TABLE OF CONTENTS

August 2024 (Issue 171)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: August 2024

SCIENCE FICTION

The Darkness Between the Stars
Richard Thomas

Resistance
Cat Rambo

The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strain’d
Archita Mittra

Under the Skin
Deborah L. Davitt

FANTASY

Mud Maidens Rise
K.A. Wiggins

Look at the Moon
Dominique Dickey

What’s in a Name
Matthew Hughes

Child of the River
Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe

NONFICTION

Book Review: In the Shadow of the Fall by Tobi Ogundiran
Melissa A Watkins

Book Review: The Crawling Moon edited by dave ring
Arley Sorg

Book Review: How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Richard Thomas

Cat Rambo

Archita Mittra

Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions, September 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 Warmtail / Adobe Stock Images

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: August 2024

John Joseph Adams | 202 words

Welcome to issue 171 of Lightspeed Magazine!

It’s hard to think of two topics more SFnal than time travel and robots, and so we’re delighted to present this month’s two extremely science fictional short stories. Richard Thomas gives time travel a spooky spin his new tale “The Darkness Between the Stars.” Archita Mittra spins a tale of android friendship in her story “The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strain’d.” We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Resistance” from Cat Rambo and “Under the Skin” by Deborah L. Davitt.

Astronomy can’t shake its connections to the gods, not when so many constellations are named for mythological entities, and Dominique Dickey delves into both topics in their hard-hitting fantasy tale “Look at the Moon.” Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe turns our gaze away from the sky in his magical story “Child of the River.” We also have a flash story (“Mud Maidens Rise”) from K.A. Wiggins and a very special fairy tale retelling (“What’s in a Name”) from Matthew Hughes.

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team.

It’s another terrific issue—thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the New York Times bestselling editor of Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele) and more than forty other anthologies, such as Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent projects include 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. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. A winner of the Hugo and Stoker awards, John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Lately, he’s been working as an editor on various roleplaying game books for Kobold Press and Monte Cook Games and as a contributing game designer on books such as Tome of Heroes. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

The Darkness Between the Stars

Richard Thomas | 4752 words

Buddy and I abandoned our hydrogen nomad at the edge of the wastelands before trudging around the rusted chain-link perimeter of the abandoned fairgrounds, waiting for the blast of steam and guttural earthly moan to escape from the fractured soil, signifying that it was clear to enter the area. Remnants of old technology lay scattered as far as the eye could see: tubes of corroded brass, mangled springs, and cracked gearwheels mingled with discarded water bottles and decomposing garbage bags—half-covered in dust and ash among the weeds.

For a half-century, the unrelenting elements and merciless salvage crews had ravaged and plundered what was once a magnificent sight to behold. Every structure of the theme park had been long since flattened, erased, torn down, or stolen, to the point that only the legends and tales remained—mindblowing exhibits and theme park amusements with a supernatural twist. We knew what these barren acres used to hold, but if you didn’t know the history, it would be easy to miss the patches of gray concrete hidden beneath the silt, the faded numbers and directional arrows stenciled on the cracked pavement in a yellow so washed-out that it was almost white, and the highlight of our visits: a singular concrete obelisk with a red metal door.

To us, it was a place to escape—away from our helicopter mothers, short-tempered fathers, and dead-eyed siblings all jacked into the similitude, too glued to their screens to ever venture out into this analog world.

Buddy and I were the only kin either of us had left, really, the only ones we could trust. The summer days were dwindling and the final year lay before us. Beyond that, trade schools, and sorted employment, mundane tasks, and a vague promise of marital bliss—an apparent guarantee of soft flesh that we hardly understood. So we stood there, children really, this one nail head bursting up through the earth waiting to be hammered down, a place to meet in the wee hours, the endless nights, and the rainy afternoons that never seemed too warm.

Buddy stood a good foot taller than me, and thicker in every way. It was as if you had taken one of me, had me swallow another me whole, and then had that mass expand in every direction. With long brown hair and a simple face, we sometimes called him Conan, or Tarzan. We, being the jerks in his statistics class, or the jocks on the scatterball team. He was as loyal as a German shepherd, a good friend, not an alarm bell or red flag on him. He suspected nothing, and saw no danger in this moment.

It didn’t matter what we did together—urban spelunking, tunnel hacking, shooting wharf rats down by the contaminated river, or slingshotting rocks at the drones that crisscrossed the fields of rotting corn husks that surrounded this forsaken plot of land. We always had fun together—as it was the company, the honest conversation, the simple dreams we shared—that made it worth the trip.

We stopped next to the red door, its titanium frame dinged and tarnished, ancient chrome hinges straining to hold up its obvious weight. The concrete around it was chipped, but extremely thick, and there was no visible handle to be seen. Despite our determination to get inside, three summers of our primitive efforts—hammers, crowbars, shovels, and sledges nicked from our fathers’ sheds—had yielded no progress and merely added to the already worn-out paint job of this mysterious entryway.

“Derek, look at that,” Buddy said.

“I see it, I see it. That’s new.”

Next to the door and brutalist outcropping was a metal box, like some old milk cooler, the lid open, and filled with padlocks. There were keys scattered in there as well, covered in dust, lying there for hours or days, who knew.

“When were we here last?” I asked Buddy.

He scratched his head, “Weeks? More?”

I turned back to the door, and saw that it was surprisingly ajar—seven latches, unlocked and bent. The gap in the doorway appeared to grow wider with every step closer, as if welcoming us into its waiting embrace, or perhaps like the mouth of a great beast preparing to devour us. Up close, the blackness within the doorframe seemed to be undulating, viscous and impossibly dark, and somehow I knew, it was almost sentient. I had been so focused on the interior that I barely noticed that Buddy, who stopped walking at some point, was no longer beside me. A primal urge deep in my gut screamed for my body to stop moving too, but I was floating away, untethered from the safety of my life into this darkness from between the stars, drawn in by the irresistible call of the void.

“I’m going in,” I said, glancing over my shoulder with a sly grin.

“Derek, no,” he yelled, taking one step toward me.

I wouldn’t see him again for several years.

• • • •

I don’t remember being pulled in, only the door snicking shut behind me, as if pulled tight in the wake of my movement. Inside, it was an eternity in a closet, both cavernous and claustrophobic, oppressively silent, like an anechoic chamber where your own heartbeat can drive you mad. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, a console with various levers and buttons revealed itself in the sourceless dim light. The pungent smell of ozone pushed a metallic taste deep into my throat.

When I opened the door to share my discoveries with Buddy, a security guard in a dark blue uniform with a thick mustache and long brown hair spilling out from under his cap sat with his arms crossed, sound asleep, in a metal folding chair. My friend was nowhere to be found, and all around us lay nothing but an endless sea of jet-black pavement. The fields of rotting corn were gone, the chain link fence had vanished, along with every trace of the ruined park. It was as if a giant steamroller had trundled across this plot of land—a massive machine, several stories high, a hundred feet across. At the distant edges of the asphalt stood towering walls, topped with sweeping searchlights and barbed wire, easily twenty or thirty feet high. Up above a rocket ship headed to the space station on the moon—they’d finally done it, the shuttles were running now.

I must have made a noise—a whimper perhaps, or a moan, the door squealing as it opened back up, my breathing louder than I thought.

The guard woke up and jumped to his feet.

“I can explain, officer—” I started.

“Get over here,” he yelled.

I did the only thing I could think of in that moment. I ran back inside. But before the door closed, I heard his voice, panicked and familiar.

“Derek, wait . . .” he screamed, lunging for the door, his eyes wide open.

And then I was gone.

This time, for much longer.

• • • •

As the door slammed shut behind me, I stumbled forward, banging into the control panel, my head careening off of something solid, and I started to go under.

The darkness pushed in on me, wrapping around me like a festering blanket as panic crushed me, time slipping forward. I tried to push upward, out of the depths, like a drowning diver struggling to find the surface.

But I failed.

Lying on the cold metal floor, sweat coating my body in a desperate sheen, a sour film of regret and despair, knowing the time I was losing, my friendship, my life.

How long I was unconscious, I do not know.

• • • •

When I opened my eyes, it was quiet, a dim light throbbing in the dark. A sharp pain erupted from my left temple, a crust of blood flaking away under my delicately probing fingers. Groaning, I stood up, turned the latch, pushed on the door, and stumbled out into the chaos.

The heat was the first thing I noticed. That and the fog. It was like stepping out of the frying pan and into the fire—the smell of sulfur, wind gusting hot and foul, as the land around me hid in the hazy mist. It was cloudy, smoky, hard to see, wet and thick, the world around me out of focus. Panic danced across my goose-pebbled flesh in a wave of discomfort, my lungs resisting every breath. Sweat ran down my face in angry rivulets, my gut clenched in knots.

I stood there, trying to see, looking for a landmark, any sign of the park I used to know. On the ground in front of me a metal chair lay in ruin—bent, rusty, and broken—pieces lying here and there, indentations in the dirt. Hoofprints, toe prints, a smattering of smaller feet running this way and that, and then a few that were much larger, bigger than my head.

Beyond the dusky thick curtain of this reality there were unnerving sounds—great heavy thuds that shook the earth, followed by a high-pitched screech from somewhere above me in the fog, and then angry, sharp barks in the distance. The air above my head swirled and a dark presence flew over me, swooping left and then right, only a faint suggestion of movement, a swimming black on muted gray on dirty white.

A shiny object on the ground by the chair got my attention, as I wondered how long I should stand out here, how risky this really was—predator or prey, eat or be eaten. As far as the food chain, I felt smack in the middle.

I took a few hesitant steps before a column of flame erupted with a toxic belch in the distance, a maelstrom of heat shooting high into the atmosphere, pushing meager, russet light through the gray fog.

I picked up the tarnished badge and turned it over in my hands.

It said Buddy.

A chittering from behind me snapped my head in that direction. Above the open door of the concrete closet that was my only refuge came a hiss followed by a stream of white, sticky substance, encasing me in fibers that, within moments, numbed my skin and deadened my limbs. I fell to ground, unable to move, my flesh spasming with pain.

From out of the gloom, eight disjointed legs appeared over the doorway, jet-black and blanketed in coarse hair and fibers, supporting a bulbous head covered in glossy black eyes. Its jagged, metal mandibles clicked together as it danced with rapturous glee—bobbing up and down, its pulsing underbelly glowing red, as it came closer to my prone body.

Its shadow engulfed me, a musky smell of sour flesh and rotting meat filling my nostrils, overpowering my lungs and burning my throat, causing me to gnaw the inside of my cheeks in a jabbering panic.

And then as quickly as it arrived, the hideous creature disappeared, in one whooshing movement, a harsh wind sweeping over me, several feathered legs reaching out, hooks pulling at me, tearing the web, and pulling it off of me in great, sticky strands. It disappeared into the looming sky with hardly a sound, a great bellowing caw making my skull ache. Oily black feathers filled the air as metal gears and pins rained down around me, a melodic cacophony as they struck the hard surface below me.

As I passed out, the toxins from the webbing finally accomplishing their job, the earth reverberated, shifting my body in painful lurches toward the doorway, as a million shiny beetles conveyed me to the opening, the door closing with a gentle click.

• • • •

When I woke up, a cold certainty encased me. How long had I been out this time? I stood in the darkness, the console black and quiet, and then I shoved the door open and was greeted by a great nothingness.

As if standing at the edge of an empty elevator shaft, or the rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, what lay below me was eternity. My mind reeled and I lurched forward, grasping at the door frame in desperation, one foot suspended over the chasm, my eyes straining for anything recognizable in the darkness beneath it. Swimming in the pitch were black currents, oily slicks that shifted their shapes, as here and there a spark of sickly yellow light exploded with a brilliance that dazzled me. I moaned gently, exhausted and bewildered, my eyes closing against my will, leaving the afterimage of the flash burned into my retinas.

I tried to see again.

Twitching in and out of the darkness were coils of phosphorescence, a muted sienna lined in a glossy red with pinpricks of squirming black tadpoles dotted across its surface—none of it making sense. In a flash, I felt the whole of the void surge towards me with a violent urgency, a hunger rippling across its murky substance, a desperate shriek piercing my ears. I pulled at the door to shut it out, but it resisted my efforts, the encroaching abyss relentless in its endlessness, tugging at the door, my flesh, my mind. With every ounce of my remaining energy, muscles burning, tendons straining, I ripped it free from the darkness and pulled it closed, tears streaming down my face, blood pooling in my eardrums.

And then a different kind of darkness wrapped around me, pulling me under.

• • • •

When I regained consciousness, the door hung open a crack, a sliver of ethereal light leaking inward. In the faint glow from the control panel, and in a rage of insanity, I turned every knob I could see to the left, all the way down to zero. When my fumbling hands found the giant lever on the far right side of the console, I yanked it downward and then slammed the door shut.

“Do what you will!” I yelled into the darkness.

And then I collapsed on the floor, and violently wept.

• • • •

When it felt like the right amount of time had passed, I barreled into the door, flinging it open wide, banging it against an alley wall. Standing before me was the OmniPark, in all its glory and prime. A Victorian mansion constructed of dense masonry in odd geometrical shapes and a glassy conservatory loomed nearby, brick walls rising up around it, and in the distance a botanical garden, like none I’d ever seen. Statues of innocent cherubs mingled with several planting beds filled with vivid flowers, and thick, green ornamental bushes trimmed into the shape of hourglasses. A constant ticking filled the air, as a great many clocks were displayed beyond the glass windows, brass and metalwork everywhere. Above and into the distance a monorail ran on a track, gliding silently in a circuit around the park.

Beyond the fences of the garden and past the walls of the mansion I could hear revelry, the smell of grilled meat and fried food, the laughter of children mixed with the shouts of parental guidance, and the clanking of metallic rides. There was half a glass dome to one side, and beyond it a series of caves, with enormous mammoth tusks over the main entrance. At the farthest point was a space station, with its chrome-topped rocket ships gleaming in the sunlight. And to the other side, two different paths extended into their exhibits—one made out of stone, and the other dirt. The former seemed to be built out of cells and membranes, microscopic creatures as large as people, and cars. The latter some sort of primordial forest, with prehistoric trees and ferns, a massive dragonfly mounted over some dining hall, its translucent wings refracting light.

I took this all in as if my mind was a camera set on long-exposure, absorbing an overwhelming amount of colors, sounds, smells, and sensations.

The maelstrom of stimulation made my head swim.

All I wanted to do was go home.

I struggled to catch my breath, as two individuals engaged in an animated conversation at the other end of the alley—a lanky man in an impeccable suit, hair slicked over, glasses perched on his nose, and a woman with dark hair, in a stylish dress, a multitude of brass pendants and charms encircling her neck. From this distance it was hard to tell if they were fighting or just excited, a clipboard in her left hand, the man glancing at his watch. And then they embraced in a kiss, quick and passionate, before parting, glancing toward a door at the back of the mansion, and then in my direction.

Their gaze held, both of them frozen for a moment, and then they walked my way.

If I’d had the energy, I might have climbed back inside, but the exhaustion of my travels only made me weep silently, as they approached me, grins sliding across their faces.

“Son, are you okay? You look disheveled and lost. I’m Dalton, and this is my wife, Evelyn. This is our park. And from the looks of the open door here, you seem to have stumbled across something that I thought was locked and secured.”

I could only nod, his face kind and beaming, her eyes sparkling with excitement.

“How did you get back here? Can we take you home? You from around here?”

They continued to stare at me, and then his wife elbowed him, and whispered in his ear. They looked me up and down, taking in my vintage denim jeans, my mycelium leather high-tops, and my t-shirt with the word SUPREME on it, cycling through its preset loop of colors and patterns.

“On second thought,” Dalton said, “I don’t know if where you are from is the right question.”

“Too true. More like when are you from, my dear?” Evelyn asked before smiling, clutching her clipboard to her chest, red lipstick framing her white teeth.

I told them about the destruction of the park, the way I’d gone forward, and then back, the things I’d seen along the way, and what I’d left behind. They nodded at every improbable detail without a hint of skepticism. Evelyn retrieved her purse and withdrew a box of Animal Crackers, the lions and elephants inside their cages a welcome snack. This was followed by a large plastic bottle filled with an oversweet orange liquid that could only have been Tang.

When Dalton stepped inside the metal door with a small flashlight in his teeth, I didn’t have the energy to warn him, let alone stop him. I could hear him clicking buttons, cranking dials, and the unmistakable sound of the large lever being pushed back up again, pointing up toward the stars.

“I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” Evelyn said, her hand on my shoulder a comforting presence while we waited for Dalton to emerge. The gardens loomed beyond her shoulder, but it was as if I were lying down in those kaleidoscopic flower beds as her perfume drifted over me—hypnotic jasmine and gardenia with subtle violet and sandalwood underneath. I knew that scent, as my grandmother used to wear it.

They call it . . . Chaaaaarlieeeeee!

And I smiled for the first time in hours, days, eons.

“When you get back, Derek, you must destroy it. It’s a dangerous invention that we haven’t figured out how to wrangle yet,” Dalton said as he stepped out of the machine.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Do your best,” Evelyn chimed in.

I looked back down the alleyway, and there stood two strangely familiar people—a buzzcut man in slacks and a striped shirt talking to a woman with a bit of bob in a peach pantsuit. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them, and yet, I wasn’t sure why. He offered her an ice cream cone and she leaned in to lick the top scoop. He smirked beneath his aviator glasses, and they both laughed. They were almost unrecognizable and then it all slammed into focus.

“My parents . . .” I began.

“This moment in time was chosen,” Dalton said, as I pulled my gaze from the alien version of my parents I’d just seen. “Time beats us all down, son. Your parents were once young and vital. But you should get going, I’m afraid. Ripples can be made.”

He was right—I had to leave. Before things came undone.

Evelyn gave me a gentle hug before Dalton shook my hand with authority and ushered me back through that red metal door. It took all of my courage to seal it again behind me, fearful of where the infernal device might take me, but the last thing I saw gave me a moment of peace. Dalton and Evelyn smiled arm in arm, their eyes twinkling with tears, beaming with pride for what they’d built, burdened by sadness for what had failed. They now had confirmation of something beyond their park, something bigger than us all. Their life’s work had led to something extraordinary, and that seemed to fill them with hope.

I’d take it.

• • • •

When I stepped outside again, Buddy was smoking a cigarette and tapping his foot, looking frustrated and impatient.

