Artwork by Geneva Benton

CONTENTS

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

PROSE

VADE RETRO SATANA

Maurice Broaddus // 4965 words

Not even Macia’s thick armor can protect her from her own conscience. A story of redemption, self-determination, and discovering what faith truly means.

TALKING TO CANCER

Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali // 5326 words

Layla has the power to save or end a person’s life with a few words. In this story, we learn the true limits of power and responsibility.

THE HARD SHELL

Russell Nichols // 4184 words

The story of a hard boiled detective, a chick, and town steeped in lies. You think you know the truth behind the rhymes, but the truth is you don’t know Jack from Jill.

THE BEEKEEPER’S GARDEN

Christopher Caldwell // 4568

In this dreamy tale, a young woman is trapped in a strange house with a strange woman and no memory of her past. She must brave her captor’s garden and learn its secrets if she is to make her escape.

HOME IS WHERE MY MOTHER’S HEART IS BURIED

Wole Talabi // 5432 words

Arin wants to go home to Earth, and Tinu wants to let go of her Earthborn memories. In this story, we explore the true meaning of family and belonging.

WE LAUGH IN ITS FACE

Barbara L.W. Myers // 2720 words

What good is forever if you have no one to spend it with? In this story, we explore the true cost of life eternal.

GRAVEROBBING NEGRESS SEEKS EMPLOYMENT

Eden Royce // 3995 words

Wanted: one negress to find a certain lost cargo. Welcome to a Charleston of the past filled with a very necessary magic.

EXTRAS

INDIE SPOTLIGHT

COAL

Constance Burris

THANKS

April 2017

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

We’re back!

Welcome to issue two of FIYAH Literary Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. If you’re joining us from issue one, thank you for sticking with us. If this is your first issue, thank you for giving us a shot. We’ve curated a spectacular collection of Black speculative fiction for you, and we hope we give you reason to hang with us for a bit longer.

The theme of issue two is Spilling Tea, and every story in this issue is robust, flavorful, and piping hot. Geneva Benton has once again graced us with a cover that flawlessly captures the essence of our slate of stories using her own unique brand of Vlack girl magic. Maurice Broaddus’ “Vade Retro Satana” is a story of fellowship, duty, and faith under fire. Khaalidah Muhammad Ali’s “Talking To Cancer” forces us to examine power, responsibility, and loss. Russell Nichols’ “The Hard Shell” is a fragrant blend of nursery rhymes and noir that will blow you away. In Christopher Caldwell’s “The Beekeper’s Garden,” we learn the power reclaiming ourselves and telling our stories our own way. Wole Talabi’s “Home Is Where My Mother’s Heart Is Buried” takes us back into the stars to examine how to heal our old wounds. Barbara Myers’ “We Laugh In Its Face” completely changes our idea of everlasting life. And in “Graverobbing Negress Seeks Employment,” Eden Royce takes us on a journey in search of things forgotten—both magical and mundane.

We also have our Indie Writer’s Spotlight. This issue we are talking to Constance Burris, author of the Everleaf series.

At FIYAH, we believe that telling our stories is resistance. We believe that art should tell the truth, and that the best art reflects the times in which it was created. We fight and we work because the stories of black writers deserve to be told. To that end check out our #BSFReport, which has enabled Black writers of speculative fiction to tell their own truths about their experiences in publishing. Everyone at FIYAH is dedicated to honoring the voices and lives of Black writers who have come before us, and to clearing the road for black writers of the future—a future that ain’t gonna write itself.

Thank you for continuing to support FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. We hope that you enjoy the issue.

Executive Editors: Justina Ireland + Troy L. Wiggins

Poetry Editor: Brandon O’Brien

Acquiring Editors: Brent Lambert + DaVaun Sanders

Layout: LeKesha Lewis

Cover Artwork by Geneva Benton

All material in FIYAH is copyrighted to the original authors and may not be reproduced without permission.

VADE RETRO SATANA

By Maurice Broaddus // 4965 words

::SO-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: All systems functioning within normal parameters::

Peacekeeping missions were always the most difficult assignment for Lieutenant Macia Branson. Not that she longed for the combat which had been much of her duty in the Service of the Order, but the reality was that it was still war conditions only with the setting lowered to a slow broil.

The Ouje villagers sat around a fire. Led by one of the church novices, their idols and totems were piled high and lit aflame. Several members pounded out a rhythm that was both mournful and hopeful. The drumming tugged at a part of Macia’s soul, the way an old vidgraph of distant relatives was both familiar and alien. Memories locked in a box, hidden in the back of a closet where all memories were treasured and then forgotten.

The planet’s atmosphere was perfectly hospitable and the Ouje people not that different from humans like her. However, the Service of the Order required all Service of the Order soldiers who provided security for a missionary colony to remain in their biomech suits. The world and its sensations filtered through its mechanical membrane. It provided a barrier between their people and the disciples; her surroundings appeared through digital feeds along her visor. Macia stood on the outside of the sacred circle.

“Look at them,” Prefect Sergeant Rhys Moll stalked the perimeter of the circle. He was a short pug of a man; even the hand unit of his biomech suit looked like five bolts fitted on a stump. When out of his suit, he smelled of onions suffused with garlic, and a hint of something vaguely alcoholic always lilted on his breath. His hair was a nest of greasy curls; his nose looked as if it had been flattened by a plank. “They’d be lost without us. We’ve done some good work here.”

“Daniel told me that this was usually when their Alawe Modu festival would occur,” she said. A twinge of guilt nagged her when she referred to Unoko as Daniel. Daniel, like her parents, was what the church referred to as an “indigenous leader.” These leaders were either locals who quickly took to the Gospel and demonstrated promise as a teacher or someone who held such sway in the community that they became a key target for conversion. Unoka was targeted for acquisition early on. The Order decided his new designation would be Daniel. “The family elders gather the tribe and sacrifice a yamma to their ancestors. The blood soaks into the ground for those who had gone before them to enjoy, the meat cooked and eaten by the family. Any boys and girls coming of age carve masks for themselves for their masquerade dance, to learn the secret language of the tribe.”

“See what I mean? Lost. We saved them.”

“Salvation is the point,” Macia said.

“Not just their souls. We saved them from themselves. They were hacking each other to bits long before we came here.” Rhys was the kind of devout who liked to hear his opinion spouted without contradiction. He was one of the first soldiers Macia met when she was assigned to the Templar Paton. Though she’d received the Purple Cross, he was suspect of her readiness as a soldier. He had no concept of how much blood she’d spilled in Jesus’ name. She’d grown quite adept at ignoring him.

“Not according to Biafra Oshun.” Macia mentally chided herself for taking his bait. She hated to be drawn into these conversations. She had the same lessons in training and didn’t need them regurgitated on duty.

“We bring order and civility,” Rhys continued. “It takes, what, two languages just for one of them to leave one village and get to the next.”

