeps us striving to improve, right? Complacency is the enemy of art.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I love to weave. With my husband’s encouragement, we recently converted our dining room into a weaving studio containing three looms, a sewing machine, and miscellaneous other equipment, including a jewelry-making nook. I started experimenting with metal clay last year and really enjoy it. Right now, though, I have very little time for creative pursuits of any sort, because I work forty hours a week as a social worker in a dialysis clinic. I’m trying to figure out ways to address the work/life imbalance, but I may need to retire to get back to everything.

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

I have a story coming out in a few months, in the July/August issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. At least five other stories are stuck mid-narrative, in the interminable-gestation phase. I hope to finish them before I die. I’m pecking away at the thing I said I’d never write, a trilogy (of novellas, not novels). It’s post-apocalyptic fantasy about difference and oppression and what happens when people learn that their cultures are founded on the subjugation of other sentient beings. No contemporary relevance there, eh? Will I ever finish this project? Bookies are standing by to take your call.

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: Vandana Singh

Laurel Amberdine | 753 words

How did “Travelers’ Tales from the Ends of the World” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story emerged from many years of studying, discussing, and worrying about climate change. Apart from being a speculative fiction writer, I am a physics professor and transdisciplinary scholar of climate change. However, climate is not the only problem before us: we also have species extinction and the unraveling of both natural biogeophysical systems and human social systems (all of which are interconnected), what is being referred to as the polycrisis.

Underlying all this is the power hierarchy, and I think of the super-rich driving it as deranged necrophiliacs of a kind, consumed by greed and drunk with power, pushing the world toward destruction. They create and maintain the destructive socio-economic system in which we are trapped. The system also traps our imaginations so that it is hard to visualize another way of living and being.

So the story is an attempt to break out of the imagination trap and consider other, better future worlds, and work to make them real. The reality of our current situation is horrific, and I am not denying that when I say that we need to dream about other worlds. Dreams are most honest and true when they look reality in the face and are informed by it, and then invoke the imagination to get through our present hell. I’ve written about it in other spaces: bit.ly/49NnaRB.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I write genre fiction because I can’t seem to help it. But more seriously, there is great potential in speculative fiction, especially from the perspective of people like me who come literally from other worlds, worlds that have been colonized and are still dealing with the fallout; I have tried to answer the question here: bit.ly/49Shci7.

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

I’d like to see more fiction about the polycrisis we face, and especially about getting away from the exclusively human. Speculative fiction has a long history of engaging with aliens from other worlds. But we have fellow Earthlings all around us and research is indicating that the Western modern gaze has missed crucial things about other species: that they feel, they communicate, sometimes in such sophisticated ways (as in the case of cetaceans) that we can’t figure it out; that they have agency, that they have a lot to teach us, that connecting with them is one part of the answer to the modern human epidemic of loneliness.

Old World and Indigenous cultures have always known all this and more. There is much we can explore through speculative fiction. And this is, to me, part of the project of getting away from colonialist conceptions that we take as bedrock reality when they are just constructs. I’d also love to see alternative economic systems in spec fic. Our current economic ideologies generally ignore the rest of nature except as a resource to be endlessly exploited, but new economic ideas are emerging, for instance in response to the notion that there are limits to what humans can do on Earth—the planetary boundaries concept being one articulation. bit.ly/49uPfNO.

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

I have recently completed work on a novella and a short story as part of the Climate Imagination Fellowship from Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. These are part of the Climate Action Almanac freely accessible at climatealmanac.org along with stories from three wonderful international writers, Libia Brenda, Gu Shi, Hannah Onoguwe, and a number of scholars who have contributed essays. I’ve also just finished a book on a radical reconceptualization of climate change, at the intersection of climate science, pedagogy, and justice: bit.ly/3OZyceF. I don’t have time to write stories during the semester, so I am currently only reading academic stuff and student papers, but getting a lot of fiction ideas for summertime, which is when I get most of my writing done.

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, May 2024

The Editors | 215 words

We have original science fiction by Nisi Shawl (“Over a Long Time Ago”) and Andrea Kriz (“Udo Gehler and the Virgin Bitch of the Resistance”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Laika” from Stephen Geigen-Miller and “Chaos Theory” by Ash Howell.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Benjamin Peek (“Exit Interview”) and P H Lee (“Richard Nixon and the Princess of the Crows”). We also have a flash story (“Done Deal”) from Rory Harper, and another (“And the Dreams That You Dare to Dream”) from Marissa Lingen.

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: Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko, Varsha Dinesh, Deborah L. Davitt, Ai Jiang, and Caroline Yoachim.

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!

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The Editors

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Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

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

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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 two 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!

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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.