“Dude, what the hell,” he said, dropping the butt, and stamping it out. “You were in there an hour! I tried tugging and banging on the door, but it wouldn’t open. I almost called the . . .”

I rushed forward and threw my arms around him as if to prevent myself from being pulled back into the machine. He didn’t hug me back, remaining stiff as a board, in shock, but I wouldn’t let him go. He must have seen the desperation in my eyes the moment I had stepped outside because he didn’t say a word until I released him.

“Hey . . .” he started with a mix of confusion and anger in his features.

I gripped him by the shoulders, holding him at arm’s length, tears welling in my eyes. He softened at the sight of my pained expression, recognizing in me a deep terror, having been shaken to my core, and in a feverish panic I recounted all the things I’d seen, every visceral detail oozing out of me into the present moment—sour, and glossy, almost sticky to the touch.

“I need to see it,” he said, stepping past me toward the gaping maw that had nearly swallowed me forever.

“No! Buddy, no!” I yelled, and he stopped dead in his tracks. The curious grin on his face quickly washed away, blood draining from his face as he recognized the barely-contained insanity in my eyes.

“We need to lock this up, right away,” I said. “Now.”

I grabbed the door and slammed it shut, a whimper that begged to turn into a crying jag, sliding the latches over the hooks, one at a time. Whoever had opened this door before us, wherever they were now, this portal had to be closed.

“Hand me the locks,” I said. And he did.

One by one, I locked it shut, spinning the dials on some, clicking the others shut as we gathered the keys out of the bin.

At the hole in the chain-link fence, we bent the wire mesh back into place, securing it to the post as best we could so it looked intact from a distance. There wasn’t much more we could do, except tell everyone that there was nothing here, nothing worth exploring, discouraging them from going inside, hoping that the dried-up, drifting topsoil might soon cover the place completely.

Two keys were in his pockets, and two in mine. And as we walked home in silence, the nomad’s battery dead, I dropped one in a sewer grate, a plink down below, followed by a whining of gears as an automated sewer bot investigated the noise. Later, he’d toss one in a dumpster behind the plastic surgery mall, the sickly sweet smell of liposuction waste filling the air. I told him to lose the other one, and to never tell me what he did with it. I’d flush mine down the toilet, later that night, wrapped in a bit of toilet paper, as I watched the water swirl hypnotically into oblivion.

Before we parted, at the intersection on the top of the hill, where north was his house, and south was mine, I tried to explain.

“Buddy, I . . .”

“It’s okay, man. I get it. And honestly? I don’t really want to know. Some things, once they’ve been seen? They can’t be unseen.”

“Once they’re known,” I continued, “they can’t be unknown.”

We stood with our hands stuffed in the pockets of our jeans.

“Like my grandfather’s funeral,” Buddy said without taking his eyes off the horizon. “He looked so gray in the casket, like a cheap wax dummy of the man I loved. Then, afterward, in the alley behind the funeral home, I saw my aunt kissing some staff member, half her age. On the ride home, my father pulled over and vomited on the side of the highway. Just left the car door open, bent over in the weeds like some kid at a frat party. His face was like he’d seen a ghost and he couldn’t stop trembling so I had to drive the rest of the way.” He slipped a cigarette out of the crumpled pack and lit it, letting that first exhale drift up into the night sky before he spoke again. “I could have done without that day entirely.”

I took the cigarette from him, inhaled deeply, and handed it back. As I exhaled it up into the night sky, my ordeal seemed so far away now. Fading already.

“Tomorrow we find a new hobby,” I said, and we managed to share a half-hearted laugh.

That fall, and into the spring, we’d hack our encephalobots for more credits, rig the evaluations for our future employment, take a bullet train to the west coast, and kiss some synthetic girls. We’d finally take a shuttle to the moon, the Earth and our problems here diminishing in size with every mile of travel into the great beyond. We’d yell at each other, beat each other senseless, then end our friendship over slights and betrayals, both real and imagined, before picking it up the next day, or the day after, as if nothing ever happened.

• • • •

When I got home that night, I crept through the side door, waiting to hear the scolding voice of my father, or confront the worried face of my mother. But neither happened. They hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone.

I passed my old man in the living room filled with cigarette smoke and dog hair, slumped in his faded brown leather recliner, wearing his perpetual scowl while engrossed in a documentary on ancient Egypt. He didn’t even acknowledge my presence standing out beyond the light of the television.

“Dad, I just wanted to say thank you for all of your hard work, for everything you do for this family.”

I left it at that, not sure if he was capable of hearing me. As I climbed the stairs out of view, glancing back for just a moment, his eyes met mine, and I swore for just a second he softened. He didn’t reply, before returning to his show, but his expression had said more than enough.

I passed my mother, hunched over the delicate glow of the magnifying lamp in her sewing room, humming along at her workbench, surrounded by cluttered shelves of pattern books, piles of vivid fabrics, and endless spools of thread in every possible color.

“What are you working on, Mom?” I asked.

She raised her head, mouth open slightly, pausing in mid-stitch.

“Fixing a hem on your favorite jeans. You’re so rough on them.”

“I love those jeans,” I said. “Thank you for taking such great care of me.”

She stopped working for a second, a twinkle in her eye, biting her lower lip, the needle catching a gleam of light.

Before she could respond, I shuffled down the hall, so eager to find my bed, and collapsed on top of the covers to the familiar sound of the heater downstairs kicking in. A lingering smell of fried chicken drifted up through the floor vents, paired with vanilla from a nearby candle, and a faint hint of lemon-scented cleaner.

I closed my heavy eyelids and slipped into a waiting dream.

Because I still could.

©2024 by Richard Thomas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Thomas is the award-winning author of nine books: four novels—Incarnate, Breaker, Disintegration, and Transubstantiate; four collections—Spontaneous Human Combustion, Tribulations, Staring Into the Abyss, and Herniated Roots; and one novella of The Soul Standard. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker (twice), Shirley Jackson, Thriller, and Audie awards. His over 175 stories in print include The Best Horror of the Year (Volume Eleven), Cemetery Dance (twice), Behold!: Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders (Bram Stoker Award winner), The Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors (Shirley Jackson Award winner), Weird Fiction Review, The Seven Deadliest, Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, Qualia Nous (#1&2), Chiral Mad (#2-4), PRISMS, and Shivers VI. He has also edited five anthologies. Visit whatdoesnotkillme.com for more information.

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

Resistance

Cat Rambo | 287 words

We have seen you come before. We have always resisted. We will always resist.

The first aliens came as conquerors, ready to crush us, ready to destroy us. We went to ground, we hid. We fought. We picked away at them, bit by bit, letting them know that they would never be welcome here. It took time, but finally they decided the struggle was not worth it, and they went away.

The next aliens came as patrons, prepared to help us, to give us things. Uplift us. But we like what we have made of ourselves, and we will stay with it. So they gave us gifts, and we returned them; they gave us more yet, and we returned those too, until the space around their ships were litterings of all the things they thought we would treasure. They left.

Others came, approached us as siblings, said we were long lost but surely part of the whole. They looked a little like us, it is true, but we are who we are, and so we drove them away, just like all the others, and we did the same with the next set, who said we were friends, without even knowing us.

We will resist . . .

But you have come in another way. You come as strangers, acknowledging our differences. Knowing that a word may signify one thing to you, another to us, and that a world of meaning lies in that. Knowing that slowly is the only way to go.

You come as strangers, because you know that is the first step and there can be no shortcuts.

And so we know you as strangers first.

And so, finally, we open our doors.

©2024 by Cat Rambo.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nebula award-winning Cat Rambo (they/them) lives, writes, and teaches in a 100 year old house in the Midwest. Their 300+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Their books include You Sexy Thing, Carpe Glitter, and Hearts of Tabat, with Rumor Has It appearing from Tor Macmillan this September. Find out more about them at kittywumpus.net

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

The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strain’d

Archita Mittra | 4796 words

It is the year 3048 and you still hate your job.

In the past eight hours since landing on this wasteland planet, you fended off two rogue mechas, hacked the building’s access code, and decapitated a droid—all to recover a rusty motherboard from the wreckage. The hazmat suit itches but the air is too poisonous to take it off. You glance at the circuit—an antiquated iridium-powered device that went obsolete at least two centuries ago—and feel a familiar sense of puzzlement. You have no clue what Olympus Corporation Ltd. needs that device for; but then again, you never question the missions they send you on.

Afterward, with the starship charging by the light of two waning moons, you stroll through the empty metropolis. The inhabitants have no doubt perished or fled to better climes, but you’re surprised that much of the metallic architecture is still intact. Giant suspension bridges hang like ribs, caging junk-clogged, waterless rivers. Lonely high-rises pierce the pinkish-gold sky like the jagged, decaying teeth of a leviathan’s carcass. Perhaps this is one of the plague planets. You spot a cleaner robot half-heartedly sweeping the silent streets and something tugs at you.

You look away.

An old diner glitters at the end of the lane. Its graffitied signboard has fallen off, the windows coated with dust but the faint red-blue neon lights announcing THIRTY-FOUR HOURS OPEN remind you of a planet that you can never return to. By your holo-watch, you still have twenty-seven minutes to kill before they demand an update or lower your rating by a percentile. Shrugging, you walk through the revolving glass doors like a portal to the past.

You almost expect the smell of oily French fries and moldy burgers to greet you. Instead, you are accosted by another droid. Startled, you yelp and take a step backward, reaching for the stun gun.

But it does not attack you.

It simply stands in front of you, as if awaiting an order.

You remain silent, staring at it. Its paint has flaked off, baring its corroding metal body. You feel a tinge of embarrassment. You look around, to the empty chairs and tables. The blue walls are still plastered with faded posters of early space travel—a cruise through the Kuiper belt, budget-friendly tours of Saturn’s moons, and an all-expense-paid trip to the Venus observatory for a lucky couple. The wall clock has slowed down but its hands still tick, pointing to the three local planetary times and the Galactic Standard Time that the holo-watch and spaceship are correctly calibrated with. Any liquid in the dispenser machine must have since dried up, yet it glimmers with the neon-bright labels of fizzy drinks and energy shakes.

After a few more minutes, the droid limps back to the counter on its rusted wheels and fiddles with the dispenser’s buttons. In between loud, hissing bursts of static, a faint synth-jazz tune whistles from the stereo. You take a seat by the window, wiping the dust off the table with your suited arm. You fight back the temptation to trace your name in that dirt—the way you did, some four centuries ago.

The droid returns, depositing an empty tray and glass. You carefully touch the glass, lift it to the pinkish light filtering through the windows, squinting for a rainbow. There are none. You put the glass down, disappointed.

The droid waits at the counter. The world is eerily silent.

You close your eyes. You can almost imagine the bustling voices that must have once filled this place—humans, cyborgs, and robots, all gathering to exchange gossip, check each other out, make seditious plans, or grab a quick, greasy meal. A nostalgic hunger claws at the pit of your stomach. But it isn’t exactly hunger. The mandatory training had subjected your body to multiple modifications. The first and the mildest of sacrifices was your appetite, since nutrients and stimulants are now pumped directly into the blood. An inert casing replaced your skin to protect it from toxic elements, while nano-bots attached themselves to the maintenance of the internal organs. You cannot afford to upgrade them, just yet; nevertheless, they have tripled your lifetime, as well as your indentured servitude.

You clear your throat. You wish to speak something, anything, but you don’t quite know what to say. Besides, you need to leave soon. The motherboard must be duly deposited at the nearest recycling station, so that you can knock off a couple of credits from your debt. Yet, you are seized with the rebellious desire to linger by the counter. The holo-watch tings warningly, on cue.

As you walk towards the doors, the droid limps to your side again. It stretches a thin, rusty arm toward you.

You’re confused—does it wish to shake hands, or is it expecting a tip?

A low, harsh laugh escapes your lips. Despite the exhaustion, you marvel at the novelty of this lonely thing, still doing its rounds in a decaying world. You search for a spare coin or a metallic chip, but your hands come up empty.

• • • •

Through the endless centuries, you visit the droid at every chance you get.

It isn’t easy since Olympus Corporation Ltd. barely offers any paid holidays. Most of your co-workers usually spend them by signing up for free preview tours of luxury ateliers in the wealthier sections of the galaxy. They attend them in low-grade VR, of course. You don’t particularly get along with them, but it doesn’t matter since you only bump into them while waiting in line at headquarters, weighed down with cartons full of equipment. Sometimes, they rent customizable geisha-bots for a night or two and politely ask you to join. You politely decline the invitations. On Earth, you had little interest in sex, and after the rampant bio-modifications, the appeal of orgasms decreased further. You aren’t sure how you can explain that to them. So, in between missions to nearby planets or taking expensive leaves that leave you more debt-ridden than before, your starship steers itself towards the diner of a decommissioned planet.

Each time, the droid welcomes you in like a familiar customer. It plops the dusty tray and glass onto the table before retreating to its favored spot behind the counter. You lift the glass, pretend to take a few sips, close your eyes, and begin.

• • • •

You tell the droid about your childhood on Earth. How on weekends, you’d catch up with your friends at the drive-in theater to watch movies about aliens and battleships, fingers sticky with caramel popcorn. How, on the way home, huge billboards on the highways dazzled with adverts for the latest luxury hotel on the newly-terraformed moons of Jupiter. How you’d wonder about which retirement satellite you’d choose when you finally made a fortune.

That was before governments and megacorps deemed that pollution levels on Earth were too inhospitable for human habitation.

You remember those final days well. The rich had already flown away in their glitzy space-jets, taking their chosen concubines and cadets in the cargo. Meanwhile, the poors were frantically bribing, blackmailing, and killing for passage—scrambling to get on freight-loaders only to be tossed out of the skies if the vehicle was too heavy to take off. Interstellar travel was so ridiculously expensive. By then, your father was already dead and your mother dying, and your three sisters were selling their bodies to collect enough credit so that at least one member of the family could afford a ticket to make it out alive.

You had been laid off for two years, stewing in shame and self-loathing until Olympus Corporation Ltd. offered an escape route for those below the poverty line—secure passage away from Earth and a minimum-wage job whose perks included a fair amount of galaxy-wide touring. You and your fellow factory workers, who had never even been on an airplane, were only too eager to sign the contract.

You put down the glass. Your voice cracks.

You know that you had no way of knowing what they wanted your bodies for, but you cannot forgive yourself for what happened after.

They sent you to the most perilous locations in the universe, to trawl through worlds littered with radioactive junk, abandoned apparatus, and sunken cities—the detritus of countless colonial conquests as mega-conglomerates swiftly spread their tentacles across galaxies. Like the graverobbers in the stories your father once scared you with, you searched for salvageable iridium, scrap metal, and obsolete devices and delivered them to the company headquarters for recycling.

The droid’s speakers do not work, but that doesn’t stop you from reliving your worst nightmares, over and over.

• • • •

There is a certain sense of routine to your slog. A typical seventy-two-hour work shift begins as soon as you receive the coordinates on your holo-watch. Then your starship charts a course across the endless reaches of space, auto-piloting all the way to the destination planet.

On longer trips, when you’re done sorting the junk paraphernalia into neatly labeled piles, you can lounge back as pulsating galaxies and quasars skid past your enhanced field of vision through the pressure-resistant glass. They throb, like the many constellated hearts of the universe. Each time you pass a nebula, glimmering like a shrine of some eldritch entity, you search for the shape of some animal or monster in those variegated, slow-twirling, giant clouds. You remember a game played with your sisters—on nights when the pangs of hunger kept sleep at bay, the dance of shadows on the plaster-peeling walls of the condo offered a different, mesmerizing tale to each one of you.

Once, while stuck in traffic in an asteroid belt, you witness a gas storm swirl through the surface of the planet like a painting by an invisible hand—a plume of reds and golds mixing and coruscating in a spiral pattern. With shaking hands, you film it on your holo-watch, turning the majestic vista into a mosaic of grainy pixels, and permit yourself the mercy of a smile.

You will show the footage to the droid and then delete it, of course, to avoid suspicion.

• • • •

You don’t know why you do this, risking your life and livelihood to come here, for these one-sided conversations. You don’t even meet the droid that often—perhaps just a handful of times in the grand scheme of things. It isn’t redemption that you seek, although this is certainly easier than visiting your one surviving sister and her child who are eking out a meagre existence in a reservation base in a frigid corner of the solar system, several light years away from the section of the galaxy where you are authorized to fly in. In over half a century, you have seen them exactly twice. Although a fraction of your salary (after numerous processing fees) still trickles towards them, it isn’t enough to afford the latest vaccines or nano-bots. Ensconced in that pinkish-gold light, you lament about the passing of one of your sisters. She’d died a slow, painful death after contracting an infection from an artificial virus. There are so many of those now—an insidious means of population control in refugee colonies that are always attributed to some new-fangled scientific accident or the other.

The droid stands behind the counter and makes no comment.

You didn’t have enough savings to attend her funeral in person—but that is a detail you do not say aloud.

You turn the topic to your other sister—the one who had taken up scavenging like you. Recalling her tragedy now, you stifle a wry laugh. She was tasked with retrieving a soldier-bot from the rubble of a war-ravaged planet when a stray bomb detonated beneath her feet.

But that isn’t the worst bit, you clarify. When you’d filed an insurance claim, the officer vociferously argued that the accident was her own fault and charged you for the loss of valuable property on her behalf.

You shake your head ruefully inside the helmet, and absent-mindedly reach for the glass, so thirsty for a drink. The droid neither speaks nor nods but it saunters towards you. It takes the glass back to the dispenser, ostensibly to refill it.

• • • •

During the long voyages from one hazardous planet to the next, you wonder whether cyborgs are closer to humans or to droids. You’re certain that all your colleagues have similar tragic stories, and so you’re not astonished when most of them voluntarily agree to forget their past, happily upgrading themselves to a full android interface. You wonder if the droid is full of stories like you, but unable to speak. You wonder how much of the droid’s actions are mere functionality programming, or sentience manufactured from code. You wonder if the droid will ever get mad enough to smash itself against the windows, a last fuck-you statement to an indifferent world.

Back on Earth, you were a champion of cyborg and droid rights. You had marched in protests and signed petitions, even though most people in the neighborhood complained about automated labor stealing their jobs.

Back then, you had been so much braver.

After each mission, the holo-watch reminds you that you’re eligible for the upgrade, that you can forever say goodbye to any painful memories and the inconveniences of the human body, that these surgeries are free of cost.

You decline the offers, realizing that you aren’t ready to transition yet.