“It’s pretty typical for an Ouje to know six languages. The language of their family, the language of the tribe, the language of commerce…”

“Ridiculous,” Rhys cut her off.

The words of a devout had a way of crawling under her skin with the sting of guilt for not believing more. Some nights she wondered if she missed the point of her own faith. Left alone in her quarters, hour after hour waiting for sleep until time lost all meaning, with only her thoughts and the silence of the Lord. Snatching up spiritual crumbs—a verse here, an encouraging word there—to knit the thing she called her faith together. She felt like an incomplete bad poem. She prayed against her heathen thoughts late at night. It was the easiest way to come down from the adrenaline rush of being on constant alert and stims administered by the biomech. When she did close her eyes, she dreamt of blood, but she always awoke covered in a thin sheet of sweat.

The Ouje milled about, dressed in their finest tunics and embroidered karosses. Each family’s clothing was patterned or colored according to a Ouje cultural theme. Many people traveled great distances to celebrate the successful harvest. The village was hundreds of kilometers from the central megalopolis and quite rural. The people roasted wollof, a tuber of some sort, and stewed yamma, a small animal which looked rather like a goat, for Alawe Modu. Herds of yamma grazed in a fenced in berne just outside of the village. The spices from the stew wafted throughout the village, its scent so thick and cloying it set off Macia’s biomech air filtration unit. Bowls of leafy vegetables soaked in a cream produced by the yamma, were set on each table. People wandered about and ate as they willed. Most ate to excess.

“I see we haven’t wrung out all of their pagan traditions and superstitious ways of thinking.” Rhys took any prolonged silence as an invitation to speak.

“I never thought we had to. My parents always thought that the best novices took a people’s customs and stories and redeemed them. They viewed all culture as opportunities to connect to worshiping the Lord.”

“How did that work out for them?” Rhys eyes widened as if realizing he had stepped over a line. Rather than apologizing, he quickly moved on. “There is a great danger to the path of syncretism. One day you are ’communing’ with the spirits and then are told to think of it as prayer to the Holy Spirit, next thing you know, we’ve added all sorts of new rituals to the church and forgotten the name of the God we serve. It only leads to spiritual confusion and dilution of the faith.”

“I think I’ll check the perimeter.”

Macia walked away from him, each step weighted by the obligations of faith. When the church came to her planet, some of the novices doubted that her people even had souls because of the language barrier. Her family’s facility with languages brought them to prominence. The hardest part of her transition to Christianity was how she had to shed her culture to find acceptance. For the church to believe that she believed and repented of her old ways. In all of her travels since, she never returned to her home village. She would be as much a stranger there as a novice on their first mission.

The children began their ritual. Wearing masks too big for their heads, they danced around the fire. Excited, their joy almost contagious, happy for a moment to hide who they were. To pretend to be something else. To be seen as something almost ready. Tonight they hid behind masks and called down the spirits of their ancestors. On Sunday, as the Service of the Order had implemented a new calendar week for the Ouje, they would serve as altar attendants.

Lord I believe. Help me with my unbelief. It was the centurion’s prayer from the New Testament and the only prayer that truly resonated with her.

::SO-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: Establishing parietal operculum::

Though the planet Nambra was on the outer rim of the Galactic Mission, the Service of the Order quickly took over the spaceports of the Angwen territory, which became the staging area for their missionary work. Only a couple of conflict-free years had passed, but the novices, church planters with mission command, now saw a record number of converts. Angwen was one of the most religious colonies on the planet. Churches dotted the landscape. The Angwen borders secure, the Ouje people’s life was finding a measure of routine again.

Security had been heightened after a bomb threat to the marketplace. The presence of so many Service of the Order soldiers only made the fear more of a reality. Food shortages and power interruptions were one thing, but checkpoints and the constant parade of armed guards wouldn’t allow the Ouje to push their fears to the back of their minds. But there was something more, something on the Ouje peoples’ faces when they saw Macia. People who looked like her, people from a colony much like hers flinched away from her as she strode by. Their village recalled her ancestral home. So much so, she half-expected her cousins to come tearing out of the dondo doors, having snuck a piece of baked pastry from her grandmother’s counter.

An older gentleman sidled towards her. Out of reflex, she re-gripped her pulse rifle before she recognized him. Daniel wore the robes of a village elder. Close-cropped silver hair topped Daniel’s head and led into a beard which framed his dark-skinned face and came to a point on his chin. His bushy eyebrows made his face seem severe. Tall and thin with a slight stoop, he leaned heavily on his walking staff most of the time, but when he approached young women, he straightened to full attention. A mad twinkle filled his eyes, as if he engaged in a secret courtship ritual with every woman he talked to.

“There are many here who believe as your friend does.” Daniel wore an odd expression, like a man watching a frog work out calculus.

“He’s… not my friend.” It took a moment for her translator matrix to recalibrate. The Ouje people’s constant language switching proved challenging for her biomech to keep up with. Macia wished that she could try to learn some of the Ouje’s tongue for herself; working alongside them. That her gift with languages would be put to more use than her skills at killing.

“Still, some believe in the… Word, as you put it, so much they are gripped with a fervor. I look around the village I once knew. Many have taken to destroying shrines which had stood for generations, and oppose any local tradition or culture that they cannot trace back to your Bible. Alawe Modu isn’t what it used to be,” he said. “Attendance is down this season. I worry that when my generation passes away, this celebration of life and rebirth and gratitude will die with them.”

“Some churches have banned all Alawe Modu festivities entirely. We were lucky to have this version of it sanctioned.”

“Thankfully, some churches can find room for both traditions.”

“Maybe this version of the Alawe Modu can unite all of the Ouje villages.”

“Maybe. As our people say, when a group urinates together, it foams.” Daniel smiled widely.

“It may be too much Horta for some.” Macia threw her head back in laughter. Horta was the religion that the Ouje practiced before the Order arrived. The Ouje’s culture and religion was so intertwined, and the Order frowned on any remnants of either.

“Christian or Horta, this isn’t about faith. It is about being Ouje. Anyway, I shouldn’t tarry. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble for speaking to a ’dirty’ Horta.”

“I consider this part of the Service of the Order’s evangelism mission. Building bridges between faiths to create a dialogue.”

“You are a wise woman, Macia Branson.”

Macia was never good at accepting compliments, believing each one was actually meant for someone they confused with her. She began to inspect her weapon. “I still suspect such a dialogue would be frowned upon.”

“By many sides. Your suit is little more than a large target.” Daniel bowed, leaving her to her security sweep.

Her patrol took her past a series of dondos. Each structure housed several families. In the shadows of a doorway, a grandmother passed a few slips of paper to her granddaughter. Like so many of the artisan class, her fingers were painstakingly gnarled, having worked intricate detail into wood during her many years, imbuing them with life and spirit. The words on the paper translated to the Republic of Nia’quong. The notes were the protocurrency a few of the Ouje began to circulate. The old woman clutched her granddaughter’s hand with the bill inside as if an important part of her Ouje identity was in the tiny grasp. Like a ghost haunting their national identity. Macia pretended to not see it.