• • • •

Once, in a moment of vulnerability, you blurt out about that fellow worker who had asked you out. That was back in the glory days when you both had just dropped out of the radioactive mining training institute, desperate to find quick work to support your families. Both of you took up jobs at a nearby factory, assembling cleaner-bots and grading their builds.

After a tedious shift which included some yelling from the manager and accidentally cutting your hand on a rusty nail, you’d shared dinner in a quaint diner like this. For a few stolen hours your heart was aglow, talking and laughing over a plate of fried chicken crumbs and watery coke. Things never progressed beyond that single date. You never saw him again nor recalled his face but you still remember the sensation of warm, bandaged fingers entwined in his, tapping your feet to the beat of a folk song playing on the radio, tracing your names in the misty glass, the sounds and blinking lights of the city washing over both of you like a spell.

The robot’s eyes blink softly, and you shudder at the eerie sensation of being understood.

• • • •

In one of the retrieval missions, your suit gets damaged. Normally, you’d notify your manager right away for a replacement, but you take a detour to the diner, bursting with news. The droid moves a little shakily to greet you.

You plunge into an account of navigating a network of tunnels, deep beneath the planet’s surface, without a holo-map. While wading through shimmering streams of lava, searching for slops of indestructible alloys, you stumbled upon a rotting seed vault. You salvaged whatever you could.

Smug, you spread out the finds on the table.

There are no claps nor cheers of applause; the droid makes no effort to even refill the glass. You’re dimly aware that the overseer at the headquarters will take credit for this momentous discovery, but it still doesn’t stop that lovely feeling coursing along your veins. You’re so eager about the possibility of lost flora being resurrected on newer and stranger soil, you feel lighter than ever.

Then you notice one of the wheels of the robot is missing.

The holo-watch registers your elevated pulse and begins playing an ad for a new nutrient serum. You turn it off.

You realize that you don’t know how old this droid is, for how long it has silently waited at this derelict diner, staring at the almost peeled-off posters of places it has probably never been to, listening to the ticking of the clock that is slowly but certainly slowing down. You do not know if it ever strolls through the empty streets, on the lookout for a certain cleaner-bot. You do not know if more mechas wait beyond the city borders, like dormant volcanoes waiting for the right moment to erupt. You feel so afraid for this droid, lest anything should happen to it while you are gone.

Yet you know with the same certainty that you’ll never pay off your debt to Olympus Corporation Ltd., that the robot is dying. The synth-jazz music plays softly on, and night falls upon the diner with a sickening urgency.

• • • •

When you visit next, a few months later, the robot is having trouble moving from one corner of the diner to another. Within the next fortnight, the movements of its arms turn jerky.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. You’re a scavenger, not an engineer, but you make a mental list of parts that you would need to repair the droid—a change of arms, frictionless rollers, possibly a new motherboard to reconfigure its pathways. Thankfully, your job is the perfect excuse to scour entire planetary systems to find what you need. You do your best to cover your tracks.

While collecting the company-mandated equipment, you pilfer other outdated devices and gadgets that catch your eye. You store some of them in the hull of the starship; meanwhile, larger components such as a mecha’s disjointed arm and cyborg trawlers find a home in the diner’s backroom. With the spare parts, you craft small metallic critters and set them loose in the city’s gutters. You install motion sensors onto the larger cleaner-bots that roam the streets like spectres, and gift them a limb or two so they can wave at each other.

But this diner droid is unique. It requires specialized parts that aren’t so easily available. In the long voyages, you are either busy fiddling with antiquated automata or browsing the galactic ethernet, learning whatever you can about the robot and barely glancing when an ice comet or a space-jet whizzes past.

From a single research paper published in an obscure journal that speculated whether soldier bots could suffer from PTSD, you slowly piece together that the droid was formerly a foot-soldier bot. It was employed in neo-colonial warfare and built to withstand even nuclear fallout. Later, the company that had once made trillions selling them as weapons of mass destruction went bankrupt and shut down, never manufacturing those models again. While the ginormous mechas were later decommissioned, the bots were repurposed into household servants and shop assistants. A few decades later, most of the bots began malfunctioning. They were quickly discarded in favor of new-fangled sentient robots.

The droid must have gotten lucky to have survived this long.

• • • •

While you are away on some other planet, or being appraised at the plush headquarters of Olympus Corporation Ltd. the droid must have figured out that the dispensers did not work and had beaten them into a pulp, losing an arm in the process. You have not witnessed this act of metallic carnage.

But it makes you wonder if the droid is haunted by memories of war, just as you are still overwhelmed by the fragments and scents of your former life on Earth. Perhaps, the bot was part of a larger garrison that had ingeniously plotted the execution of enemies. Maybe, the corroding metallic arms that now existed to serve had once killed humans and other lifeforms. When the diner had first opened, perhaps for a split second, the droid had hesitated, confused by the influx of hungry guests they’d once been programmed to kill.

If you tinker with the bot’s circuit board, perhaps, you can awaken that killing machine and set it loose in the offices of Olympus.

This thought strikes you more than once, filling you with guilt. Each time, you look away and rush out towards the starship like a trespasser unwilling to be caught.

• • • •

With each visit, the music steadily becomes fainter, then a hiss of static.

The day it stops altogether, you linger at the doorway, reluctant to return to the starship. Illuminated by the blue-pinkish glow of two orbiting moons, the diner is transformed into an unreal and magical space, a relic of the past that is somehow still alive because everyone else has forgotten about it.

The robot waits beside you, holding you back without uttering a single word.

Usually, you’d drop an old coin or a tiny bolt into its outstretched palms, happy to see a red light blinking in the visor. But on some days, you can offer nothing. You clench your cold fingers and unclench them again, and after a brief nod, walk away from the deafening silence.

• • • •

Eventually, the droid loses the tray and offers you only a single empty glass when you visit. Yet, you’re nowhere close to locating another arm or a compatible circuit board.

You try to be more talkative in the childish hope that the company might heal the droid’s malaise. You and your co-workers aren’t permitted to ask questions or disclose the sensitive nature of the missions to anyone, but here, you can voice doubts and conspiracies without restraint: Why are companies so eager to retrieve outmoded components from abandoned planets? Perhaps the whispers are true—that multi-planetary conglomerates are slowly running out of resources. While standing in line, one of the co-workers had once made an offhand comment—that these old pieces of scrap metal and junk equipment were actually auctioned off by investors for billions and trillions. But your personal theory is more insidious—that the latest iridium machinery that Olympus claimed to manufacture is possibly and very probably recycled from the salvaged remains of the past.

The droid cannot answer these questions. The red lights in its visor no longer blink.

You choke back the frustration, and go on venting about all the ways Olympus Corporation Ltd. have repeatedly violated your body under the pretext of enhancing its functions and boosting productivity, turning you into an empty husk. You question if you’re still human or cyborg anymore.

You look up helplessly at the droid’s face, searching for your own in the visor’s reflection.

You confess about the two times you’d tried to engineer an accident to end your existence. Yet, unlike your father who’d hanged himself after the police had broken into a union meeting and shot down his comrades, voluntary suicide isn’t permitted in your semi-machine build. You feel envious of the sister who had died in the bomb blast. Your voice, through the helmet, comes out rough, laced with regret and bitterness.

What a tragedy, you spit into the glass.

The droid jerks, swings its lone arm at you. You duck, powered by the nano-bot reflexes. It misses and hits the glass, instead.

It falls to the floor, splinters.

You stare at the mess, horrified.

It doesn’t move when you kneel down to clean up the shards. It doesn’t move when you promise that you’ll find a way to repair it, that one day, you’ll take it out of the diner and show it the many wonders of the universe from the starship. It doesn’t move when you confess your deepest fantasy, of rooting the ship’s navigation system and steering it towards a rebel colony you’ve only read about on the ethernet, that may or may not exist but is still worth a shot anyway.

It stands immobile as though it cannot register your presence at all.

It is only when you’re outside by the window that it moves jerkily to stand on the opposite side of the dusty, dirty glass.

• • • •

In your haste to repair the droid, you become careless with your official work. The sudden absences that aren’t logged by the holo-watch, which turned increasingly frequent in the last decade, have aroused suspicion among your superiors.

Soon enough, they punish you for negligence: your license to update the nanobots is permanently revoked. You can never completely heal from the many injuries you sustain during the missions. Corrugated iron missiles pierce your outer casing, searing and infecting the muscles beneath. The fumes you inhale find their way to your thin lungs; you cough up blood and spittle, straining to breathe. The missing circuit board haunts your dreams.

Yet, you learn to laugh, louder and coarser.

The prospect of your impending death does not frighten you in the slightest. Instead, what fills you with more dread is the fact that one day, soon enough, you’ll arrive at the diner only to watch the droid sputter and become motionless forever.

• • • •

That day arrives earlier than you expect.

To repair the droid, you need a specific motherboard, powered with an iridium chip that is no longer manufactured anywhere. After months of fruitless searching across the black markets of half a dozen planetary systems, you recall the fight with the rogue mechas the first time you landed on this world. When you’d retrieved the only functional circuit board from the rubble and proudly handed it over to the bosses.

Unless you can break into the company vaults located on an icy moon in the Sagittarius belt, there is no hope for you.

You think about the robot’s open palms when it first saw you. You had always assumed that it was hoping for a tip or something, but now you wonder if it had sensed that treasure you were carrying that day. Perhaps, all this time it was simply waiting for you to return what you had so unwittingly stolen over two centuries ago.

Resigned to your gloom, you spend all the remaining credits to ask for a leave, so that you can at least be there for the droid’s final moments.

Perhaps you can apologize for dooming it, so thoroughly.

The request is promptly declined. Yet familiar coordinates blink on the holo-watch, announcing your latest mission: retrieve model MS-271, see coordinates. When you click on the attachment, a grainy photograph of your diner robot, standing next to the dispensers, pops up.

You are non-plussed as to how Olympus Corporation Ltd might have secured this image. Then you remember a gas storm filmed almost a lifetime ago that you had excitedly shown to the droid on the holo-watch one windy night and deleted right after.

You gasp. Had they really been tracking your movements all along, or had some other scavenger on a mission taken this photograph?

Bile rises to your throat, but it doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters.

Nothing will ever matter for you have been allotted exactly seventy-two hours to deliver the droid to the headquarters for recycling.

• • • •

When you arrive at the diner for the last time, you see through the dirty glass that the droid is already sputtering, like a creature trapped inside a cage, doomed to repeat its movements until the last gear stops turning. You rush forward and pull the bot close against your beating heart.

The lone, corroding arm flinches at your touch but does not fight back. The red lights in the visor blink unintelligibly. After a few jerky movements, the droid becomes still. You curse loudly, nervously adjusting the bolts on its neck; the visor blinks back on again.

You take off the helmet, and cradle the faintly-twitching droid in your arms. The poisons in the air cannot kill you—just yet. You open your mouth and close it stupidly, the apology dying on your parched lips. Pressed against the metal, you hear the sound of a still-beating heart and the tick-tock of an immortal clock. Then you carry the droid back to the starship and turn on the engines. With trembling fingers, you override the ship’s controls and manually enter the coordinates.

You take a deep breath, and allow yourself a mercy that you have been denied your whole life—a hope for the impossible.

Perhaps, the patrols shall find you before you escape. They will rip apart your body for any salvageable nanobots and then incinerate all organic components. The diner robot will also possibly be stripped for its parts, or be granted a new lease of life in a luxury hotel planet under a different model name. Or maybe, if the stars align and you are very very lucky, you shall somehow dodge the police shuttles and escape, just in the nick of time, to a rebel colony in a forgotten corner of the universe.

But before all that can happen, you shall watch the stars for one last time with someone you love by your side, and there is no power in the universe to steal that away from you.

It is the year 3271 and your seventy-two-hour work shift suddenly feels very short.

©2024 by Archita Mittra.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Archita Mittra is a writer, editor and artist from Kolkata, India. Her work is published or forthcoming in Lightspeed, Locus Magazine, Reactor, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She is an Ignyte Award finalist for Best Critic while her fiction and poetry have been nominated for the Pushcart and best of the net prizes. You can find her haunting Twitter and Instagram @architamittra.

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

Under the Skin

Deborah L. Davitt | 1004 words

I know what you’re going to say. That I got what I deserved. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Nothing like kicking someone when they’re down, eh? But here I am, dressed in all my mistakes. Huddling inside a house I don’t dare to leave.

I’m an early adopter. Mostly, that’s not a bad thing. I got nanite tattoos as soon as they came on the market. You control them with an app on your phone. And powered by your own body’s electricity, the nanites migrate wherever you want, glowing with bioluminescence like a firefly. So you can be whoever you want, whenever you want.

I’d plaster my face with dayglow butterflies at a rave. Go full tribal sleeves at a rougher bar. Turn them dormant for my corporate job—or better yet, keep them just under my clothes, a full-body irezumi suit that no one knew was there.

It was expensive, but I was young, had a good programming job, and paying off my student loans looked doable. Then the economy crashed, I lost my job, and I needed cash just to eat. When I was near rock-bottom, a friend told me about AdsUp!, the app that would pay to run ads on my skin. Why not let them even run in my sleep? More adtime up meant more money in the bank, right?

The ads triggered off the cloud of data surrounding each passerby in the street, on the subway, on the bus. Their search histories crowded my skin, even with the things that they might not have wanted people to know—what detergent they use, would they like some artisanal cheese, how about a super-pack of flavored condoms?

I got stares at first, but after the first week, no one even saw me anymore. They tuned me out. Just one more intrusive piece of advertisement in a world already saturated with it. Once in a while, some older person would stop and tell me how I was ruining my life.

Oh, it wasn’t ruined yet. Not by half.

You see, advertising doesn’t work if people ignore it or blacklist it. And AdsUp! went belly-up two years after I signed on with them. Low response rate, no way to measure engagement, some crap like that. I’d found a job by then, so I figured that wasn’t my problem.

Except . . . when they folded, hackers got ahold of their programming assets. And they started sending out messages to the network of adware assets.

They took over my skin, overriding my controls. The first wave was obviously teenagers—lots of dick jokes and some nasty harassment of a girl at their school.

They got caught.

The second wave was smarter, older, more sophisticated. Suddenly, my skin sprouted hate speech. Manifestoes. I was a living testament to other people’s prejudices and rage. Bomb threats. Racial slurs. I can’t go outside without my skin completely covered, for fear someone will think I believe this shit, and curb-stomp me. It’s an odd kind of modesty, I realize. Not religious at all. Try explaining that to a prospective employer, even on a vid call interview.

Yeah. The gig work I can get, programming this and that from home barely covers the bills. This isn’t a recognized disability; it’s not an expression of religious freedom. There’s nothing that protects me under the law.

It doesn’t hurt when the nanites move under my skin. I rarely know it’s happened, till I look in a mirror and see that someone’s painted a swastika over my face. I can’t do a damn thing about it, besides stay indoors. And you can forget about a social life. Dating. I don’t even answer the door when the delivery service brings my groceries. I wait for them to leave, crack open the door, and drag the packages inside.

As I sit here, taken in by a couple of my remaining friends out of charity, I’m a modern kind of leper. My face, my identity erased, subsumed to other people’s cancerous beliefs. I know that this isn’t the worst it could be. Honestly, what I fear most is the day that the hackers decide to monetize me once more, and sell my skin to some porn site.

You’re laughing now. You’re saying to yourself that I turned myself into a prostitute the day I sold my skin to AdsUp!

Maybe. But that was something I agreed to, willingly. None of the rest of this has been anything other than a violation. I’m not the only one who feels that way, either.

You didn’t know? There’s a whole community of us lepers. All shut-ins with nothing to do but scour the internet for clues and try to cobble together a cure. Oh yeah, we dream of that. The medical company that manufactured the nanites posted some hotfixes before they went under, sued into oblivion by the class-action suit, the residuals of which are what most of us live on. We all pry at the patch codes. Try to jailbreak their programming—so what if it violates the EULA of a defunct corporation? We’re just trying to hash out some new tweak that’ll work for a while.

Till it doesn’t anymore.

We’ve all tried medical extraction of the nanites, too—trouble is, the hackers got clever and made the little buggers self-replicating. So unless you get them all, they just reproduce, using your own body tissues for materials, till they’re back up to speed again. You’ve never been so hungry in your life as when you’re trying to eat faster than the nanites consume you, I assure you.

You want to know what gives me hope?

I’ve been working with the nanites on my own, not in collaboration with my fellow lepers. Changing their core processes. Teaching them. Getting them to form their own network.

Yeah, I know, AI research is dicey ethical business.

But in the end, I’d rather hear what they have to say than the rest of my common humanity.

©2024 by Deborah L. Davitt.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her award-winning poetry and prose has appeared in over seventy journals, including F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her Elgin-nominated poetry collections, The Gates of Never, Bounded by Eternity, and From Voyages Unreturning, see deborahldavitt.com. She also has a new poetry chapbook coming out in 2024: Xenoforming, as well as a TTRPG coming to Kickstarter in later the same year: Mists & Memory.

Mud Maidens Rise

K.A. Wiggins | 558 words

At first, it was the not-quite-hidden things.

Worms suspended from sticky silk, tree-trapping the unwary. Glassine jointed lines, half-helical, hardly seen vitreous shadows. Diamonds caught in fallen leaves and blades of grass under midnight streetlamps after the rain, heavier and more multitudinous than dew, glittering fields of a fleeting harvest that slicks the skin, leaving nothing behind but damp disappointment.

Then it was the half-seen.

The echoes and shades, the empty rooms that still held the warmth of bodies only just departed, the calls on the edge of hearing. The cluster of stumps cut just so for a witches’ brew-off in the back woods. The lacey wafers of snowmelt that mark facades and balconies and windows and lovely scrollwork-edged doors for entire ice-faerie empires formed from white banks higher than your head yesterday that will decay by evening, collapse with the dawn, and turn to sludge soon after.

But then, oh then the mud maidens rise, wavering and beckoning and humming their low hypnotic tunes that speak of the cool dampness beneath the trees and the slow sinking freedom from striving that you crave.

Before you danced with the mud maidens, you knew what it was to fly.

Your feet fell slow, the wind rising, your progress hitching just for a moment, weightless. You ran and jumped, just to feel it, leaped the last steps to remind yourself gravity held you but lightly.

And you walked on water.

Reached for the trembling surface, pressed your soles to its coolness and felt it push back, playful, welcoming. Stand, oh human child, trust and walk, it sang, in its lapping against the pilings.

Perhaps you stood, perhaps you danced, perhaps you flew. Perhaps you crooned back to it, a waiting song, a not-yet song. A mud-maiden, not a lakeling, nor yet a seafolk song.

Perhaps you laughed, broke the surface with a kick and a splash and jumped in.

Was that before or after the mirrors?

Before or after (after) you stood (on your toes, so small, so quiet that no one thought to come looking and what if they had? What then?) and, stretching on your toes, you stared into (through? Through.) the mirror. Not just into the mirror, but into your own mismatched eyes, marvelling at the spattering of brown in the blue, the squiggles and bands and movement. The endless, shivering movement of them, even when you tried to hold so still.

And the eyes in the mirror stared back, moving (shivering, shuddering, constricting), drawing you in, alien and dark and other.

After that, every time you closed your eyes, you saw those others, endless others. Watching. Wanting. Now, oh now, you wonder if it was then that the world started cracking open around you. Or if it was always splintering, and it was only then that you learned to look. To really see the barely-theres and the nearly-almost-theres and the shouldn’t-be-theres.

To accept that, if most people went about their days ignoring or unseeing the one, why shouldn’t the others be just as there, even if they were neglected.

What sounds, what smells—what unacknowledged senses beyond describing—then, did all these well-formed willfully blind earth-bound plodders go about their days so careful not to ignore?

And what—oh, what—will become of those who forget that one should not look at hidden things?

©2024 by K.A. Wiggins.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

K.A. Wiggins (Kaie) is an award-winning Canadian speculative fiction author best known for “eco-apocalypse + monsters in dystopian Vancouver” gothic YA Fantasy series Threads of Dreams. Her quietly subversive works exploring the tangled webs of society, environment, and identity through intricate, dreamlike tales of monsters and magic can be found in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Pulphouse Magazine, Mysterion, and The NoSleep Podcast, among others. She teaches with the Creative Writing for Children Society in the greater Vancouver area and abroad and is the president of the Children’s Writers & Illustrators of British Columbia Society. Find her at kawiggins.com or @kaiespace on social.

Look at the Moon

Dominique Dickey | 9420 words

We drove out to Joshua Tree for the star party—a gathering of amateur astronomers under a clear, dark sky. It was Holly’s idea, an impromptu adventure on a Friday after work: “Hey, Lou, do you want to go look at the moon tonight?”

Holly had the best ideas and the worst ideas, and in the daylight, it was hard to tell them apart at first glance. I took a gamble. I said yes.

And I meant it—I wanted nothing more than to lay down under the Milky Way with my hand in hers and gaze into forever. For a long time, our love was the biggest thing I knew how to believe in.

• • • •

When we met, I was trying to find God and Holly was trying to split the difference, looking for something halfway between the terrifying God of her youth and what she saw as heresy. She was looking for the right kind of God, because the only alternative was the sin of losing faith entirely.

I asked her if she was afraid of God, or if what she was really afraid of was people, after growing up in a family that used the Bible like a blunt weapon.

She considered it. We were in a church basement—Baptist, but the kind of liberal Baptists who’ve formally apologized for slavery—for a queer women’s prayer group. Holly looked like she was afraid of being struck down just for walking through the doors and years later I’d tell her I loved her at first sight, even though it wasn’t technically the truth.

“Can’t it be both?” Holly asked, after a lot of thoughtful hmm sounds from the circle of folding chairs. “I want a God I don’t have to fear, and I don’t want to fear the people who love Him, either.”

More hmm sounds, along with a deeply ponderous “Amen.” Then the pastor said “God is love, God is love,” and the conversation moved on.

I never stopped thinking about it: God without fear, and love without fear, as though they were opposite sides of a balanced equation. It felt trite, forced, even at the height of my desire to believe. Honestly, the more I reached for faith, the more everything felt trite and forced.

I didn’t grow up with God, not in the traditional sense, but I grew up loved so hard that it threatened to suffocate me. I grew up with love, and I grew up with fear, and maybe what I was really looking for was a way to separate the two.

That’s not something you can find in a church, but I didn’t know how to stop looking.

• • • •

“New friends!” someone bellowed as we turned into the roadside pullout.

Our headlights were off so as not to blind our fellow stargazers. We were over a hundred miles out of LA, in a sort of mecca for those who want to see the night sky without light pollution. It was so dark, the kind of velvet-black that should’ve had a texture against your skin, except for a circle of red-tinted flashlights set up about fifty yards from the parking area. It was the kind of darkness that felt amniotic. It reminded me of being terribly small—and terribly afraid—on a sort of instinctive level.

Someone pulled my door open before I could do it myself. A man, not very tall but quite round, with the sort of face that would have every other stranger approaching him like You look just like my long-lost cousin’s boyfriend’s brother. The kind of face that was, in and of itself, an invitation to conversation. As someone who also suffered from Resting Approachable Face, I sort of respected that he’d charged into this social situation without giving us a chance to be awkward at him.

“Welcome, friends,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I’m Orion.”

“Luna.” In those days, I found it easier to use my given name with strangers. It was a calculus of safety, both from physical harm and from the prying questions that came with using a man’s name. I wanted to trust Orion on sight, but I was wary of my own split-second assessment of him, and I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of a national park with his assumptions about my gender. And people tend to see what they want to see, which meant that he’d see me as a woman no matter what I did.

I was right: he didn’t think twice before he moved on, scrambling around to Holly’s side of the truck and offering to help her wrangle her telescope out of the backseat. I turned the engine off and handed Holly the car keys, and she stowed them in the front pocket of her backpack.

“Oh—It’s not that heavy, really. I can do it,” Holly said, but she gave him the telescope, and that thing was her baby, prized above any of her other possessions. “Thanks. I’m Holly.”

I lifted the folded tripod over my shoulder and followed them into the circle of red light. The ground was bare and dry, and the wind was high, and the desert was cold at night even in August. I fumbled to zip up my coat one-handed, but the zipper got snagged on the strap for my binoculars.

“I brought new friends,” Orion called, and the group sent up a cheer, clearing a patch of dirt for us to lay down our blanket.

“Wow,” Holly said, knocking her elbow against mine. There were seven of them including Orion, and they had come prepared—really prepared. Everything I knew about stargazing equipment came from online gift guides, trying to spoil Holly every birthday and Christmas, but even I could tell that the telescopes and cameras were too good for amateurs. Holly’s telescope, which had relieved me of half of a paycheck, looked downright dinky in comparison.

I felt self-conscious about my shitty little binoculars and lack of technical knowledge, but Holly saw the circle of experienced astronomers as an opportunity. She’s always been braver than me about striking up conversations with strangers—or new friends, as Orion said. She turned her red-tinted headlamp to the woman set up to our right, who was sharing a telescope with a young boy.

“Nice to meet you,” Holly said. “Is tonight a good night to see Saturn, do you think?”

Holly made her way around the circle, making introductions for the both of us, asking little questions about what everyone was looking at. The network of relationships became plain: Orion and Aurora were married. The twelve-year-old, Virgo, was their son. I was almost jealous of the way his voice cracked when he introduced himself—his first victory in attrition warfare with puberty. Phoebe and Stella, who were Aurora’s sisters, were taking composite pictures of the bright, full moon as it crossed the sky. Castor and Pollux were, of course, brothers; they were drawing Jupiter on a large piece of butcher paper, the edges weighed down with fist-sized stones, their hands moving in tandem to create a single illustration. Their names, all of them related to astronomy, seemed self-chosen. I respected that.

I didn’t think it was strange that the star party was publicly advertised, but everyone here already knew each other. I’d been to about a billion churches where the doors were open to strangers even though the congregation had coalesced into a family, and this was a type of holy place. And I could practically see Holly thinking that they were all friends, and they wanted us to be their friends, and maybe someday we could have this. She could see a future: Friday nights driving out to Joshua Tree to watch the stars with people who had the skill to match her passion.

As Holly offered to share the trail mix and canned beer we’d brought, I looked at the sky. My binoculars hung against my chest, ignored—I could see more stars with my naked eyes than I had in a long, long time. Each star was in the past, the light an artifact of a nuclear reaction that had long fizzled out, but it still felt like looking into the future. Looking at the night sky had always felt like looking forwards, ever since I was a kid, but at this point it was still abstract. It was just a sort of itch at the back of my brain and in the pit of my stomach. Sense without meaning.

I turned my headlamp back on and watched Holly take the sketchpad and charcoal pencils out of her backpack. She sat on our blanket and aimed her telescope towards the full moon, just as I knew she would. She began to draw, just as she always did. She’d drawn the moon countless times in all of its phases, mostly from the roof of my apartment building. It was a proclivity I enjoyed teasing her about, though we’d been dating for four years and I’d never asked if there was a deeper reason.

I’d always been afraid to. The quiet way she loved the moon felt sacred, on par with the annotations she used to make in the margins of her Bible. I knew where that road could lead, if she let it. I’d grown up at the end of it.

I heard Castor make a joke and Aurora laugh. When I turned my head, the red light passed over Orion kissing Phoebe, a momentary brush of his mouth over hers. Familiarity prickled under my skin as I looked away, along with embarrassment. I felt like I wasn’t meant to see them. Orion was kissing his wife’s sister right out in the open, and I felt like I had done something wrong by looking.

I didn’t often think of my childhood—this was deliberate—but I did, in that moment. It was hard not to: the dark sky, the names, Orion’s generous affection.

So it was then that I finally asked Holly why, with so many photographs of the moon on the internet, she needed to see it with her own eyes to draw it. Why she even needed draw it at all.

“I like to draw pretty things,” she said.

“There are so many other pretty things,” I insisted, thinking of Aurora explaining how to locate Saturn as I watched Holly move the pencil in rapid strokes, forming the shape of a crater.

“I draw the moon whenever I want to draw you,” she said.

I was surprised. I could have made a list of all the world’s beauties, down to the way jacaranda blossoms piled into the gutters, and still not included my name on that list.

“I know I can get the moon right, but I can never pin you down on paper. Not all of you, anyway—the moon is an easier target.”

“Can I kiss you?” I asked.

“Not here,” Holly said, very quietly. She could be shy about touch in public—and then doubly shy about her own shyness. She held up the half-finished drawing. It looked the same as all the rest she’d shown me. We could have each wallpapered our apartments with them. “And you know what else? The moon stays still long enough to be drawn.”

I mumbled something about proving that I could stay still, but my feet were tapping against the blanket without conscious thought. I heard Aurora laugh again, her voice tangled up with Orion’s, and when I looked over my shoulder he was kissing Stella this time, just a quick touch that made me feel overheated inside with recognition. Strange to see those little moments of affection that hold so much weight. Stranger, still, that nothing was hidden from us.

I wanted to kiss Holly. I wanted to kiss her, and I sort of regretted using my birth name. I wanted to know what it would mean to be myself here, with these new people.

I laid on my back and used my binoculars to look at things I had no interest in identifying. Perhaps they were planets or stars or even distant galaxies, but it didn’t matter to me. Holly cared about the physics of the universe enough for the both of us. I couldn’t keep up with her—I’d never been an artist and I wasn’t much for science, aside from facts I’d collected growing up—but I was nonetheless drawn to the beauty of the night sky, and all the potential in it. My feet were still moving, but I felt like I could lay there long enough to watch the constellations shift as the night passed us by. I could have laid there for longer than a season, letting the stars show me in their own language what had happened, and what might happen, and—if I really concentrated—what would happen.

As it was, I stayed there long enough for my eyes to become unfocused, until all I saw were shapes made of light. Then Holly touched my hand and asked me to look at her sketchpad, where she’d moved on to drawing Saturn and one of its larger moons. I told her it was beautiful. Farther off—Aurora had pulled him away, towards a large rock formation that was hard to make out in the low light—I could hear Virgo crying with a child’s unabashed intensity.

I closed my eyes, tipped my head back, then opened them again. The Milky Way was a bright, white sprawl. I said to Holly, “I have a bad feeling about this,” even though I didn’t know entirely where the words came from. It was like the feeling of seeing Orion kiss his wife’s sister: the feeling of knowing something that wasn’t for me to know, building in my belly.

“He’s a kid,” she said. Virgo’s fit was the loudest thing—of course she’d assume it was him upsetting me. “Kids are dramatic. He’s probably tired.”

“Holly—”

“Kids cry all the time. Where else will I get a view like this?”

I looked at her drawing again. Her hand was still moving, another of Saturn’s moons taking shape on the paper, and it was true that nights as cloudless as this were rare. That didn’t take away the not-quite-right feeling behind my navel.

“Sweetheart, sweetheart, just try,” Aurora was saying, holding out a pair of binoculars for Virgo to take. “Just try one more time, okay?” He knocked the binoculars to the ground. I looked away, taking the light with me. I turned my headlamp off.

“Orion?” Holly asked. “Do you know what time Venus sets tonight?”

Orion crossed the circle towards us. He checked his watch. “About now, but you might still be able to catch her if you’re quick. Can I?”

She stepped out of the way, and he swung her telescope down towards the horizon, bending to follow the eyepiece. Turning my headlamp off was the equivalent of putting on sunglasses during the day: I could look wherever I wanted, without any indication of my focus. I watched Castor and Pollux move towards Virgo, and then one of them picked up the binoculars from the dirt and offered them to him again. The kid wailed, words I couldn’t make out, but later I thought it sounded like “I’m scared.” Castor grabbed his arm, and I could see that it was a firm grip, and as Orion snapped up to standing I caught the outline of a gun on his hip.

“Hey!” Orion hollered. The wind threw his voice back at us. “Cut that out. Now.”

Castor let go. Virgo didn’t stop crying.

Orion apologized to Holly, then went back to fiddling with her telescope. His sweatshirt had rucked up from the motion and that was definitely a pistol, small and satiny black, and it didn’t look real. It was the kind of thing you’d see in a movie, or a video game.

“What’s that about?” I asked, because I really wanted to trust him, and because I’ve got the kind of smile that makes people see the best in me, though I rarely ever use it. My mom used to say the expression made me look just like my father.

“What’s what about?” Orion peeked up at me, then at Aurora and Virgo, then back down at the telescope.

“The firearm. What’s that about?”

“Bears, coyotes.” His voice was the kind of mumble you can only manage with one eye squished shut and the other focusing hard. It reminded me of Holly doing her makeup. “You never know what you’ll run into out here.” He moved back from the telescope. “There, now take a look. Probably not enough time for a sketch, but I bet you can get a picture.” And then he bounded off towards the rock formation, his wife and his son and his mistresses and his brothers-in-law huddled in its shadow. That feeling, that wrong-feeling knowing, snaked up towards my sternum. I didn’t want it to make its way to my throat.

Holly lined up the lens of a little disposable film camera with the eyepiece of the telescope. Her telescope didn’t have a camera built in, and using her phone would’ve killed her night vision, along with everyone else’s.

“Let’s get out of here, after you get this shot,” I said.

The camera clicked. Holly didn’t answer. She picked her sketchpad back up, balanced it on her lap. The astronomers—all of them in a single cluster now—were speaking, quietly enough that I couldn’t make out the words. The men had gathered around their women and the boy like wild animals preparing to face a predator. I could still hear Virgo crying, even above the overlapping voices.

“Come on, Holly, I don’t like this.” I was going to choke on the sheer wrongness of it. I had never had a feeling like that before, with that degree of certainty.

“Give me a minute,” she said, fitting her eye to the telescope. “I really think I might have time to draw—”

Aurora started to march towards us, her arm around Virgo’s shoulders. Stella grabbed her by the hood of her sweatshirt and tugged her back into the circle so hard that she fell to the ground. She disappeared behind a wall of bodies.

I began to unmount Holly’s telescope from the tripod—never mind that Holly’s face was still turned towards the eyepiece—as Orion walked over to us, his face alarmingly placid. “Sorry about the scene,” he said. “Everyone’s tired, and Virgo can get quite emotional—gets it from his mother, you know how it is.”

“Oh, don’t worry about us, we’ll just go.” My cold fingers fumbled with the bolts and clasps.

“You don’t have to do that,” Orion said, but he started to help me take down our equipment. “We would really love to have you stay.” He had the telescope held in his arms like a newborn. “The thing is, we’ve gathered here for a religious observance, and we weren’t sure if you were comfortable with that.”

Holly had gotten with the program by then, thank God, and was shoving her sketchbook and pencils into her backpack.

“But hey,” Orion said, “we’re all friends here.”

There was a scream. It echoed terribly in the smooth darkness. I reached for the telescope, but Orion wouldn’t let go of it. He was looking at Aurora, sprawled out on the ground and begging, over and over, “Please, spare him. He’s a baby. Please spare my baby.”

She’d knocked over one of the flashlights, and the angle covered everything in patches of shadow. I clicked my headlamp on. I don’t know why I did it. I already knew.

Castor—or maybe it was Pollux—had Virgo pinned to the ground with a knee on his chest. Pollux—or perhaps it was Castor—had one of those rocks in his fist, the big and jagged ones that had held their drawing flat.

He swung the stone down into the child’s temple. Aurora’s scream almost covered the wet, thumping sound.

Holly took off running towards my car, and I followed her. The light from her headlamp swung into my eyes as she looked back—she kept looking back—and I was struggling to make out the ground at my feet. All it would take was a rock or a root to send me sprawling, and I would be lost. I knew it. I knew.

“This is a warning!” Orion shouted, in the same booming voice that had called us his friends, but I heard him as if underwater. All I knew was that I needed to get to the car, but I couldn’t push my legs or my lungs any harder, and I had to be sure not to trip.

His words made sense when the gunshot broke open the sky. I hadn’t ever heard a gunshot in real life before that. I had no idea how loud it would be, even at a distance. I had no idea that my ears would ring for minutes after. It didn’t matter—that was the push I’d needed, and I was somehow running faster, the ground disappearing from under me like it didn’t even matter. I caught up to Holly, then passed her, then came up against the driver’s side door.

The car was unlocked. The interior lights came on when I opened the door, awful and white after so much unbroken darkness, and my eyes began to water as I threw myself in, and I found I had to squint to look out at the pullout. I blinked and blinked, and I couldn’t see Holly, and I couldn’t start the car. The keys were in her backpack.

“Lou,” she said. Her voice came from below me, barely a wheeze. I looked down.