The idea of countries, or borders, was a concept the Ouje lacked until the church arrived. It carved up regions for those they had converted and armed borders against those they hadn’t. Nambra had been held up as a model of missionary work until civil war broke out a few months ago. The Ouje who secretly practiced Horta attempted to create a refuge: Nia’quong, a country within the country Angwen, sparking a civil war. After months of brutal fighting and countless dead, and with the peacekeeping militia of the church in place, the surviving Ouje were one country again. It was a chapter of their history they sought to forget.

Except for Biafra Oshun. A pro-Nia’quong independence activist, she led protests across the region. She protested the economic, social, and political marginalization of the Horta Ouje. None of them were a part of the ruling council appointed by the church. Though the Ouje were mixed on separatist causes, her last protest turned violent: the Service of the Order had to open fire on them. Charged with conspiracy, part of an illegal operation due to her work with underground militia, there was an open warrant for her detention.

Watching the grandmother reminded Macia of the first time she met her new family after her parents were killed on the mission field. They welcomed her with all smiles and hugs. They ushered her to her room, her very own room she wouldn’t have to share with anyone. Crisp sheets folded over the bed. The tall window peered over a wide yard. They closed the door behind them to allow her time to acclimate. She dropped to her knees and sobbed. Her aunt slipped back into her room and knelt down beside Macia, even though the little girl was beyond consoling.

“I’m not going to tell you not to cry,” her aunt said. “I’m not going to lie to you and tell you everything is going to be okay. In these short years of yours, you already know that’s not the case. So you cry. Cry for your mother and father who are gone from you now. Cry for the childhood lost to you now. Cry for all the hardness you have yet to face.”

Her aunt patted Macia on the back with her left hand and fished in her pockets with the other. She remembered what her aunt wore: a simple blue frock, hand sewn and ill-fitting. Over it was an apron. The entire front of it was a series of pockets. It seemed like her aunt had all the secrets of the universe carried in those pockets. She removed a small wooden bird carrying an egg on its back. The bird’s head was craned backwards as if attempting to peck the egg away. Macia’s tears ebbed, now curious, as her aunt placed it before them.

“There was a custom our people had, before the coming of The Order. We believe it is not wrong to go back for that which once was or is lost to us now. The best way to hold onto who we are has always been through the stories we pass onto our children.”

And every night, Macia’s aunt told her stories right up until Macia joined the Service of the Order. That was the way she chose to remember it now. Back then, the stories got on her nerves and she quickly tired of hearing the same old tales over and over again.

::SO-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: Navcom interface offline::

The digital telemetry of her helmet subsystem went blank. Macia’s military experience reduced her first response to equipment failure to tapping it, and she tapped her wrist panel as her displays failed. Next she attempted a partial re-boot of her navcom system. The link was an information tether to her orbiting ship, the Templar Paton. The roar of the approaching airship alerted her just as quickly as her malfunctioning proximity detector.

The ship hovered above the village, its thrusters scattering the yamma as it prepared to land in the berne.

“Rhys, you copy?” Macia yelled.

“Barely. Lots of interference.”

“You have a skimmer due to land?”

“None on the schedule. I already have a squad moving to intercept.”

“Good. I’ll meet you there.”

Macia broke into a half jog, the motors in her leg units speeding her along. She arrived in time to see the ship pivot, lock onto the arriving troops, and open fire. The inhuman whine of missiles screamed across the berne. Macia dropped to her knees. Three soldiers opened fire over her head. The ground shook with the impact of two more missiles. The ship lurched. Its cargo hold opened like a yawning mouth and deposited a contingent of enemy combatants.

“What do we have?” Macia ran across the berne to provide cover for Rhys and the rest of her men to reach an outcrop.

“A mass of hostiles. Fifteen meters from our position. We lost navcom just before the ambush.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence. This sounds coordinated. Wounded?”

“It’s bad. They lured us in, took a lot of us out. What’s the plan?” Rhys peeked around the corner to survey the scene.

“Same as it ever was. Catch them between us and other units. I’ll take point. You and you,” she pointed out two men, “on my six. Rhys, bring up the rear.”

Small weapon fire erupted from all sides. The ship crashed into the side of the building next to her. Without telemetry readings, she lost her bearings. Another blast of heat, and the air grew thick with hot gases. Something exploded, sending her biomech suit hurtling through the air. Her flight was stopped short by a metal wall, and though her biomech suit absorbed much of the blast, the force and the impact made her head swim.

::USER-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: Catastrophic systems failure. Initiate shutdown and self-repair protocols

Macia hated unconsciousness. Drifting off to sleep often proved difficult enough, but the slow murky confusion of regaining consciousness left her nauseous. Like swimming to the surface of black waters. Pressure bubbled about her head, making her feel vague and uncertain.

Her eyes open, she craned her head about as best she could within the biomech suit. Without power to the servos in her arms that aided her movements, her arms slumped like leaden weights at her side. She was trapped inside her biomech suit, which was little more than a form-fitting coffin in this state. She sat against a wall, her legs akimbo, and her weapon useless at her side. Her head rang. Another wave of nausea swept over her. Unable to move, she was little more than a monument to a fallen soldier. A few meters away, Rhys struggled to his feet, the left arm of his biomech suit shorn off. It took a few moments for her to process that it meant his arm was also missing. He limped about, lost and uncertain.

A contingent of enemy troops rounded up the remaining soldiers of The Order. They dragged the novices out to the center of the clearing in full view of the soldiers. Macia struggled to move, but she feared something was broken because every movement sent a fresh spike of pain to her skull. The troops parted as their leader approached.

Biafra Oshun appeared a lot younger than Macia had imagined. She moved to a beat that was soft at first but seemed to gain force with each step. She had a power, an intensity about her that buffeted the novices like they were caught in a windstorm. Her face remained unadorned, striking in its cold beauty. She wore her head shaved clean. Her skin was as dark as unearthed pottery, the darkest shade of brown Macia had ever seen. Biafra’s eyes, both haunted and weary, scanned the crowd.

“Who is in charge here?” Biafra demanded, refusing to speak any of the commerce tongues, instead using one of the old languages.

“I am.” A novice struggled to his feet. One of Biafra’s men shoved him forward.

Biafra drew a weapon with such speed, Macia didn’t register it until the woman had already fired. The novice’s body stood erect for a heartbeat or two until it realized it was dead and dropped. “I’ll ask again. Who is in charge here?”

::SO-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: Partial power established. Back-up systems nominal. Non-essential systems offline while charging.

“You are in charge,” Macia said. Her biomech suit needed time to regain power. All eyes turned toward her. “But I am responsible for these people’s lives.”

“You?” Biafra spat. She turned to face the crowd of Ouje that had gathered around the spectacle. “These people prey on the vulnerable and desperate. These people come armed with a Bible and guns, and I don’t know which of the two is more destructive. These people come to tell us to reject our customs and history and teach us to self-hate. These people have taken away our spirituality and left us with religion.”

“If I have a credit, it can be used for good or evil,” Macia managed. “Whose hands it is in, what lies in their heart, determines how it’s used.”

“Funny how you gravitate straight to currency to plead your case. Your mission trips provide an excuse for you to mine our resources and ‘trade’ with us. You prop up a few leaders, make them wealthy, so they are more amenable to spread your ‘Word.’ I feel sorry for you. The things you must do to yourself and your thinking to remain so… conditioned. You are thrice damned: a tool of the oppressor, a traitor to your people, and a betrayer to yourself.”

“Don’t pretend to know me.”

“Abducted as a child, indoctrinated, and forced to commit acts of violence against your people. I don’t need to know you—the story of the ‘church’ is the same all over. If I had my way, I’d put you on trial and indict you for the same crimes that were initially perpetrated against you. There is a kind of poetic beauty to that.”

“I know who I am. I found my faith.” I know who I am, Macia thought. Lord I believe. Help me with my unbelief. She rubbed her hand against the inside of her biomech suit, feeling the hum as her suit recharged. Her fingertips had developed callouses from years of holding weapon grips and she still felt the occasional ghostly itch of them against her skin. Soon her suit would be fully powered up. She only needed to stall a little longer. “Who are you?”

“I have seen how the church treats dissenters. They have made me what I am today. They hobble us with religion while stripping away our spirituality. They came here with their Bibles and guns, put the guns to our heads and told us to worship. Herded to their churches like prisoners of war. They murdered our… ancestors.” Biafra drew her weapon again. “You are responsible for their lives? Then you are responsible for this.”

Biafra motioned for one of her men to bring Rhys over. She pressed her weapon to the side of his head, then leveled her eyes at Macia with a cool detachment. Rhys’ mouth moved wordlessly, rhythmically. Was it a prayer? Was it a plea for Macia to do something, anything to save his life? Without her internal filters, she smelled only her own fear sweat, which made bile rise in her throat. She screamed, feeling every bit the helpless prisoner in her biomech suit. As if enticed by Macia’s screams, Biafra squeezed the trigger and Rhys’ brains splattered against the nearby wall. His blood ran down the wall in an imperfect smear. It looked no different from the blood of any of the Ouje dead.

Macia counted her opponents. By the way she moved, sure-footed and fluid, Biafra was the most dangerous. Despite the swelling chaos, the jeers of Horta supporters among the crowd, and the waving of weapons, only a half dozen people remained of Biafra’s ambush party. Even without a pulse rifle, with her biomech suit pumping stims into her system, she would soon satisfy the cry of innocent blood.

Macia had been taught that she fought for the church and the safety of its people. Throughout her training she was told that she was a “holy soldier” under divine provision. Many a senior novice absolved their soldiers of any crimes committed if they had obeyed their orders, orders passed down directly from the Holy Spirit. So in the eyes of God, the soldiers were blameless, they were simply carrying out God’s will. God judged soldiers differently from civilians. Once the “hostile relations” conditions were met, judgment protocols were in effect. This could only end with the death of either Macia or Biafra.

There would be blood.

“Kill us together or leave them alone.” Daniel pushed through the gathered crowd. He stared down Biafra’s men, taking the steel from the spines of many who had been jeering only moments ago. Some of Daniel’s followers slipped past him and stood in front of Macia and the novices.

“This doesn’t concern you, Unoka,” Biafra said.

“You do this in our name.”

“What I do, I do for all Ouje.”

“We aren’t threatened by stories, we learn from them. We don’t believe one story should destroy another.”

::SO-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: Systems restored. All systems functioning within nominal parameters::

Macia’s hand crept toward her weapon. Her biomech suit was as close to optimal as she needed. She locked eyes with Biafra.

::SO-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: All systems functioning within normal parameters::

“You let her go.” Daniel’s gaze was shrewd.

Macia had been young once. Lost and angry, searching for any life preserver to cling to. To provide her direction. In the church, in the Service of the Order, her anger found purpose. She wondered if her eyes mirrored Biafra’s. Macia wondered what her superiors suspected. The official story was that the rebels, having made their point, left before the Service of the Order reinforcements arrived from the Templar Paton.

“Consider it a judgment call,” Macia said. “We were outnumbered. Too many civilians around. Casualties would’ve been high on all sides and I didn’t want to risk innocent lives. We can send in a fully armed squad into the mountains after her if need be.”

“Assuming she hasn’t gone completely underground.”

“Assuming.”

Daniel convinced the village to continue with the Alawe Modu. The rains had stopped and it was neither too hot nor too cold nor too dry. The first kits returned with the season and songs welcomed them. This season of the year was worth celebrating, he cajoled. Old men sat on logs and warmed their bodies, waiting for the masquerade dance to begin.

“I watched you throughout the festival. You’re curious,” he said.

“Faith is a curious thing for me. So fleeting and uncertain.”

“What she said about your story, the kidnapping and indoctrination, how close was she?”

“It is a chapter of my life I consider closed and don’t choose to remember.”

“What a people choose to remember about their past, the stories they pass down, informs who they are. Sets the boundaries of their identity. We remember the pain of our past to mourn, to heal, and to learn. Only in that way can we ensure the same mistakes are not repeated.”

“What I lost is my faith in humanity.”

“Do you recall what your Jesus said about the faith the size of the mustard seed? It’s not about the amount of the faith so much as the object of it. Doubts are what makes it real. What makes it yours.” He took her hand, gently steadying her, helping her forward. She withdrew her hand.

“I got it. I can find my own way.” Her tone was almost accusatory.

“I had no doubt.” Daniel held his hands up. “I simply tend to leap at any excuse to invite a young woman to dance.”

She looked at him for a moment and then to the masquerade dancers. Her body ached, though not from the usual bruises that followed a skirmish. Hers was a soul weary fatigue. Each exhalation burned her chest. Her breath hitched. Her ribs would be sore in the morning. Her legs wobbled under her full weight, but the suit did most of the work.

::USER-COMMAND\TEMPLAR-NAVCOM-INFO: Initiate exit protocols::

Her biomech suit released a slow hiss as it unsealed. The black stocking of her exosoma served as an interface between her and her biomech suit. Without the suit, she feared her legs might betray her.

The frantic rhythm of the drums rode the same current as her own heartbeat. Her eyes locked onto the dancers. Waiting. Emptying herself of the contradictions and shedding all that was unnecessary. Letting the rhythm of the drumbeat enter her. Find a true place in her. Not worrying about her steps, only being caught up in the music. Returning to a simple truth. To be free.