Orion had her pinned in the dirt beneath the jut of the car door, his weight on her chest and the pistol held to her shoulder. He looked up at me, his face hard and unbothered in the light shining down from the car, half of him still red-tinged from those distant flashlights.

“Well, friends,” Orion panted, “I can’t exactly let you leave now.”

• • • •

I’d been going to church with Holly for two years when I realized I didn’t really want God at all. What I wanted was to be someone else’s problem, for a change. I wanted to lay myself down at some divine father’s feet and say Take it, it’s all yours, and it’s your responsibility. I wanted someone to tell me that everything would be okay, and I wanted someone to blame for the sum of who I was; I wanted them to be the same someone.

I flung myself on altar after altar. God never showed. I figured He was dead, like my dad. Maybe, like my dad, He’d been dead since before I was born, and I had once again arrived too late for that kind of big belief.

I was a capital-A Atheist for a while, then a garden-variety nonbeliever. And then Holly, who had always been taken care of in the way that smothered, who had always wanted to learn what it looked like to love someone with a loose grip, said, “Let me love you.” She said, “Let your burdens be mine,” and I was hers in an instant.

“And at this point, it’s the practical thing to do, isn’t it?” asked Holly, who was always looking for ways to make her desires unimpeachable.

“Sure, let’s get together for practical reasons. Want to shake on it?”

She held out her hand. I took it, and pulled her in, and I was halfway to laughing when I kissed her for the first time. It was a clumsy, half-cocked effort: she was laughing too, and I wanted to hear the clear, bright sound almost more than I wanted to swallow it.

I said, “You’re ridiculous, do you know that?”

“I just figure you’ve been in my heart for so long,” said Holly. “You’ve probably got squatter’s rights by now.”

She was right—our lives had blurred together with the protracted inevitability of stars colliding in orbit, ever since that afternoon in the church basement, and it was past time to call it what it was.

This was what I found to believe in: I believed in Holly. I believed in us together. I believed in myself when I was with her.

It didn’t feel forced, like worship songs and altar calls had always felt forced. After trying so hard to love God, loving her was easy.

We’d been together for almost a year when Holly told me a secret: God had never clicked for her, either. He was a reflex, she said. He was something she reached for on instinct, like a child sucking their thumb. He was a habit she was ready to grow out of.

She could have fooled me. Her faith—or her performance of it—looked so genuine from the outside, in a way I used to envy. She looked peaceful, when she prayed. I always thought I just looked desperate.

“It’s not that I don’t believe in God,” she said, after a while. “God is something we construct. I believe in God the way I believe in, I don’t know, daylight savings time. The real problem is that I don’t know how to love Him without being afraid of Him, and I can’t do that anymore.”

Which is to say that, as Orion walked us back to the circle of red light, I was surprised that Holly began to mumble the Lord’s Prayer. I picked up the thread nonetheless, said “Forever and ever, Amen” along with her. She’d cut her palm on the rocky ground when Orion tackled her; when she squeezed my hand in hers, I felt blood smear between us.

“Lou, we’re gonna die,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“You’re not going to die,” said Orion, “if you do exactly what I say. If you’re just as guilty as we are, then you won’t go running to the cops.”

“We wouldn’t,” Holly promised. “We won’t.”

“Just tell me why you’re doing this,” I said, but I knew it was too late for his answer to change anything. It was all in Holly’s shift from hypothetical to definitive, wouldn’t to won’t. She could see a way out of this situation, and she was going to take it—whatever it turned out to be. She would do it for me, even though I hadn’t asked her to. She’d never mastered any other kind of love.

Orion didn’t answer. More of the flashlights had gotten tipped over. The roadside pullout was a confusion of astronomy gear and discarded coats, the silhouettes strange and shadows too large. Aurora’s sobbing felt loud and far away, and it took me a long moment to realize that the scraping sound was her digging into the ground with a small trowel.

“You said it was—You said it was a religious observance?” I asked. “What, you’re doing it because God told you to?”

At this, he huffed out a breath that was almost a laugh. “We don’t answer to any god you know. We answer only to the night sky, and the future.”

That wrong and bad feeling, still present, began to crawl up onto my tongue. I felt like I’d be sick.

Orion nudged one of the fallen flashlights with his foot so that the beam pointed towards Castor, Pollux, and what was left of Virgo. He’d been beaten so badly that his shapes were all wrong. He’d lost one of his sneakers, and his white tube sock was soaked through with blood.

“One of you has to hit him,” Orion said. He had the gun pressed against the back of Holly’s neck. “It’s the only way you’re leaving here alive.”

Castor hauled Virgo into something approximating uprightness. His head—uneven, cratered—hung limply from his neck. I remember that I was focused on the boy’s hands, because they were still moving. He had dirt under his nails. He kept splaying his fingers out and then closing his fists, over and over again. I wondered what he was reaching for.

I thought of Holly reaching for God, like a child with her skull caved in.

Holly held her hand out. Orion picked up her telescope and handed it to her. “I do this, and you let us go?” she asked.

“I swear,” said Orion.

Holly raised the telescope like a bat, the weight balanced over her shoulder. She told me not to look.

I watched her swing her telescope in a clean arc into Virgo’s head. I knew at once that I would never be able to stop seeing it, and she would never be able to stop living it. I knew at once that it should’ve been me.

• • • •

The rest felt like stop motion, sporadic bursts of half-remembered light.

Virgo’s hands stopped moving. There was nothing left of him, and nothing left for him to reach for.

Holly had a splatter of blood on her cheek shaped almost like California. Her tears made tracks through it, the Coast Range melting into the Mojave, and then obliterated it completely.

Orion walked us to the car, even as his voice went bright and frantic: “You can stay with us, if you want. You can come back. It’s not always like this. This isn’t—Don’t assume that this is all of who we are. You’ll understand with time. We could be friends.”

I answered with a single strained, “No,” but the sound didn’t quite come out even though my mouth made the shape of the word.

At the car, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills. They were in my shaking hands between one blink and the next, and I didn’t even want them, because it wasn’t like money changed any of this. But he said, “For your telescope,” and his eyes looked old and sad, and I said, “Oh,” and handed the money to Holly.

I drove us back to the I-10 and away, away. When I blinked and realized I couldn’t remember the last forty miles, I pulled into a rest stop outside of Banning. We were near where I’d grown up. I thought, hollowly, that my mother, who I hadn’t spoken to in years, might be asleep a few miles away. And then I was leaning against the hood of my Subaru with no memory of getting out of the car, a puddle of vomit at my feet and the engine still running. And then Holly was opening the tailgate, dousing her face and hands with bottled water, shivering, scrubbing at the crust of blood in the lines of her palms and under one nostril. She took off her coat and her shirt, crossed the parking lot in just her bra to shove them into the dumpster, then came back and wrapped herself in a faded blue baja blanket that had been sitting in the trunk for a year, maybe longer.

She was crying again, or she hadn’t ever stopped, I didn’t know. I watched her hands grip the edges of the blanket. I thought of Virgo’s hands, opening and closing. I thought, Is this what it’s supposed to feel like? I only felt numb.

Holly pulled me under the blanket with her. We stayed there for a long time, and the sun came up over the desert.

• • • •

The first god Holly learned to worship was her mother.

They were everything to each other. They loved each other in their own private language, inside jokes and secret gestures. They had the same face. They had the same laugh. There were no walls up between them. No privacy, and no need for it.

When Holly was frightened as a child—and she was frightened quite a lot—she reached for her mom first, and God second.

Her youth ministry picketed pride parades and drag shows, and her mother told her she was an upstanding kid doing the Lord’s good work. She kissed a girl after softball practice, and her mother told her she would go to Hell if she didn’t clean up her sinful heart, and how could she destroy her family like this? Because Holly’s mother was going to Heaven, and if Holly got herself sent to that other place, they’d be separated in eternity. So it was selfish, wasn’t it, for Holly to lust after girls the way she did?

When we met, Holly was looking for God because she didn’t want to lose the woman who’d once been her entire world.

“My mom’s my best friend,” Holly said, after we’d known each other for half a year, and I knew she was lying but I didn’t think she knew it. I could see it on her, because we’d grown up in similar houses, though they were governed by different theology: the only children of widowed mothers who, for all their good intentions, only knew how to love their daughters as extensions of themselves.

“If your best friend thinks you’re going to Hell, maybe you need more friends,” I told her, as diplomatically as I could.

Holly didn’t talk to me for nearly a month, after that. I knew I’d prodded too hard at a gaping wound. When she was ready, she would outgrow her need for her mother. It was possible that, in doing so, she would outgrow the need for God.

I was so proud of her when she walked away from religion—and I wasn’t surprised at all that she called her mom as soon as we’d made it back to my apartment. It was a bright Saturday morning. I felt like all my edges had been worn down and like I needed at least three showers, but Holly took her phone and ducked into the bathroom. It didn’t matter that it was six a.m. in Texas; her mother would always pick up when her baby girl called, and I could hear Holly through the door, still crying, as she’d been steadily crying since Banning.

“Mommy? Are you there?” When she spoke to her mother, she sounded like she’d never stopped being that terrified child. Like she’d never stopped being helpless and easy to love. “I’m sorry to wake you, I just—I just needed to hear your voice. It was—I had a bad dream.” I heard a new rush of sobs, muffled under the running tap. “Can you pray for me? Just say you’ll pray for me. I’ll let you go back to sleep, just say a prayer first. I love you. I love you so, so much.”

I lay on the living room floor and wished I could just die. I still felt numb all the way through. I wanted to hurt. I wanted someone to hurt me.

I slapped myself across the face. I dug my nails into the curve of my cheek. I missed the father I had never known. I wished I had something to reach for after a fright, the way Holly backslid into faith. I wanted to believe, but I found no satisfaction in belief as both the means and the ends. I wanted to believe, and I wanted to be proven right.

• • • •

The first god I learned to worship was my father.

This isn’t something I talk about, not even with Holly, and it’s not for lack of trying. It’s just that God is so big for some people, and this isn’t my story—this has always been prologue. Here it goes.

My father was the leader of a fringe religious group. It would not have been a stretch to call it a cult. There’s even a Hulu documentary about him, if you care to look him up, but it’s all conjecture—none of the allegations ever stuck. It was the kind of congregation that gets really wrapped up in one person’s teachings and can’t possibly last forever, and they made this perfectly mortal man their god.

When I was an embryo, he had a heart attack. His followers scattered. I assumed they came to their senses, or moved on.

My mother never let go.

My father was her god, and he would live on in her. He would live on in us, because what was I, but a part of her? She’d held me tucked under her heart for nine frenzied months, a steady presence while her life fell apart around her. I always thought my mother loved me best when I was in her skin.

She kept pictures of my father in every room of the house. She dragged me to places where the sky was dark and holy for eclipses, meteor showers, every supermoon. There were things she wouldn’t tell me, and things she hid in metaphor, but the picture became clear enough: he was the kind of god who destroys that which doesn’t serve him; maybe even a more vengeful god than the one Holly had grown up fearing. He was a god, and he was looking for his heir, and the ends would justify the means. He was a god who wasn’t above killing his own sons, like so many gods before him.

It was all bullshit—I could see that, even as a kid—but I envied the fervency of my mother’s belief. I remember watching her tilt her face up to the Perseids on a moonless night, weeping, her arms flung wide in expectation. I felt unmoved by the sky full of falling stars, jealous that this moment could mean so much to her. I wanted conviction. I wanted, just once in my life, for something to feel that true to me.

When I met Holly, I was looking for a god big enough to kill for, or to die for. I wanted ecstasy, in the oldest sense of the word. I wanted to reach out to the divine and feel the divine reaching back.

I was looking for God, but here’s what I found: I’m far more my father’s son than I ever was my mother’s daughter, and my father would have beaten me to death for failing him.

Which is to say, the first time I was baptized, I was afraid the pastor would drown me.

The second time I was baptized, I sort of wished he would.

• • • •

Holly started going to church again. Just Sunday mornings at first, then Wednesday night Bible study and Saturday afternoon prayer group. It seemed to make her feel better. I didn’t hold it against her.

She woke up screaming nearly every night—always in my bed, because she was afraid to sleep alone and her place was too small for the both of us. She buried her face in the front of my shirt and cried like Virgo had cried, like a terrified child. I held her. I didn’t hold it against her.

Some nights, she didn’t wake in a panic. She woke quietly, slipped out of bed, and called her mother from the bathroom. This, I did hold against her, because it should have been me she woke with her grief and regret, because I had been there. I had lived through it with her. I knew the truth she could never tell anyone else, and lying to her mother about what upset her only made her more upset. And Holly’s mother knew her best, and knew how best to hurt her, and was careless with that power. Holly loved her mother with the sort of love that brings fear with it.

But on those nights, I took the stairs to the roof so that I wouldn’t have to overhear the conversations Holly tried to keep quiet. On those nights, I fed myself little glimpses of whatever stars I could make out.

I spent a lot of time looking down, because I thought this was the mark the star party had left on me: a feeling of knowing something I shouldn’t know, creeping up from my belly to my chest to my throat, that hit me whenever I looked at the night sky. It was the only real thing I felt, aside from the numbness, and I suspected that if I threw myself into it, something would happen. Finding out what would require its own kind of faith—a faith I simply lacked. I had no interest in trusting something I couldn’t see.

By February I was exhausted, everything felt impossible, and Holly was praying on the phone with her mother for the fourth night in a row. I couldn’t get back to sleep. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t frustrated. I didn’t feel much of anything, but I wanted to. I wanted to hurt. I wanted to experience something that would change me.

I looked up.

I could see the Big Dipper. The moon was a waning sliver. The breeze was cold, but not as cold as that night in the desert. I clenched my hands into fists.

I knew. I couldn’t say what or how, but I knew.

When I went back inside, Holly was curled up on the couch with a mug of tea steaming on the side table. I grabbed both of her hands. “Hey,” she said.

I felt like a passenger in my own body. I said, “I forgive you. You ruined your life, and you did it for me—so that I wouldn’t have to. I thank you, and I forgive you, and I know you need a bigger forgiveness than this.”

“Lou, what?” She looked confused, but her nose wrinkled like it did when she was about to cry.

“I’m going back to bed,” I told her.

• • • •

In the morning, she asked me what a bigger forgiveness would look like. I told her I had no idea. She said she’d pray on it.

I said, “I thought you couldn’t stand being afraid of God.” Six months on, and it was the first time I’d pushed.

Her smile, old and sad, reminded me of Orion. “Now I’ve felt real fear, and I know it’s not the same. It’s not like that at all,” Holly said. “I think what I felt was love all along. It doesn’t have to be complicated.”

With love and fear so blurred together, I wanted to ask Holly if she was ever afraid of me. If she was ever afraid that I would hurt her, like her mother hurt her over and over again.

Instead of asking, I waited for the sun to set, and I went up to the roof. I looked up at the sky.

• • • •

Every Wednesday evening, Holly injected a small amount of testosterone cypionate into the meat of my thigh. The needle was so tiny that I hardly felt it, but I couldn’t bear to watch it going in, and I didn’t have it in me to push the plunger. I never asked her to do it; the routine that we fell into just made sense, because she wasn’t afraid and I was. She knew I wanted this—needed it—and wasn’t going to watch my fear hold me back from becoming myself.

We started in August, the Wednesday before the star party. By February, it was a well-practiced choreography of hands and eyes. I sat on the edge of the bathtub in my boxers and cleaned the injection site with an alcohol swab. She stood beside the sink and drew the solution from the vial into the syringe. I tore open the wrapper of a plastic bandage, patterned with blue and green stars. She pressed her palm against my knee. I focused on that sensation, that warm and broad touch, and tried to slow my speeding pulse. I watched her face: focused, worrying the tip of her tongue between her incisors. She grasped an inch of my skin between her forefinger and thumb, lifting subcutaneous fat away from muscle. I closed my eyes.

A quick pinch as the needle went in, and then it was over—until the next Wednesday.

Another week of cataloging the gradual changes. Nothing for a while, at first. Then a sudden appearance of acne between my eyebrows. Broader shoulders, and newly defined muscle in my calves. Uneven stubble under my chin, so that I was always getting razor burn in the crease of my neck. The fine hair on my legs seeming to take on both texture and color overnight. Deepening of my voice, in stops and starts, which Holly said made me sound more certain of myself.

She said I seemed to enjoy talking more. She said I seemed to enjoy the daily realities of having a body more: eating, exercising, showering, existing in three dimensions.

I couldn’t tell. At the bottom of it all, I still felt that numbness.

Except for this: on Wednesdays, after Holly did my shot and left for Bible study, I started going up to the roof. That creeping knowing feeling, from belly to throat to mouth, grew stronger with each passing week. It didn’t feel wrong anymore. I found a sort of safety in it.

I looked at the smoggy sky, light pollution rendering most of the stars invisible, and I knew.

It was a series of little premonitions, things I could have written off as luck or intuition. Once, Holly misplaced her car keys and I knew she’d put them in the fridge door by accident, and put the little jar of capers in her purse. I had a good run of knowing just the right thing to say to calm her down or win her over.

It was a series of small moments that could have been called faith, if not for the blistering certainty I felt. I knew that I would see Orion before the year was out. I knew that Holly and I would be okay again, someday. I knew that the future spread out before us, an unbroken thread of possibility. Believing was never a challenge, because I knew these things were true.

Small truths, building up to a bigger one. Which meant that in July, when I told Holly that she would feel better if she visited her mother, I knew she would believe me.

“I hate that place,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like. I hate that place.”

She may have hated the town that raised her more than anything, but she refused to call anywhere else home. And her mother was her oldest god, and maybe she needed—just for a few days—the kind of love that smothered. And I had an errand to run, and needed her out of the way.

“Don’t you think it will feel circular? Don’t you think it’ll be a sort of closure?” I offered. “Maybe this is your big forgiveness.” She made a face, but she booked her flight the next day.

• • • •

Holly spent a week with her mother, in a small town I’d only seen in dreams and photographs. I spent a week in Joshua Tree.

A week of days in an AirBnB outside of the national park, a week of nights at that roadside pullout in darkness so bottomless I was afraid to get lost in it. Holly called me every night to tell me of the outrageous things her mother had said or done, and I answered the phone sitting on the blue-patterned baja blanket near the rock formation where Virgo died, looking at the stars. Looking at forever.

“What are you doing?” she asked, on the fifth night.

I was holding up a red-tinted flashlight, using my toe to poke at the place where I remembered the grave being. The ground had swallowed it up.