And Macia danced.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT MAURICE BROADDUS

Maurice Broaddus is the author of the Knights of Breton Court urban fantasy trilogy: King Maker, King’s Justice, and King’s War (Angry Robot Books). His fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Cemetery Dance, Apex Magazine, and Weird Tales Magazine. Some of his stories are being collected in the upcoming Voices of the Martyrs (Rosarium Publishing). He co-edited Streets of Shadows (Alliteration Ink) and the Dark Faith anthology series (Apex Books). You can keep up with him at his web site, MauriceBroaddus.com.

TALKING TO CANCER

By Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali // 5326 words

I was eight years old the first time I spoke to cancer.

It had metastasized and my mother’s belly was swollen with tumors. I took care of her because she needed me, and I needed her, and also because father was always at work or visiting his friends or Aunt Diane.

I tried to feed my mother. I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or sometimes tuna, because I wasn’t allowed to use the stove. She rarely ate more than a bite or two. I used an old halfway-working electric tea kettle, bright copper sparks flashing through its frayed cord, to make cups of tea.

I cleaned up vomit and washed soiled clothes. When my mother cried, curled into a cocoon of pain in sweaty sheets, I cried too. When the pain meds sucked her into the void of nothingness, I experienced relief.

I saved my mother’s life.

She lay still as a tombstone in her bed, skin ashen and gray, with chapped lips pulled tight across teeth too expansive for her gaunt face. Her chest rose and fell, uneven and infrequent, to inhale fruitless breaths. My father was there, a sad shadow in the periphery, offering nothing of comfort or solace. We thought she would die that day.

“Layla darling, come speak to your mother.” The hospice nurse extended a warm hand to me. “See to it that she leaves the world hearing your sweet voice.” I didn’t believe my mother could hear me but I spoke to her anyway.

I lay my head on the pillow next to hers. She smelled like Dove soap and baby powder and sour sickness. I cried until my tears soaked through the pillow case. I begged, “Cancer, please don’t kill my mother.”

It listened.

∙ ∙ ∙

My first patient of the day, Hiba, arrived at 9 o’clock. I offered her a seat across from me at my desk. She wore a gray dress with white flowers, too large for her shrunken angular frame. Like many veteran cancer patients, Hiba didn’t bother with a wig, and bravely sported a clean scalp.

Everyone who comes to me is desperate. Everyone who comes to me has run out of treatments, or doctors, or hope, or all three. They come to me because either they or someone they know has seen my thirty-minute infomercial. It comes on channel fifty-five at 3 a.m., three days a week. I do what their doctors cannot. And I do it for $99.99.

I can stop the cancer from killing. Any cancer. In any part of the body. Regardless of what stage it is in.

My patients have usually tried several cancer treatments before coming to me. Enough treatments to know that nothing else is likely to work. Hiba’s cancer had outsmarted three different chemotherapy regimens, so her doctor suggested she come to me.

“Dr. James said that at this stage,” she paused to cough into cupped hands, “I have nothing to lose…except the rest of my life. Right, doctor?” She laughed pitifully. I smiled back at her.

“I’m not a doctor.” People always made that mistake.

“Excuse me?”

“Not a doctor,” I said, pointing to the degrees and accompanying licenses on the wall behind me. “I’m an Advanced Practice Nurse.”

“But you treat cancer. You’re licensed to give chemo.” Her ghost thin brows furrowed. “Aren’t you?”

Despite the infomercial where I explain exactly what I do, people’s expectations still never quite align with reality.

“I do not give chemotherapy, Hiba. May I call you Hiba?” She nodded. “In fact, I will not give you any type of medicine.”

I guided Hiba to a curtained area on the other side of the room, my hand on the small of her back. I felt her vertebrae and her ribcage beneath the thin fabric of her dress. While she disrobed, I returned to my desk.

“Do you really think you can help me?” Her voice was hopeful.

“Of course.”

She pulled back the curtain and stood there, drawn and cachectic in an overlarge hospital gown. “And you’ll do this just by talking to my cancer?”

I helped her onto the exam table, braced my arm across her shoulders and eased her head down onto the pillow.

“Well,” I said as I warmed the bell of my stethoscope between my palms, “it really is quite straightforward, though difficult for many to believe. I will simply ask your cancer to stop. And, it will.”

“Then why an exam?”

She kept her big brown eyes focused on me the entire time she questioned me. I found it difficult to meet them, though I couldn’t at the time express why. I wasn’t uncomfortable under her gaze. It’s just that I felt an odd distaste for the woman behind it.

“I’m a nurse, Hiba. I take care of the whole patient. Once the cancer has stopped, you’ll still have much recovering to do. I’ll help you do that.”

Hiba nodded, the invisible veil of doubt lifting.

I placed the bell of the stethoscope over her right chest. “Please take a deep breath.”

∙ ∙ ∙

I was twenty years old and in a biology class the first time I actually saw cancer. It was also the first time I met Moody. We shared a microscope and together we studied the cancer cells. I was enamored with them both.

The cancer cells were irregularly spherical with protrusions like the deformed arms of a lover, refusing to relinquish her dysfunctional hold on her beloved. Stained blue and glowing bright in the ocular light of the scope, I recall thinking that while they were unwholesome, they were beautiful the way they clumped together.

And Moody? He was so young then, only twenty-three, tall and slight as a bamboo stalk. He moved awkwardly, as if unused to his own limbs. Even then, he was a serious and somber soul, but there was a light in his dark eyes and he always smiled when he was with me.

Everyone at some point in their life has a cancer growing in their body. A group of badly behaving, mutating cells on the verge of getting out of hand. Our immune systems kick in and destroy these misguided cells before they can do any damage. Usually.

Everyone wants to kill cancer for the way it sequesters organs, hollows out spaces and lives. Can you blame them? Cancer takes over and takes apart without warning or explanation or even a thank you when it has taken all that it wants. I believe that cancer is misunderstood. A victim of cruel personification, cancer is viewed as malicious, but I believe this could not be further from the truth.

Moody was not as taken with cancer as I was. Never has been, especially not now. But he was once very taken with me. We married three months later.

∙ ∙ ∙

Hiba returned to my office the next evening. I don’t typically see patients after five but her case was different. Her cancer had responded sluggishly to my pleas at our first meeting. This had happened before, so I wasn’t worried. I planned to try again.

Hiba leaned heavily upon a cane this time and though she shivered, sweat beaded her forehead. She struggled for each shallow breath. Her cancer radiated a bright hungry energy and I heard its whisper at the edges of my mind. I helped her to a chair and checked her vitals. Her pulse was too high. Her oxygen saturation too low. She told me through gritted teeth that her pain was five on a scale of one to ten, which I suspected was an underrepresentation.

I helped Hiba take an oxy for the breakthrough pain and a compazine for the nausea it caused. I managed to get her comfortable on the couch in my small, three-room office. I pulled a blanket over her and dimmed the lights. She moaned fitfully in half-sleep.

Dim light glinted off a charm dangling from the necklace she wore. I stood to get a better look. The charm was of a little golden elephant with emerald eyes. I’d seen that elephant before. I grasped the arm of a chair and lowered myself onto its cushions just as my knees gave way.

A year ago my mother-in law requested a copy of a video of Moody, Abe, and me from the summer we went to Disneyland. I had scrolled through a list of videos stored on our family PC. What I found instead still loops in my mind, as fresh as that day. If I could scrub it from my memory, oh God… I would do anything to scrub it from my mind.

Anything.

Any fucking thing.

The clip was fifty-three seconds. Fifty-three seconds is a lifetime when you’re watching your husband make love to another woman.

Moody memorialized their tryst using the video camera I bought him for his birthday. He had said he wanted to take up amateur filmmaking. There was more than just the one video. The idiot downloaded the files into the shared folder on our family PC instead of his private folder. The idea that Abe could just as easily have come across them made me sick enough to retch.

Her lurid moans echoed in my memory. And what I witnessed, eyes flashing in ecstasy, dimpled cheeks, her mischievous smile as she ground her hips against my husband, tiny toenails painted evergreen, a little golden elephant dangling between brown bouncing breasts are emblazoned on my brain like a brand.

There is no way to measure the loathing I felt for her and my husband. But Moody swore that he and Hiba were done. He begged for forgiveness I’ve still yet to achieve. To his shock, I didn’t ask for a divorce or separation. I told him to stay. Every day we remained together, he was afraid.

∙ ∙ ∙

In the early years of our marriage, Moody and I struggled with finances, but we were happy. He never finished school and took a job with the city as a bus driver once we married. I finished nursing school and gave birth to our first child, Abe, soon after. We lived in a small apartment on the fourth floor of an infested old building destined for demolition. The elevator never worked and the stairwell smelled of urine.

Our neighbor Marc smoked so much we could smell it through the walls. He owned an energetic bullmastiff whose barks kept us awake for hours. Marc never walked the dog. Instead he let it race up and down the hallway at night and it regularly deposited abundant black mounds in front of our door.

“Can’t stop a dog from being a dog, can you?” he would joke. And our landlord wasn’t getting enough money from us in rent to be bothered with our complaints.

Sleep deprived and near tears, I held my screaming son against my breast as I paced the floor one morning at 2 a.m. I heard the dog’s snorting chuffs at my door, and Marc’s cigarette-roughened laughter.

“I wish that bastard would just fucking die,” I hissed.

“Layla?” Moody had never heard me talk that way before. He reached for Abe. “Let me have him. You go rest.”

“Keep smoking those cigarettes and you’ll get lung cancer,” I screamed, startling the baby just as he was drifting off.

∙ ∙ ∙

“They say a person knows when death is close,” Hiba said.

I didn’t respond. Her cancer had proved to be more than sluggish and truth be told, I had stopped trying to talk to it. Hiba had become considerably weaker. With each visit she was more desperate, more serious, more intent than the previous one.

Now, she just sounded resigned.

“I used to think it was an old wives’ tale,” she said starting to cough.

I reached into the small refrigerator behind my desk for a bottle of water. An image returned to me.

Brown skin damp with sweat. Moody’s brow furrowed and his eyes closed tight in carnal intoxication.

I closed the refrigerator without retrieving the bottle and waited for her to finish coughing.

“But it’s true, you know? It’s like there is an aura around me. I can smell it. I’m not saying I can see the ghosts of dead ancestors or anything, but—” she erupted into another fit.

Hiba wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and blew her nose. “I don’t have much more time. The treatments, this thing you do, this asking the cancer to stop,” she inhaled and I could hear the fluid in her lungs rattle a little, “isn’t really working, is it?”

∙ ∙ ∙

Marc had knocked on my door shortly after noon. I let him in mostly out of curiosity. He brought a box of fresh donuts from Beamon’s and a stuffed bear for Abe. His eyes were puffy and red but he’d shaved and combed his oily blond hair into a neat ponytail. He wore a clean but faded blue checked shirt, and he didn’t smell like cigarettes.

“What can I do for you?” I set a cup of coffee on the table in front of Marc and took a seat across from him.

Marc didn’t say anything for a long time. He clasped his trembling hands on the table and closed his eyes, like he was meditating. “I need medical advice, and since you’re a doctor…”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“But I thought…”

“I know. It’s the lab coat. I’m a nurse.”

“Oh.” His shoulders sank.

My curiosity redoubled but an icy thread of unease climbed my vertebrae and spread across my scalp like a swarm of ants. “What’d you need advice about? Maybe I can help anyway.”

“The doctors said there was nothing they could do,” he said after a long time.

“Do?” I heard my heart beating hard in my ears.

“They say it’s met-, mestat—”

“Metastasized?” I finished.

He nodded. “Yeah. It’s spread all over.” He pulled a tissue from his breast pocket and coughed into it. I saw pink streaks on the paper.

I knew then what I had done.

∙ ∙ ∙

I started the conversation with my mother by mentioning the weather. The fact that Abe was having trouble with math. The new engine recently installed in my old GMC, and how I probably should’ve just bought a new car. I talked about how I planned to repaint our dining room walls canary yellow.

We sat beneath a floral printed umbrella on her patio, the brisk evening breeze reminding us that spring was still young. Mother flipped through a magazine and didn’t seem to be listening, but I knew she was. I needed to work through my anxiety, so she let me. When I’d finished, she closed the magazine and lit a cigarette. I glared at her.

“What?” Cancer would never take my mother because I had asked it not to, but I had no such sway with other diseases or with time. “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t smoke?”

“How about me?”

“Good reason,” she said chuckling. She crushed the cigarette out in an ashtray next to a pink hydrangea.

“So, what’s really up?” Mother trapped me with her gaze.

“I think I’ve done something wrong.”

She was quiet a long time.

Though still without wrinkles, her age showed in the way her amber skin relaxed around her mouth and jawline. Her dark eyes narrowed and she pinched her full lips into a straight line. She was figuring and reading me.

“The last time you told me that…well, that was when you had that unfortunate situation with Marc.”

I nodded.

Mother’s hands trembled but she still managed to relight her cigarette, sprinkling ash down the front of the faded Mickey Mouse sweatshirt I’d given her some time ago.

I told her about everything, including the evergreen toenails and the tiny golden elephant. I was wrong to think that talking would make me feel better. I was wrong to think there would be ready answers.

∙ ∙ ∙

When I told Moody what I’d done to Marc, he laughed. He reached for me and pulled me into his arms. “I think it’s sweet that you feel so guilty about a single moment of anger that you actually believe you caused that man’s disease.” He squeezed me tightly and kissed my forehead.