“Looking at the sky,” I told her. Holly didn’t question it.

She groaned, and I imagined her eyes going large and somber. “My mother knows I’m going to Hell,” she said. I waited her out. “She keeps talking about how my choices have eternal consequences, Lou. I think she knows. I’m going to Hell for—”

She let me cut her off. I knew she wouldn’t want to finish the sentence. “Holly, I’m pretty sure your mom still means you’re going to Hell for being queer.”

“Oh. Right.” Holly was silent for a while. I squinted at a point of light that might have been Venus, and wished I’d picked up new binoculars. “Why didn’t you come with me?” she asked.

“I couldn’t miss work,” I said, but that wasn’t it. The truth was this: I had to be here. I had a feeling.

“I know we haven’t really talked about it,” I said, “but you should move in with me.”

“I already have squatter’s rights,” she said. I could picture her touching her dark, curly hair—flirting, shy about it. “You’d have to evict me.”

“Let’s make it official.”

“Ooh, you know paperwork really gets me going.”

“For practical reasons.”

“Right, for practical reasons.”

“But don’t get the wrong idea,” I told her. “I’m not asking because I love you or anything.”

That made her laugh, which made me laugh, too. I hadn’t heard her really laugh in a long time. I didn’t know how much I’d missed it.

That numbness had started to ease—not just under the night sky but in the daylight, too. I think I was happy. I laid down on my blanket, and talked to Holly about nothing until she fell asleep.

• • • •

On my seventh and final Holly-less night, there was another car parked in my usual spot at the roadside pullout. A figure with a red headlamp sat by the rock formation.

“Hey, friend!” Orion called when I got out of the car. I turned on my own headlamp.

“Are those mine?” I asked, pointing to the binoculars around his neck as I sat down beside him.

“Do you want them back?”

“No, I’m good.”

He held them out for me anyway. I didn’t take them.

“You got a cold?” He gestured at his throat.

“What? I—No.” I laughed. I felt so at home with my new voice that I only noticed the way it had changed if I looked at an old video, and even then it was with a sort of detachment: Did I ever really sound like that? You must be joking. There must be a mistake. “I’m transgender.”

I expected follow-up questions, but Orion moved on. “How’s your girlfriend?”

“Holly.”

“Right. How’s Holly?”

“She’s fine,” I said, because I could tell that she would be. And then I asked the thing I had come here to ask: “Tell me about your god.”

Orion had a smile like a stock image, or maybe just one particular photo: my father, grayscale and grainy from magnification, hanging above my mother’s bed. She used to kiss her fingertips and then touch the glass of the frame, and the picture was always distorted with a thousand little smudges.

Orion smiled his familiar smile, and he told me the story of a gifted man—a man so gifted that he became sacred. A man who could look at celestial bodies and see the path forward. Such a gift brought acolytes from all over the world, looking for clarity and divine wisdom, and the man who became their god was happy to oblige. He could reassure the broken; he could look at people who were in pain and tell them, with complete certainty, that their suffering was not permanent. He provided hope, something so rare and precious and holy.

The problem was that he was still a man, and he would die, and he needed his gift to live on. The problem was that he needed an heir: someone who carried his blood, and his gift.

He knew the future, but only in broad strokes—he didn’t trade in specificity. He knew his heir would be his son, or maybe his grandson? He knew a lot of blood would be spilled along the way, boys rooted out as they failed to manifest his power of prophecy. His followers trusted him with their bodies, their children, their fate. They reached for him with their fears and their doubts, because he was their god.

When he died, the unworthy fell away like chaff from grain, leaving only the truest of believers. A small circle of those who carried his word, knowing his heir was on the way. It was just a matter of time. Time, and watching the stars.

“He was my father,” Orion said. “Virgo was my son.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“I had to. He wasn’t my father’s true heir, and I’m just the conduit.”

This was a man who’d grown up with a living god, all of that divine love and fear attached to something he could touch. His god fed him mushy peas as a baby. His god taught him how to ride a bike. His god kept him safe, waiting for him to hit puberty and either prove his worth or be put to death. He never had a chance.

I took my headlamp off and rested it on the ground between us. The shadows made Orion’s face sharp. He looked so much like those photos, in every room of my childhood home.

“Was one of your father’s wives called Pandora?” I asked.

“You look just like her,” he said. I wondered when exactly he’d pieced it together. I didn’t need to know.

But I looked into the spray of stars above us, willing myself to fall once more into the future. Trying to prove to myself that I wasn’t making this up, this gift I had.

I looked up, and it was the truest thing I’d ever felt.

“Stella’s pregnant,” I said, as I hauled myself up off the ground and turned towards my car. “Another son, and he’s going to live a long life.”

“He’s the heir?” Orion called after me, and I couldn’t help my long, startled laugh. Funny, that he couldn’t imagine any other way.

“I am,” I shouted back at him.

• • • •

“Hey, Lou, do you want to go look at the moon tonight?” Holly asked as she let herself into my apartment—our apartment—with her duffel bag in tow. “Nothing crazy, just from the roof.”

A summer Friday night, a little adventure. I took a gamble. I said yes.

We stood in silence for a long while, looking at the sky. I couldn’t see nearly as many stars here as at Joshua Tree, and Holly didn’t reach for her sketchpad, but it was enough: our fingers twined together and only the brightest constellations above us.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked her.

“Praying,” she said, and her voice was dreamy and peaceful, and for the first time I didn’t really envy her. I didn’t need faith, and I didn’t need belief, because I knew for certain.

All this time I had wanted proof, and I was the proof. I felt that my very existence was justified. I felt that I meant something bigger than my beating heart.

Holly said, “I need to remind myself that what they did in the desert wasn’t holy. Just because they said it was doesn’t make it true, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said, but I knew I’d have to tell her everything, all of it, and soon.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a ring: a silver band with a small pearlescent stone, a rainbow of colors in the low light. It wasn’t in a box or anything, and it was covered in lint from the fleecy lining of her hoodie. “Hey, Lou?”

“Yeah?”

She held the ring out towards me. “You should marry me.”

“You’re absurd, do you know that?” I was thinking about Orion and his family—telling him that I’m the son our father was promised, wondering if he felt disappointed or if he felt free—as I gave Holly my hand.

“For practical reasons,” she said, sliding the ring onto my finger.

“Right, for practical reasons.” I took her hand. “I have squatter’s rights on your heart. The sexy paperwork just makes it official.”

She laughed that real and sparkling laugh. The future snaked its way up my throat and dissolved on my tongue, irrefutable. I said, “I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you.”

The sky above us was the biggest thing I knew.

©2024 by Dominique Dickey.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dominique Dickey is a speculative fiction writer and game designer. As the creative director of Sly Robot Games, they’ve created Plant Girl Game and Tomorrow on Revelation III. They contributed to the Nebula Award-winning Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and the ENNIE Award-winning Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. Their novella Redundancies & Potentials is forthcoming from Neon Hemlock in 2024. Their short fiction has appeared in venues including Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Nightmare Magazine. They live in the DC area, where they’re always on the hunt for their next idea. You can find their work at dominiquedickey.com.

What’s in a Name

Matthew Hughes | 1001 words

“What do you mean, ‘no?’” I said. “We have a deal. I kept my end, now you have to keep yours.”

She showed me the face of a willful child. “I’m not doing it.”

Then she turned her back and summoned the royal guards. Their halberds were iron. Just the nearness of the cold metal weakened me. I left, but from the doorway I said, “This is not over.”

She actually stuck her tongue out at me.

• • • •

Well, what do you expect from an uneducated peasant trull who finds herself, through no accomplishment of her own, made up into a queen? Indeed, if it hadn’t been for all my hard labors, the king would have chopped off her empty head. And probably that of the braggadocious miller who started the whole imbroglio by claiming his lumpish daughter could work wonders.

“She can spin straw into gold,” he said, after several pints of sour ale in his village’s tavern, before passing out on his way to the jakes.

Unfortunately for him, his boasting was overheard by one of the listeners the king sends out to catch a whiff of any republican sentiments. The agent reported back, and word went up the chain to the royal ears.

Now, the king likes gold. And he isn’t too bright. It never occurred to him to ask why a man whose daughter could transform straw into gold was operating a run-down mill in a village whose net worth was two pigs and a blind cow.

He called in the miller, the man pale and shaking from his hangover and the king’s reputation for taking off heads for the slightest of reasons. Like telling lies that inconvenienced His Majesty.

The upshot: Miss Galumpha was put in a room with a spinning wheel and plenty of straw. The chamberlain made it clear that if the room was not filled with gold when he returned, she and dear papa would find themselves observing traffic through the town gate from the vantage of their heads on spikes.

• • • •

It was just the opportunity I had been waiting for, had been building up power for. When the palace was silent except for her quiet sobbing, I fiddled the brass lock on the chamber and entered.

I got right to the point. “I can spin that straw into gold for you.”

She gawped at me, speechless.

“No, really,” I said. “But I’ll want something in return.”

“All right,” she said. She lay back on the straw and began to pull her skirt up.

“Not that,” I said. “I will want your first-born child.”

“What for?” she said. I saw a surmise form in her doughy face. “You’re not going to eat it?”

“No, I’m not. You wouldn’t understand.”

She didn’t think about it too long. I doubt she’d ever thought about anything much more complicated than whether to put lard on her supper bread. “All right,” she said.

“Move out the way,” I said and when she went off into a corner, I started the wheel spinning and addressed myself to the task, establishing a flow of mana from me to the straw. When the connection was made, I poured almost everything I had into the transmogrification. When I finished, I was drained. But a gleaming pile of gold ingots stood where the straw had been.

“I’ll be back for the child when it’s time,” I said. She was gawping at the gold and just nodded as I left.

• • • •

Almost a year passed. I worked at rebuilding my store of mana, but otherwise kept to my little cottage deep in the forest. I prepared for the child’s arrival, painting a room light blue, with images of flowers and friendly beasts, a rainbow and a unicorn. I’d asked some sparrows to keep an eye on the miller’s daughter, now Queen, to let me know when she delivered.

A boy, they twittered.

“Excellent.” I set out for the palace. Of course, you know what happened. The refusal. The tongue.

“I’ll give you three days,” I said. “If you can’t tell me my name by then, I’ll bring the roof down on you.”

If I could have, I would have done it there and then. But I was still underpowered from the gold spinning. I would need the three days to build myself up.

I went back to my cottage and carefully laid out the inducing mandala before my doorstep. Then I began to dance the paths of mystic power.

My mistake: I had been in such a flather about her tongue-sticking rudeness that I went straight to my hideaway. And she came right behind me.

Again, you probably know what happened: my power was in my name, and as I danced along the mandala, my feet striking sparks from its arcane symbols, I chanted the mantra, which included my name.

Three days (and nights) of dancing are not easy, even for one like me. I kept thinking about the boy, the son I could never father, and all that we would do together. I would teach him and guide him, show him the ways of power, give him all that I had to give. He would enrich my lonely life.

At the end, I was staggering with fatigue when I stepped out of the endless path. But I spoke the congealing ergophones and the strength that had suffused the mandala flowed into me.

“Right,” I said. “Now we’ll see.”

But the Queen smiled her mean-girl smile at me and spoke my name. She didn’t know it shielded her from my power and I didn’t bother to explain.

• • • •

Nor did I explain how it takes less mana to undo than to do. I would have liked to have seen the king’s face when he found his strongroom filled with straw.

But I did see two fresh heads on the city gate.

The king disowned the child, gave him to a woodcutter.

I stole him. He loves the painted unicorn.

And I love him.

©2024 by Matthew Hughes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew (Matt) Hughes writes fantasy, space opera, crime fiction, and historical novels. He has sold 24 novels to publishers large and small in the UK, US, and Canada, as well as 100 works of short fiction to professional markets. He has won the Endeavour and Arthur Ellis Awards, and has been shortlisted for the Aurora, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Endeavour, A.E. Van Vogt, Neffy, Derringer, and High Plains Book Awards. He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association’s Hall of Fame. People who sign up for his monthly newsletter will receive a free ebook of his short story collection, 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn: eepurl.com/cyNSA9. Find out more about him at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Hughes_(writer).

Child of the River

Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe | 3055 words

Mother used to say I am a child of the river. I never understood her. I thought I would be a child of the wind, like her. Like all the children of the wind, my mother could fly. When I was younger, I liked spying on her as she shifted into a body that was more suitable for flight. Her favourite form was the owl. I used to think she didn’t know I was watching but I was wrong. The air is home to invisible things and they constantly whisper to the children of the wind. These unseen air sprites reported me to my mother and one evening, while she sat sewing one of my torn school uniforms with a needle, she called me from my play with the other children in the compound.

“Maami, you called?” I said, peeking into the room.

“Come here.” She said and gestured at the floor beside her crossed feet.

I obeyed, puzzled. It was still in the early evening which meant the time had not come for the nightly tales by moonlight my mother liked to tell.

“Irapada, Irapada, Irapada,” Mother said. “How many times did I call you?”

“Three times, Maami.” I replied.

“The elders say what a child cannot see while standing, the elders can see while seated.” She said. “You have tried to see unusual things but you do not understand. Yet, you are fascinated by them. Is that not so?”

I did not really understand what she meant but I nodded anyway. Mother sighed and put the needle and uniform away.

“Come here, my child.” She said and reached down to draw me into her lap. “A mystery is a mystery because it chooses not to unravel itself. Do you understand?”

I nodded again.

“My child, I know you have been spying on me when I go off to fly. You do not have to be afraid.” She said.

“Are you . . . a witch?” I asked. I remembered the way the Christian Religious Studies instructor in my school had said all witches would burn in an unquenchable lake of fire for all of eternity. I did not want that for my mother.

She laughed at my question and pinched my nose.

“A witch? No, no. I am born of the wind, one of the Afefe. That is why I can fly.”

I blinked at her, suddenly filled with awe.

“Am I a child of the wind too?” I asked. “Can I turn into a bird and fly too?”

I flapped my hands like wings, making my mother burst into another fit of laughter.

“No, no, my dear child,” she said.

I frowned at her.

“So what am I then?” I asked.

“You are a child of the river, an Omi,” she replied.

“That doesn’t sound as interesting as being a child of the wind,” I said.

My mother stroked my head and smiled.

“The river is powerful too, my child. She gives life and takes it. She flows in her majesty from North to South. The river cannot be bound.”

I thought about her words for a while before asking the next question on my mind.

“What about my father? Was he a child of the wind or of the river?” I asked her.

Mother’s countenance changed. She got that faraway look in her eyes that always appeared when anyone mentioned my father. I had never met him and every time I tried to talk about him, she always changed the topic. But that day, she gave me an answer.

“Your father was different, my child. He was a child of fire. An Ina,” she said softly.

I blinked and looked up at her. I wanted to ask so many questions. Why had he left? Was it because of something I had done? What were the abilities of a child of fire? Could they also shapeshift? These questions and more ran through my mind but something in my mother’s eyes stopped me from asking.

“Go now, Irapada. Go back to your play.”

I left her embrace and walked to the door. When I got to the door, I stopped and looked back.

“When will I be able to use my . . . abilities, like you do?” I said.

“When the time comes, the river will call to you. Until then, you must wait.”

“And if I choose not to wait?”

Mother stared at me for a long time before replying.

“A bird cannot fly if its wings are not strong enough to support flight. If you try to use your abilities before you are ready, you will drown.”

• • • •

I am drowning.

The water fights me. It drags me below the surface every time I go up for air. I try to fight it but the water is much stronger than I am. From the depths, I can hear the mocking laughter of the water spirits.

“Never ever . . . have we seen . . . a drowning fish,” the sibilant voices say. I try to yell back to them, to tell them to shut up and help me, but that is a mistake. The water surges into my mouth and smothers me, tightening its grip around my throat. I cannot breathe. I feel myself go faint.

Regrets and unbidden thoughts swim to the surface of my mind. I wish I had listened to my mother. I wish I had asked her if I am really a child of the river. I wish, I wish, I wish . . .

I raise my tired eyes to the surface, trying to keep a memory of the sunlight with me, an impression of light for the dark days ahead. But the light is not bright enough. It has been refracted through layers of murky brown water.

I close my eyes and the river, sensing victory, wraps its tentacles around me and drags me to the depths.

I drown.

• • • •

I wake from another dream of drowning. I blink and look around my room, trying to get my bearings. I recognize the room. It is my room, not the bottom of a river. I look down at my bed. As expected, it is thoroughly soaked. My body is covered by dead shrimps and tiny fishes. The smell of the river creatures is already beginning to spread around the room. I sigh and get out of bed, displacing some dead fish from the bed to the floor.

I switch on the lights and the room is washed in the sickly glow of the yellow bulb. I retrieve a broom and parker from a corner and get a disposal bag from under the bed. Then I start sweeping the dead shrimp into the parker and dumping them in the bag. I perform the task with the ease that comes with long practice.

Every week, for the last two years, I have had these strange dreams. Dreams where I am drowned by a vindictive river, with my silent screams echoed by the laughter of the river spirits. And when I wake, the sight is always the same. My body is always covered with little river creatures. This is one of the reasons why I don’t sleep over in other people’s homes. It’s also why I am still single. I cannot imagine bringing a girl home and waking to find ourselves in bed with dead fish.

I finish my unpleasant task and turn to look at the soaked bed. The river always brings itself to me as a dream. I have refused to go to it so it haunts me, following me even to this big city. As I have done several times, I wish there is someone I could meet for answers. When I was younger, I only had to run to my mother and unload my questions at her feet, but my mother left this world seven years ago. Before the dreams started. Before the river called me.

Sometimes, I dream about her too. I see her the exact way she had looked just before she flew away. She had bid me farewell through a dream. She was dressed in her best clothes, an iro and buba made of white lace material, and a majestic gele was wrapped around her head. She smiled at me and beckoned.

“Will you come with me?” she asked.

I shook my head and stepped backward.

“You have made the right decision, my son,” she said. “Where I go now is a place you are not prepared for.”

“Where are you going, Maami?”

“I am going home,” she replied. Then she spread out her arms wide but they weren’t arms anymore. They were wings, great white wings. The owl that was also my mother turned its large eyes in my direction and hooted once. In my head, I heard my mother’s voice.

Someday, we must all return home. The wind has called me home. When the river calls, you must answer.

And with that, the white owl flapped its wings and launched itself into the air. I watched my mother fly away, climbing higher and higher until she was nothing but a tiny white speck in the sky, becoming one with the wind.