“But you heard what I said. I said he’d get lung cancer, and now he does.”

“It’s unfortunate, but I’m not surprised. He smokes like a chimney.”

I decided to prove my point. I forced Moody to trap a mouse. We kept it in an old mayonnaise jar with holes punched into the lid. We fed the mouse cubes of cheese, the yolks of our boiled eggs, droppers full of milk.

Moody named it Sam.

Within a couple of days, patches of Sam’s gray-brown fur were falling out and hard festering nodules erupted in the bald areas. A day after that, Sam stopped eating. By the end of the week Sam was dead.

We caught and I cancered three more mice before Moody believed me. He didn’t name those. He wanted me to try to talk Marc’s cancer down. Moody didn’t know that I’d been trying to do that since the day Marc sat at our kitchen table, but his cancer did not seem to be listening.

When off from work, I would visit with Marc, make sure he ate a hot meal, took his meds, and that he was hooked up to a fresh oxygen tank before he went to bed at night. He didn’t have anyone else.

My marriage was also dying. It’s difficult to trust someone as dangerous as I am. Lack of trust can strangle love.

∙ ∙ ∙

Hiba’s continued visits to my office were pointless. I could do nothing for her, the single opportunity to communicate with her disease having been claimed when we were both unaware. Besides, hard as I tried, I didn’t have the will. Despite this, I continued to schedule the appointments. I allowed her to hope. Forced her to confront her mortality. I also forced Hiba to face me.

I didn’t tell her that I was her lover’s wife, though part of me wanted to. I wouldn’t have been capable of suffering her contrition, if she had any. And if, instead, she was full of bitter pride, my hurt would be multiplied and I’d be powerless to do anything worse to her than I’d already done.

I would be lying if I denied deriving satisfaction from causing her to relive the same disappointment at the end of each visit when I told her that again, her cancer was unmoved by my efforts. Part of me looked forward to that.

When Hiba did not arrive for her next appointment I called her cell. When she didn’t answer I entered her address into my GPS and got into my car. It turns out that she didn’t live very far from me. I could have walked the five blocks from my home to hers any day.

Her lavender and white single story house was surrounded by flowers and sculpted shrubbery, like a fairy tale cottage fashioned of cake and icing. It fit like an irregular puzzle piece between two larger, newer houses. Like her presence in my life, it just didn’t belong.

But that wasn’t quite true. I’d come to need the object of my bitterness, the simulacrum of my grief. And more, it was through witnessing the fragility of humanity in her that I learned that forgiveness was almost always possible, though I had no idea the path to reach it. Though I seemed enslaved by my hatred I just as desperately wanted to forgive or at least release.

The man who answered the door was as damp and crumpled as a used tissue. Had we not been married for the past seventeen years I would not have recognized him, too stunned to think of an excuse for being at her bedside after promising he’d never see her again.

“She dead?” My mouth was dry with fear and hope. I wanted her to still be alive. I wanted Moody watch her die, for him to suffer too.

I wanted to not want those things.

Moody shook his head, a fresh wave of tears wet his face. I restrained the urge to wipe them away, to slap his cheek, to pull him into my arms, to comfort and simultaneously maim him. He was my husband, whatever I was to him, whatever she was to him, whatever we all were to each other.

“She’s holding on.” Moody reached for me. “You’ve come to help?” His voice was tentative.

“Help?” That might have been my intention, though not conscious, but seeing his hopeful expectancy clouded out any good will on my part. If I somehow managed to save her, what would this leave me, except alone? I shoved Moody’s hands away. “Why should I?”

“She’s going to die.”

I shrugged my shoulders, “Don’t we all?”

Moody grabbed my wrists and held them up so that my clenched fists were at eye level. He glared at them as if, like some comic book superhero, my power would shoot out of my fingertips like lightning.

“Prove this thing you have is more than a curse,” he demanded.

I wrenched my hands away. “I prove that every single day.” I headed back to my car.

“Why did you come?” he called after me. “If you hate her so much, what are you doing here?”

I stopped, but did not respond.

“I thought you would save her. I told her you could.” Moody’s voice quavered.

“Cancer will only listen once. I can’t stop it once it’s been set in motion.”

Realization came to us simultaneously but I spoke first.

“You sent her to me? Not Dr. James.” The tremors started deep in my gut and worked their way out in rippling waves. “She knows who I am, what I am to you?” I said, myself unsure what that was.

“You caused her cancer?” he said, each word a separate accusation.

“I must have. I can’t think of another reason her cancer wouldn’t respond.”

“You did this, again?”

“What’s done is done,” I said, not caring if it sounded trite.

“But you save everyone else. Why not her?”

I thought of Marc. I hadn’t saved him.

Moody held me fast, his chest against my back, his breath warm in my ear. There was a time when such a gesture made me want to dissolve into him. I felt him tremble against me. More tears.

“Why couldn’t you save her?”

Hungry hands grasping a zaftig hip. Eager lips pressed against the sweep of a neck. Soft lusty laughter.

“Why couldn’t you save her?”

I reached out and felt the live energy of his healthy cells. They would do as I asked, if I asked. The next moment belonged to me alone, and though it was brief, mere seconds, I contemplated doing a lifetime of damage.

“Abe still needs a dad, even if flawed. And in the end, I’d hate myself more than I want to hate him now,” I said, unaware I was speaking aloud until I heard Moody gasp. Wide-eyed, he slowly backed away from me with hands held out as if to show that he meant no harm.

“You made a promise, Moody. You said you’d never see her again. Perhaps you should go home. I’m sure Abe would love to spend time with his father.”

∙ ∙ ∙

I expected local oncologists to shun me when I first opened my clinic. I knew that I would be ridiculed in private and that some would even publicly deride my efforts. I also knew that once the secret of my skill became public, I’d learn who among my friends were true.

I’d be accused of preying on the desperation of dying cancer patients. I’d be called a quack and a shyster. There would be efforts to shut down my clinic.

I have since proven my ability. My successes are many, measurable, and provable. Now, local oncologists freely send their worst cases to me.

What I hadn’t expected was Moody’s reaction.

“Everyone will know. We’ll be a laughing stock.”

I couldn’t interpret what I saw in Moody’s face. In hindsight, I realize it was fear and disgust. He’d felt that way since Marc. I can understand how frightening it could be to live with someone capable to both curing and causing a cancer, but I would not have harmed him.

“Haven’t you ever wished you could do something good?” I massaged my temples against a growing headache. “I want to pay it forward.”

“Can’t you find a less public way?”

My headache spiked. I was tired of being on the defensive, of always being agreeable. Since Marc, I’d been, in a sense, begging Moody’s forgiveness. I’d spent so long apologizing for my gift before I began to understand. I didn’t create my skill any more than I created Moody’s eighteen months of unemployment.

“How’s the job search?” I asked.

“Layla, you know I’m still looking.”