• • • •

I glance at the digital clock on my bedside table and curse aloud. It’s six thirty already. If I don’t start preparing now, I will be late for work. I am a journalist for The Daily Report, one of the many small news agencies in this big city. The salary is just enough to pay my bills and stash away a little savings. When my mother was still with us, I also had to send her small amounts for her monthly upkeep.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a journalist. That was the reason why I applied to study in a college of journalism and mass communication for four years. But the excitement has waned. The dreams always sap all of my energy out of me. They started when I graduated from the college two years ago and I have never had a week where I have been entirely happy. I once asked a co-worker, a reporter named Shola, if she believed a person can be haunted by spirits. She had given me a weird look and said, “Sure. That is actually very common.”

“Oh? What do you think people do to chase it away?” I had asked her.

“They pray about it,” she replied. I frowned and turned away. Prayer has never worked for me. I hadn’t really liked religion since my CRS teacher claimed people like me and my mother are doomed to burn in hell.

I hear the voices of the river spirits as I go through my day. While I sit at my desk, going through news briefs, I hear them in my head. When I go to the cafeteria during the lunch break, they whisper in my ears. When I am on the bus that ferries me home from work at night, they are still there, singing their mocking songs.

I wish they would just leave me alone. I wish they could understand that a person can move on, leaving places and things behind. But, of course, I cannot banish the voices with mere wishes.

Now, the river is calling me. Calling persistently. I do not want to answer. Maybe I am scared of drowning. Or maybe I still don’t think I am ready to become a real child of the river. What I do know is that I did not ask for this. I did not ask to be a child of any spirit. I could have been a normal baby boy when I was born. But the river spirit, for some reason, had marked me as its own.

Now, it is calling me back home.

• • • •

The elders say we are chosen at birth. They say not all of us are chosen. They say there is always a mark of some kind to let us know where we come from.

Of course, the elders are right. My mother said when I was born, it rained through the night and the river rose so high it flooded our town. When a child of the wind is born, gusts of wind will attack the house and rip away the roof. For a child of the earth, it is an earthquake. Children of fire are the most dangerous to have in any household because at their birth, fire will consume the house and whoever is trapped in it. The children of fire, also known as the Ina, are considered unlucky.

My father was an Ina. While I was growing, I asked my mother about his whereabouts but she always evaded my questions. I later got the impression that even she did not know where he was. Like smoke in the wind, he seemed to have drifted off the face of the earth.

I know he is not dead, though. I don’t know how I know but I do. Somewhere, his lifefire still burns. Sometimes, I think he can help me with my dreams but what would a child of fire know about the river? I still think he left because of me. Maybe he hated me for being a child of the river. It is known that water and fire are enemies. I guess I will never know exactly why he left. That is just another one of the questions in my head that I will never get an answer to.

• • • •

They come at night. Their voices are louder now. It echoes off the walls of my room. The light bulb is off so the room is dark. I can hear them moving around, surrounding my bed. I want to cry out but my lips refuse to open. It feels like I am having one of my dreams but this is too real to be a dream.

“If you will not come . . . to the river . . . the river will come . . . to you . . .”

Somewhere, a drum starts beating. The river spirits are chanting. The drum—no, drums—get louder.

“A son of the river . . . must return home . . . you cannot escape . . . your fate . . .”

I shut my eyes and try to make myself believe that somehow this isn’t real but I can feel tentacles wrapping themselves around my body and lifting me from the bed.

“Come home . . .”

The tentacles let me go suddenly. I fall, but not onto my bed. I fall into the river.

Immediately, I start drowning. The river doesn’t let me reach the surface this time. I fight with every bit of strength I have left but the river’s laughter echoes in my head.

Foolish child. You are home now. There is no escape from me now.

I close my eyes and I see my mother. She is alternating between a white owl and a beautiful woman in white lace. I can see my father too—a tall dark-skinned man in an agbada. His face is wreathed in smoke so I cannot make out his features but flames dance on his skin. I can see other people too, unfamiliar faces that I somehow recognize to be my relatives. I see boys covered in mud, girls with fire in their hair, men who float in the air, women with rivers flowing from their eyes. These are all the people who are like me.

“Let go, Irapada.” My mother’s voice echoes across the gap between this world and the next.

“Listen to your mother, boy,” my father says, his voice rumbling like thunder.

“Give the river what it wants,” one of the girls with fire in her hair says.

“Very soon, you will forget this ever happened,” a boy with clumps of earth on his face quips.

I open my eyes. I am still in the river but something has changed. I can feel a warmness in my chest. I realize that I am not drowning anymore. I am breathing underwater. I try to turn my head but I cannot. I try to raise my hands but they do not seem to exist.

Realization dawns fast. I have shifted into a creature of the river. I am a fish.

Your doubts delayed your transformation.

I know the river is right. I have been drowning because of my doubts and fears. I have always been a fish but I was also scared of the river. That is why I never heeded its call.

If you do not give yourself to me, you cannot know true peace.

I think of having the dreams of drowning every week for the rest of my life and shudder. I think of the river spirits waiting hungrily in the depths. I think of my mother’s last words to me. I must surrender to the river. I must let it into my being. I must be its vessel.

But what if my fears surface again? What if I start doubting? That means the river will rip me apart. I will cease to exist.

What is your decision, child?

I will myself to morph back into my human form. I don’t know exactly how I am transforming but I can feel it working. I flex my fingers just to make sure. Then I look down at the river’s dark depths.

“I will give myself to you,” I say.

Immediately, I feel the river revolving all around me. I close my eyes and summon the image of my family again. My mother, my faceless father, my cousins, all of them. If I still have any doubt in my mind, the river will reject me. I will probably be found washed ashore after some days and maybe I will take up a small corner of the front pages of the newspapers. Journalist at The Daily Report found dead in hometown. No name, no picture, just another mysterious death in a country where mysterious deaths are a daily occurrence.

I try to let it all go—my doubt, my fear, my loneliness, my hopes, everything. The river fills me. The river takes it all, washes it away.

For the last time, I drown.

©2024 by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe is writer of the dark and fantastical, a poet, and a reluctant mathematician. He has poetry and fiction published or forthcoming from Podcastle, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Baffling Magazine, Lightspeed, and elsewhere. When he’s not writing about malfunctioning robots or crazed gods, he can be found doing whatever people do on Twitter at @OluwaSigma. He writes from a room with broken windowpanes in Lagos, Nigeria.

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

Book Review: In the Shadow of the Fall by Tobi Ogundiran

Melissa A Watkins | 651 words

In the Shadow of the Fall
Tobi Ogundiran
Hardcover/ eBook
ISBN: 9781250907974
Tordotcom, July 23 2024, 160 pgs

Ashâke should be a priestess by now, but while all of her peers have ascended into service, she’s still an acolyte, toiling away at menial tasks in a remote, isolated temple. Desperation leads her to try to call on the orishas directly, but instead of binding the gods to her will, Ashâke discovers incredible things about the state of the spiritual world and her place in it. All of this leads her on a quest full of surprising truths, new friends, and frighteningly nasty villains.

There are so many things to love about this novella (the first in a planned duology), starting with the world it’s set in. One of the wonderful things about the growing popularity of novels by Nigerian-American fantasy writers like Tomi Adeyemi, Jordan Ifueko, and Tochi Onyebuchi is that concepts like orisha, ashe, and griot are becoming part of the general cultural collective and don’t need to be explained in detail every time someone creates a fantasy world based on West Africa. We’re approaching a point where writers can lean more into the stories and have a bit more fun. Ogundiran does that here. In many ways, this is a traditional fantasy epic—goofy young hero, deeply evil villains, slowly-revealed epic quest, wide world full of quirky groups of people—but it’s thoroughly grounded in a world stitched out of West African traditions, theologies, and magics. There are lots of words from real West African cultures strewn through the story, from foods and instruments to spiritual concepts and objects. But there are also fantasy elements spun out of whole cloth—odd objects, strange places, and magics light and dark. Mixed together, they create a richness that saturates the story like a good sauce, making every new bite of plot thoroughly satisfying.

Speaking of goofy young heroes, I’ve seen plenty of hapless young men in fantasy, bumbling along asking “Why me?” and rebelling against the status quo for no other reason than to annoy the local mysterious wizard and get the story started. This book has a wizard-annoying, mistake-making, generally immature young woman as the hero, and it works wonderfully. (That she’s a Black African woman is just sprinkles on the cake.) Ashâke is a pain, sure, and she makes plenty of decisions that are more guts than glory—but she has reasons that anyone who’s felt lonely or unwanted can relate to. She does wallow for a bit—after all, what else would get the local mysterious wizard, in this case a foul-mouthed one-eyed witch doctor, to give her cryptic messages to start her quest with?—but when she finally steps into her power, it’s exciting. Good thing, too, because the villains here are pretty scary. Without giving too many spoilers, Ogundiran does a good job of gradually building up the villainry, but it starts in a pretty intense place, with a lone dead-eyed traveler named Yaruddin. Finding out how awful he truly is only amps up the excitement of the novella’s climax, but it also makes the soft cliff-hanger ending a bit unsatisfying. That’s okay, though—it creates space for the next book to start with surprises, hopefully.

Ashâke is the chosen one, bound to gain power and knowledge and focus, and while it doesn’t necessarily feel earned yet, it does fit into a sense of a much larger world happening around our heroine. Here’s hoping the next book takes us further into that world and solidifies her place in it. I’m certainly looking forward to whatever comes next.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Melissa A Watkins has been a teacher, a singer, an actress, and a very bad translator but now has found her way back to her first artistic love, writing. Her work has previously appeared in khoreo, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Fantasy Magazine. After fifteen years of living in Europe and Asia, she now resides in Boston, where she reads and reviews books at EqualOpportunityReader.com.

Book Review: The Crawling Moon edited by dave ring

Arley Sorg | 1530 words

The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread
dave ring, ed.
Trade Paperback/Ebook
ISBN: 9781952086823
Neon Hemlock, July 30, 2024, 398 pgs

Way back in the December 2020 Lightspeed I reviewed Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World that Wouldn’t Die. In the November 2021 Lightspeed I reviewed Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness. Here I am again, having deeply enjoyed another Neon Hemlock anthology by dave ring, one with a title which suggests these books might form some kind of series: The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread. On the Neon Hemlock website, this one is described as “an anthology of gothic depravity, horror & perversion.” The description, specifically “perversion,” or even “depravity,” doesn’t apply to every story, but a number of them will delight readers in their lascivious turns. All the same, the quality of the entries is high, and while the degree of depravity runs from fairly prim or kind-of-absent to lip-licking-page-rereading-high-octane-sexuality, the strength of the works means you will probably enjoy the stories either way. I’ll highlight a few pieces as examples of what’s on offer. If you’d like to jump to the end and skip any possibilities of spoilers: yes, it’s good—buy the book!

“The Rise” by Amelia Burton flows with delightful horror atmosphere. Vega is a diver braving the depths of a flooded city, swimming through ghostly streets, hunting for treasure. The writing is strong, and places the reader in the moment, rendering that atmosphere more effective. There is a cool distance to the voice, which works well in this context, pairing with occasionally elegant phrases and suspiciously murky water. Of course, since this is horror, it’s no surprise that Vega encounters what may be an insidious presence, waiting deep in the silt. This story is less overtly sexual than other pieces—well, mostly. There is a strange sense of an underlying sensuality running through it, or perhaps an intimacy, which is possibly an effect of an expertly delivered voice. The read feels brief but it’s a good one, with interesting worldbuilding and an ending horror readers will love.

“Measurements Expressed as Units of Separation” by M.L. Krishnan opens with beautifully written seething against institutionalized misogyny and colonialism, seasoned with a dash of blood and bone. The sentences themselves are wonderful, and the voice is confident, alluring, insightful. Krishnan renders palpable the many modes of misogyny in fresh and astute ways. The protagonist takes regular excursions deep into the woods to escape the oppression of college, usually suffering some kind of personal harm along the way—scrapes, tumbles, and the like; all worth it to be able to breathe, to feel free, even if for a short span of time. On one such excursion, she discovers one of her professors swimming in a stepwell. The protagonist feels an immediate attraction; but the professor, in this setting, is far more than the wisp of presence she seems to be when viewed from a chair in class. What follows is an extraordinary and emotionally effective tale of ill-fated lovers who are caught in parallel but very different cycles.

Winifred Burton proves her expertise with words in “Blood Claim.” Well-written lines and interesting details place the reader deep in place, time, and character, so that we immediately have a distinctive sense of protagonist Michelle Warren, and the town she has returned to, and even the people she encounters. When Michelle feels that initial sexual attraction to Ada LaDucarly, it’s relatable and powerful. In fact, it’s absolutely delicious. Ada has just moved into a plantation house, one where despicable things happened long ago, and . . . well. This is a horror anthology; the setup is familiar, so readers may have a sense of where things are going. But the power of the writing compels the read, inspiring a hunger to devour more of the story. Ada’s presence in the narrative is palpable, not just by description, but by the things that presence brings out in Michelle. And, ultimately, the story is as much about being confined by expectations and finding ways to break free, to truly be yourself, as it is about the horror narrative. It’s such a clear and wonderful vision, told with such fantastic style, that I hope there is more room in the market for Burton to follow up on these characters.

Grief is entangled with urban legend in Yeonsoo Julian Kim’s “Bluebonnet Season.” College student Kathy Ro and her friends are dealing with the recent loss of Mel. Unfortunately, Mel’s ex Rhys is one of those friends, and he is kind of a jerk. Shortly after Mel’s death they had words, loud words; but since then, Rhys has seen Kathy as “connected” to him because of their respective relationships with Mel. Meanwhile, Kathy actually had serious feelings for Mel, feelings which were never really shared. Along with this is the legend of the bluebonnet fields next to the cemetery, which says that if you take pictures there—okay, I don’t want to give everything away! But what shines, for me, is the grounded and nuanced portrayal of complicated and uncomfortable relationships, especially in the middle of grief. Kim’s approach to horror is more about creepy atmosphere than many of the other entries, and readers who seek creepy vibes more than blood and sharp teeth will enjoy the shivers it offers. Kim’s piece is also less sexual; the focus is, if anything, the nature of our feelings for someone after they are gone. It’s a thoughtful, worthwhile meditation. The urban legend piece is nicely tweaked, so it’s not quite expected in terms of where it all leads. Overall, a very well structured and executed story.

When I consider reviewing an anthology, I always glance at the table of contents. Seeing Donyae Coles among the contributors was one of several arguments in favor of giving this book a look. With “Fenestration,” Coles is so very good at eloquently evoking a sense of discomfort with oneself, and of pairing that sensibility with a vague unease provoked by story elements. Simple but elegant prose, distinctive voice, and a feeling of newness all combine to create an utterly absorbing narrative. Despite the strangeness underlying everything, there is also a degree of relatability, making the story even more engrossing. In the telling, Coles makes the ordinary act of Caro buying a plant and bringing it home something fascinating and important; a moment through which Caro’s character is revealed, traits that may be painfully familiar to many readers. Also: Caro has feelings for her coworker, feelings which she believes to be unrequited. In her dreams Caro finds sexual companionship of a very different kind, and in waking, drifts from hookup to hookup and from home to work and back. Things change when her crush gives her a new plant, one which may be responding to her sexual energy; or perhaps the thing is just hungry. Observations and truths breathe between the lines, giving the story incredible vibrancy and depth.

Let’s talk about “Jumbie Closet” and let’s talk about it last. To say that Suzan Palumbo has a way with words would be an embarrassing understatement. There is so much joy to be found in the way Palumbo puts together phrases, the way she creates visualizations, not to mention the sheer power of her craft. The reader is immediately absorbed into the story by Palumbo’s frank and fresh prose, which lends a sense of the real to everything: that feeling of a specific place and time. Add to this the interesting setup: a protagonist awakens to find her jumbie’s (very hot) hookup just waking up in the other room. If you are like me, you immediately need to see where all this awkwardness will go. The journey Palumbo has mapped out is far more engaging than expected. It’s full of longing, awakening, and nuance. Truly wonderful storytelling.

The Crawling Moon, as with other entries in what may or may not be an anthology series, also features illustrations by Matthew Spencer. This particular book opens with a poem by Jess Cho, a brief but provocative piece which embraces both horror and sensuality. Twenty-five stories of varying lengths but consistently high quality, plus a “story game” by Maxwell Lander, will take you from perfectly dreary-creepy moods to blood-spattered climaxes. Genre readers will recognize a number of names stacked in the table of contents: Hailey Piper, Cynthia Zhang, Natalia Theodoridou, E. Catherine Tobler, and more. If you haven’t picked up a Neon Hemlock anthology yet, my friend, you are missing out. You better get this one and get started on catching up! Settle in with a glass of wine, wait till it’s dark outside and nice and quiet, sink into your favorite chair, and enjoy!

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: How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler

Chris Kluwe | 822 words

How To Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying
Django Wexler
Paperback / eBook
ISBN: 9780316392204
Orbit, May 2024, 432 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re living one of the many lives of Davi, a wise-cracking, violence-loving hero who’s had enough of being on the losing side and decides that this time in her time-loop life she’s going to become the Dark Lord instead, in How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying.

For those who have read Edge of Tomorrow, watched Groundhog Day, or consumed literally any isekai story ever (which Wexler notes as an explicit influence on the story), the broad strokes of How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying will be instantly familiar. Davi, the protagonist, has been whisked away from her world to become the Hero who stops the Dark Lord, and if she dies she shows up back at the beginning of her quest to try again (in her case, naked in a pond like some watery tart dispensing swords), but the thing that makes this particular novel unique is that Davi has had quite enough of being the Hero. Every time, no matter what she does, she ends up failing, so instead she decides to see what life’s like on the other side of the fence. After all, if she doesn’t like it, she can just go back to being the Hero, right?

One of the first things that really caught my attention with How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying is that while Davi is initially presented as a somewhat bitter and jaded wisecracking nihilist, Wexler immediately manages to establish stakes for her that she actually cares about and is then forced to grow as a character to keep safe. Many time-loop stories fall into the trap of having supporting characters treated as things (essentially “if I manipulate the pieces around me right, I can get the optimal ending”), whereas the good ones find a way to make the protagonist not want to restart a run, and I can happily say that How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying falls firmly in the latter camp here. This isn’t to say that everything that Davi does is perfect, because it most certainly is not, but Wexler does an excellent job of keeping Davi’s motivations relatable and clear, despite the reader knowing she can start over whenever she wants, and there is a rising set of tension as the book goes on that is very cleverly done.

The second thing I enjoyed about How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying is that, while the humor doesn’t always land, it does far more often than not, and this is a pretty funny book. Davi’s internal monologues and explanations to the reader have a deadpan morbidness that does a lot to cement why she is the way she is at the start of the book, and her interactions with the various other characters of the book are frequently irreverent while remaining germane to the plot. Wexler also uses one of my favorite devices, which fans of Terry Pratchett will immediately recognize, and that is the vanishing art of footnotes as the second (and sometimes third, fourth, and fifth (sadly, as this is a review and not a book, I can only do this as parenthetical asides)) layers of a joke.

Lastly, I highly recommend this book because it is also incredibly inclusive while still maintaining the general nerd-fantasy vibe that traditionally permeates isekais (which has been getting better in the genre in recent years, but still has a lot of work left to go). Davi may have her sharp edges and perhaps be a little too quick to resort to murder as the best solution, but she genuinely cares about the people around her and is more than happy to dispense the murderyness onto those who threaten the vulnerable and maligned. I won’t say it’s quite a found family style story, but How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying has definite shades in that direction, and as a whole Wexler tackles some thorny issues with grace and care.

Overall, if you’re looking for a relatively light-hearted romp in a direction most time-loop stories don’t go, How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying is perfect for wiling away a couple hours at the beach or lounging in the summer sun, and as the start of what promises to be a very interesting adventure, I can’t wait to see where Wexler takes Davi and us next.

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: Richard Thomas

Alex Puncekar | 753 words

So, what inspired this story?

This story comes from a few different places. First, is the limited television anthology series, Tales From the Loop. That show had a really nice mix of technology and everyday life, with remnants of robotics, machines, and futuristic advances layered over a down home, simple existence—family, friends, work, life. It also owes a bit of inspiration to the Stephen King series, The Dark Tower. I always loved his mix of fantasy, science fiction, horror, western, and the weird. I know that I wanted this to be a story with time travel, but more about the relationship between two young boys and how in the blink of an eye you can lose everything you love. Has a bit of that “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” vibe as well. You know, absence makes the heart grow fonder, etc.

Derek goes into this time machine and travels to the same spot in various time periods. What is it about time travel that interests you?

Part of what drives this story for me is the lack of control, the chaos—he doesn’t know how it works, he screws up, the machine pushes forward (showing him such strange sights) and it pushes him backwards. In that grief and curiosity he loses a bit of his childhood innocence. He sees his parents in a different light, in the past, and also comes to understand that the universe is a mysterious, fascinating, dangerous place. That frames everything he currently has in his life, and changes him, profoundly.

When he returns to his normal time period, Derek has a much different perspective on the people in his life. When deciding when and where to send the character or how things have changed in different time periods, did you have any particular ideas in mind of where things would end up or challenges you faced when implementing this theme?

I did have a strong sense of wanting the ending to be different. I’ve been trying to get into Lightspeed for fifteen years now, and so of course I’ve read the magazine, as well as JJA’s anthology series, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Coming out of my MFA in 2012, I had a new appreciation for all things literary—especially the darker corners of that world, the black sheep—everyone from Haruki Murakami and Margaret Atwood to Ted Chiang and Jeff VanderMeer. So where Derek goes, I knew I wanted it to be weird, to elevate and raise the stakes one trip at a time, knowing that the ending was going to be filled with introspection. I wanted the end to feel more literary—to explore his feelings towards his best friend, his father, and his mother. When this story was accepted, I guess that’s the first indication I had that this ending, and the literary aspirations I was seeking, worked. And that meant a lot to me. I hope the ending moves people, and that the technology and science fiction are great vessels for the human story within it.

What’s next for you? Do you have any new projects or stories you’re publishing that you’d like to mention?

Sure. Mostly I’m focused on my fourth novel, which is out on 9/10/24. Incarnate is an arctic horror, sin eater book and I’m really excited about it—I think it’s some of my best work to date. I’ve compared it to everything from The Thing and The Terror to The Only Good Indians (Stephen Graham Jones) and The Fisherman (John Langan), with a dash of Lois Lowry’s The Giver. It’s a mix of cosmic horror and rural folklore, weaving a strand of hopepunk throughout it. Much like my story for Lightspeed, part of my goal was to blend speculative and literary fiction. I try to write body, mind, and soul-entertaining stories that keep you turning the pages, added to a strong emotional reaction, and something that will stimulate you intellectually. Fingers crossed that my fascination with the arctic, the sixty days of night up in Alaska, the visceral meals and escalating creatures birthed by the sin eater, and what comes after absolution, when consequence may be more appropriate, works, and it’s a satisfying journey.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar writes fantasy, science fiction, and horror. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion Magazine and Jenny Magazine. He is also an interviewer for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and has reviewed for Grimdark Magazine. You can find him alexpuncekar.com.

Author Spotlight: Cat Rambo

Alex Puncekar | 454 words

What initially inspired this story?

This story came out of one of the writing game sessions that I run with my online community every week, where the prompt was to pick a verb and explore it. Resistance is much on my mind lately, with the world in its current state, and I wanted to talk about how communication might shape itself in a conversation about the act of resistance.

I enjoy this idea of resistance that you present in this story: resistance of things that are “like us.” Of familiarity or maybe comfort, of which there often doesn’t allow room for growth or change. Do you think this society in your story holds growth/change in a high regard? Maybe they just don’t like the idea of seeing themselves—and possibly all their flaws—presented in another?

One of the things I love about flash fiction is that you can create ambiguity that lets a reader pick from a variety of interpretations. For me, the story is about manners and that initial act of communication—what forms are appropriate and what forms put the other off so much that communication becomes impossible.

What, if you had to guess, were the gifts that the second alien culture shared? My mind either goes to something practical and life-changing (something to combat climate change, perhaps?) or to something wildly cartoonish, like a Looney Toons-style ray gun.

What a great question! I always think energy and ways to de-salinize ocean water are two of the big necessities, but what if they brought something wonderful and unnecessary and horribly addictive, like the network formerly known as Twitter.

What’s next for you? Do you have any new projects or stories you’re publishing that you’d like to mention?

Yes! I have the third book in my space opera series, Rumor Has It, coming out this September. It’s already available for preorder and I urge people to order it from their favorite indie bookstore, like our fabulous Brain Lair Books, here in South Bend. I’ve also got a new collection in the early stages, which is what I’ve been wrestling with, along with finishing up a fantasy novel.

Writing fantasy and science fiction and want to move from promising rejections to actual acceptances? The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers offers live and on-demand classes as well as a virtual campus featuring daily co-working sessions, weekly story discussion, and other Zoom-based social events as well as a lively Discord server for chatting with other writers and exchanging story critiques.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar writes fantasy, science fiction, and horror. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion Magazine and Jenny Magazine. He is also an interviewer for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and has reviewed for Grimdark Magazine. You can find him alexpuncekar.com.

Author Spotlight: Archita Mittra

Mayookh Barua | 1474 words

We’re so happy to be able to bring your fabulous story, “The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strain’d” to our readers. The details of the story along with the crisp sentences make it such a wonderful read. What inspired you to have this “love story” take place in the year 3048?

It’s interesting that you began the interview with this question, since the first draft of my story didn’t have a particular date or time period mentioned, and some of my beta-readers were rather insistent on knowing which century the story took place in, haha! I knew I wanted the story to take place in the future—distant enough to feel sufficiently SF-nal in an “outer space travel is within our grasp” sort of way but not so distant that the engines of corporate capitalism and neo-colonization (that are already turning our present into a dystopia) are utterly unrecognizable. While the exact year was an arbitrary choice, I hoped that by beginning the story somewhere in the mid-31st century, it would be easier to speculate just how much worse our capitalist and extractivist cultures could get, especially for marginalized folks. Of course, it’s bad enough already but I suppose the cynic in me (partially inspired by the workplace horror anecdotes I keep hearing from friends slaving away at unfulfilling corporate jobs) wanted to dial it up further.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing this story?

Figuring out the point-of-view, tense, and pacing was definitely the hardest part for me. The actual plot of the story didn’t change much from one draft to another but I kept rearranging paragraphs and rewriting them in first, second, and third person to figure out which “voice” worked best, until I finally settled on the second person singular. The story was initially written in third person and our main character had a name (Scal) but I thought there was a disconnect between the character and the reader, so I finally switched to second person present. Fingers crossed that it worked!

I am very curious about so many things here from technology to family, extraction to exile, and, of course, love. The droid becomes the interface with which the protagonist interacts in order to unfold all these themes. What made you choose this whole idea of the protagonist revealing themselves to the droid?

I wanted the scenes to be something between a confessional and a conversation, but veering heavily towards the former, since the droid for the most part, does not and cannot communicate using the conventional signifiers of language. The initial ideas for this tale came to me in early 2021, during the pandemic-enforced lockdowns—a deeply isolating period where apart from my close family, I hadn’t seen any friends or acquaintances in months. I mean, I’ve always had an unfortunate habit of talking to people (both real and imaginary) in my head, but during that time, I was thinking a lot about social distancing, touch starvation, and the melancholy that comes from feeling that you’re not really a part of a “community” in a tangible sense (of course, Discord watch-parties and video calls/texts both alleviated and exacerbated that curious sense of isolation), and all of that bled into this idea of a lonely, over-worked and extremely depressed character who is so desperate for companionship—not in a typical romantic sense, but more out of a desire to talk to someone, anyone—that he projects all of that onto this droid.

Solitude can be lovely, of course, but I think long periods of socially-sanctioned isolation are actually inimical to our health and well-being, as we saw with the whole switch to the WFH model during the height of the pandemic where you’re basically trapped in the same few rooms for months on end, your close family or friends could get sick or be hospitalized any moment, and if they die, you’ll have to attend their funeral over Skype—all the while working longer and longer hours for ruthless CEOs who see you as an easily replaceable cog in the machine. So, in a way, the lifestyle changes that the COVID-19 pandemic brought about informed the structure of this tale where the MC is basically narrating his life story to a droid and consequently, develops a deep, emotional attachment to it.

I can’t help but wonder why the jump in the years at the end. What do you hope people arrive at from that ending besides the interpretation they bring to it?

Well, I don’t want to sound too prescriptive as I merely wanted to play around with our sense of time—how time can feel frustratingly short and also painfully long, depending on the circumstances—and that the MC’s relationship with the droid isn’t something that spans a few months or years, but entire centuries, to heighten the realization that if corporates claim to care about your health, it’s only to extract more “work hours” from you and that if we ever have enough scientific breakthroughs to drastically increase one’s life-span, it will most certainly be co-opted by companies to improve the productivity of their employees without any regards to their well-being. Essentially, there’s no compassion under capitalism except for the small kindnesses we choose to offer each other.

What is something you are afraid of but also hopeful about in relation to the distant future?

Oh gosh, it feels scary to even be hopeful about the distant future, especially because I sometimes wonder if there will even be a “distant” future for humanity, with the devastating consequences of climate change already unfolding in certain parts of the globe and the multiple ongoing genocides that are being livestreamed into our devices all day! It’s certainly not been easy to watch the world get worse and worse, such as the rising influence of right-wing governments in my country (and elsewhere) to say the very least. In fact, I’m typing this in the middle of a horrific heatwave summer—a heatwave that has already claimed at least two hundred lives so far, and one that disproportionately affects the lower castes and classes, and yet the government refuses to acknowledge this climate emergency while the upper classes remain complacent inside their apartments with their still-functional air-conditioning units. But despite the inequality and injustice, I’d like to believe there’s still time, that with enough cooperation and empathy we might be able to build a more sustainable society together—though whether you can call that hope or a delusion, I’m not sure. I wish I could be a more optimistic person, sigh.

What are you working on now, and are there any other projects we can look forward to seeing from you in the future? So excited about all of your upcoming work.

As a full-time freelance writer, editor, artist and occasional fortune-teller who regrets all her life choices, I’m well aware that I’m committing the classic mistake of juggling several projects at once, all in varying stages of completion—a process made even slower when you have to contend with the usual, systemic perils of a shaky freelancing career while being based in the Global South, along with certain invisible disabilities, especially untreated ADHD, lol. But writerly whining aside, do keep an eye out on my socials for new announcements, especially if you’re interested in my non-fiction work, as I regularly review the latest SFF books (and the occasional film, video game, or web series) for various outlets, including Strange Horizons and Locus Magazine.

At the time of writing this, I have a sapphic horror novelette called “The Summoning” detailing the toxic and complicated friendship between two girls attending a boarding school, out in Haunted Hallways, an interconnected dark academia anthology edited by May Celeste, published by Outland Entertainment earlier this year. I was very recently surprised and immensely thrilled to learn I’m an Ignyte Award finalist for the Critics Award—voting is open to the public till the end of August.

I also interview Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld about the threat of generative AI and its impact on SFF publishing and beyond, in Deep Dream—a timely and remarkable anthology that imagines the future of art, edited by Indrapramit Das, as part of MIT Press’s Twelve Tomorrows series. This one comes out in October 2024, but you can pre-order it now, if it piques your interest!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Mayookh Barua (s/he/they) is a Los Angeles-based writer from India who is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Southern California. He holds an MFA in Fiction from North Carolina State University. His work explores sexuality, art, mythology, education and family through a queer South-Asian voice. A 2023 Roots.Wounds.Words Non-Fiction fellow, MOZAIK Philanthropy’s 2023 Future Art Writers Award winner, and a Dorianne Laux Poetry Prize 2023 Finalist, his works appear in The Audacity by Roxane Gay, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Litro Magazine and elsewhere.

Author Spotlight: Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe

Phoebe Barton | 771 words

Welcome to Lightspeed Magazine! We’re honored to share your story “Child of The River” with our readers. Can you talk a bit about how this story took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

When I write stories that have heavy tones of fantasy, I tend to include things like gods and complicated magic systems. With this story, I wanted to write something simpler, something that seems almost possible even if it contains hints of strangeness.

Also, I tried to give the narrator and his ancestors a kind of power that forces them to give back. They don’t get to control the elements freely like powerful mages. In the end, they are claimed by the forces that gave them those powers in the first place.

This story explores growth, loneliness, and the desire to escape fate. These were all feelings I experienced at the time I wrote it and tried to replicate in a world that closely resembled my own.

There’s a lot here about, while not necessarily fate, the demands of elders—in this case, the river—for the narrator to subject himself to something imposed on him. Whether readers read it as being subjected to cruelty, taking up responsibility, or something else entirely, what were you looking to explore with this?

The whole point of this story, at least from my perspective, is to show that some things are just unavoidable. There are so many stories out there where the main character cheats fate and escapes whatever destiny the universe or their family tries to force on them. I was going for a touch of horror or at least something dark in this story, so I knew it had to end with the narrator eventually succumbing to the demands of fate and showing just a bit of hopelessness and bitter acceptance.

The narrator’s line “the dreams always sap all my energy out of me” hit me hard while reading; it’s a powerful and common feeling in these times. How did the plague years affect the way you planned or wrote this story?

This is such a great question! I wrote the first draft of this story in 2021 and I haven’t changed much about it since then. During the pandemic, I tended to write darker stories. Maybe it was a reflection of the world around me or it was some form of escape, I’m not really sure.

I still have several unfinished horror stories from that period on my computer and I’m unsure if they’ll ever see the light of day. They’re much darker than this story, though. Maybe the world will get to experience them someday as well.

While the story was very specific about the supernatural qualities it dealt with—the nature of the narrator’s mother, the river spirits, and so on—it only hinted at where it took place on Earth, which to me gave it the warm sense of a very old, deeply told story. What led you to shape it in this way?

Most of my stories are based in secondary worlds, a byproduct of growing up reading too many Forgotten Realms books. I have never been too good at writing about the real world, especially the modern world. This is why most of my stories feature forests and small towns. I don’t have to come up with names for highways, streets, monuments, etc.

However, most of the work I started in the pandemic was set in the real world. In this story, I wanted to blur the line between the real world and the worlds beyond because the narrator himself is trapped between two worlds. So I had fun trying to give the readers a taste of how he feels.

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Apart from the inexhaustible pile of uncompleted short stories, I’m currently trying to finish a challenging but fun novella told from the POV of the most unreliable of narrators—a literal god of trickery.

My first novelette, which is based on the misadventures of the aforementioned god, “A Dish Best Served Cold, or An Excerpt From the Cookbook of The Gods,” will be published in a future issue of Lightspeed Magazine.

I also have a flash piece, “In Every Version of The Universe You Are Gone,” coming soon in Baffling Magazine.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Phoebe Barton is a queer trans science fiction writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Lightspeed, and Kaleidotrope, and her story “The Mathematics of Fairyland” won the Aurora Award for Best Short Story in 2022. She lives with her family, a robot, and multiple typewriters in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Find her online at www.phoebebartonsf.com.

Coming Attractions, September 2024

The Editors | 235 words

Coming up in September, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Gabriela Santiago (“Reconstructing ‘The Goldenrod Conspiracy,’ Edina Room, Saturday 2:30-3:30”) and Sagan Yee (“Two Motes in the Zeugma Dark”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “The Life You’ve Given Me, Rusty” from P.A. Cornell and “The Oracular Manifestation of Human Consciousness Offers Three Provocative Verbs, Separated by Commas” by Aimee Ogden.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Osahon Ize-Iyamu (“We the People Excluding I”) and Jae Steinbacher (“The Ex Hex”). We also have a flash story (“The Terrible Secret of The Immortal Bards”) from Adam-Troy Castro, and another (“A Superior Knot”) from Ash Huang.

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: Ai Jiang, Kenneth Schneyer, Russell Nichols, Ashok K. Banker, and P H Lee.

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

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

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

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Bluesky

bsky.app/profile/lightspeedmagazine.com

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

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

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

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

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Lightspeed and/or Nightmare, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of 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!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and our other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor

Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Mayookh Barua

Editorial Interns

Mayookh Barua

Madison Brake

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

Chris Kluwe

Melissa A Watkins

Copy Editor

Luke Tolvaj

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher

Christie Yant

Emeritus Staff

Rich Horton (Reprint Editor)

Laurel Amberdine (Assistant Editor)

Aigner Loren Wilson (Book Reviewer)

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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming, Oct. 2024]

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.