“I know, but we still have a mortgage and a child to feed. Unless you have another idea, this clinic will help us do that.”

We never spoke about it again.

∙ ∙ ∙

My mother blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth as she paced the short length of her porch. “There has got to be a way to undo this.” She paused to flick the tip of burning ash into an ashtray. “Maybe,” she said, face naked with hope, “the trick is forgiveness.”

I shook my head. “Forgiveness isn’t the answer,” I said without addressing the fact that I was as unsure of my ability to forgive as I was about my certainty that I was prepare to do so.

“How do you know?”

“It didn’t help Marc.”

She took my hand and coaxed me from the balustrade I’d been sitting on. “Maybe it will help you.”

With our hands intertwined, my mother and I walked down the driveway to my car. Her hand felt more warm and firm than she appeared to me these days. This buoyed me in the belief, whether true or false, that my seventy-one-year-old mother had many more years ahead.

“Why do you care if I fix this, mom?”

“Because I care about you.” My mother smiled wanly. “You won’t always hurt because of what happened with Moody and Hiba, but the responsibility for her death will always haunt you.”

“Did you ever forgive dad for Aunt Diane?”

I saw my mother’s eyes dim as she thought back on that time. “I did, but not soon enough.”

“Soon enough for whom?”

“For me. Who else?”

∙ ∙ ∙

Marc had a crooked smile on his face when I told him about his cancer, as if he expected me to reveal the punchline to a joke. His eyes were red rimmed and the sclera were yellow. When I didn’t reveal the punchline, he studied my face for a long time and I forced myself not to look away.

“You’re serious.”

I nodded.

“Don’t be foolish, Layla. No one can create cancer just by saying it.”

“I can.”

“Impossible.” He ran his fingers through his hair. His jugular, blue and ropey beneath his pale skin, pulsed in quick rolling bursts. “People can’t do that.”

I lowered myself onto the chair next to his bed. We sat this way, considering each other in wary silence for a long time. I was prepared to suffer his anger and hatred at the ugly injustice of it all. I needed to.

“Why?”

I told him about that night, the noise, my exhaustion, and the fitful baby. “I said it in anger. I didn’t mean it. I would never wish cancer on someone.” Those words sounded staggeringly inadequate to my ears. “I’ve always been able to talk to cancer, to make it stop. Stop, you see? I didn’t know I could make it do the opposite.”

“Hell of a way to find out.” Marc chuckled mirthlessly. “Too bad it was me and not something more useful like mass extermination of the mice. Right?” He laughed some more and this time it was genuine and robust. He reached for my hand and I took it between both of mine. His fingers were cold and dry. “You’ve got to be the most dangerous woman in the world. I’m just glad you’re my friend.”

“Glad? I’ve killed you. You should hate me, Marc.”

“No.” Marc shook his head. “I’m actually grateful. At least I think I am. This could very well be delusional thinking on my part, brought on by not getting enough oxygen to the brain.” Marc laughed until he was out of breath and started to cough. I offered him the breathing mask when I noticed his lips were purple tinged, but he pushed my hands away. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, his gaunt cheeks puffing out like balloons.

“I was so lonely before. Now I’m not.” He squeezed my hand. “Because of you I am dying, but at least I’m not doing it alone.”

∙ ∙ ∙

How many songs and poems exist that posit real love is about surrender? Too damned many. But they’re right. I can’t deny that. Don’t take this to mean that I was willing to give up my husband to another woman with the hope that he’d realize his error and eventually return to me. I’m not longsuffering, or desperate. I understood and accepted that I had probably lost Moody the moment he learned what I could do.

I returned to Hiba’s house. Her mother, a stout pretty woman, welcomed me inside without hesitation.

“I’d know you anywhere.” She hugged me as if we’d been long time friends and guided me to Hiba’s bedroom. “You’re prettier in person that in your commercials.”

I stood just inside the bedroom door, arrested by how much Hiba had changed since I’d last seen her. She barely made an impression in the bed. Her slow breathing rattled with the inevitable. And there was that mildly sour sick smell just beneath the scent of baby powder. The time when my mother had cancer came back to me. It choked out the remnants of my anger.

You’d think that I would be at ease with the subject of death. I’m not. It terrifies me.

Hiba’s mother encouraged me to sit in the room’s only chair positioned next to the bed. I sat and took Hiba’s cool limp hand in mine. I stroked her arm.

“Hiba?”

She turned her head toward me and her dark eyes fluttered open just a moment before they closed again. Her brow furrowed a bit and she mouthed something I couldn’t hear or interpret.

“She hasn’t spoken for the last couple of days,” her mother said from the doorway. “But she can hear you and maybe even understand what you’re saying. So, if you’ve come to say goodbye—”

“I haven’t.”

I leaned forward, my insides shuddering with memories of my mother when she had been sick with cancer, of Marc and how I had failed him, and with fear for myself. “You are stronger than your anger. You are greater than your pain. Let your gift define you, not the stupid trespasses of others,” my mother had said before I backed out of her driveway. Those words had become my mantra. I repeated them aloud on the drive to Hiba’s. I let them fuel my strength. I closed my eyes and reached out until I felt the quiet electric hum that symbolized my connection with her cancer cells.

“Sweetheart,” her mother crooned, “she’s not long for this world. If ever there was a time to talk to her, this is it.”

“I haven’t come to talk to Hiba,” I said. My own voice sounded so far away. “I’ve come to talk to her cancer.”

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT KHAALIDAH MUHAMMAD-ALI

Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and three children. By day she works as a breast oncology nurse. At all other times she juggles, none too successfully, writing, reading, gaming, and gardening. She has written one novel entitled An Unproductive Woman available on Amazon. She has also been published or has publications upcoming in Escape Pod, An Alphabet of Embers anthology, Diabolical Plots and others. Khaalidah is co-editor of Podcastle.org where she is on a mission to encourage more women to submit fantasy stories.

Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to immortality. She can be found online at khaalidah.com and on Twitter at @khaalidah.

THE HARD SHELL

By Russell Nichols // 4185 words

You’re gonna hear things about me. Fabrications. Exaggerations. Tall tales cooked up by deadbeats about my so-called “instability.” About how “depressed” I was. How “uneasy.” Yellow journalism with splashy headlines: Humpty Dumpty Exposed! Tabloid titles with terrible puns: Eggsistential Meltdown!

Don’t believe the hype. It’s all lies, understand? Lies, lies, and more lies. Part of the king’s smear campaign to disgrace me. Plain and simple. Was I under pressure? Yes. I can admit that. But I never cracked! So do me a solid, will you? Don’t listen to them. Listen to me.

Let me tell you how it all went down.

∙ ∙ ∙

It all started twelve hours ago, two in the afternoon. I remember because I heard the castle cannons fire twice. Lying on my back in the living room of our rotten westside apartment, I watched the fan blades spinning above me. Trying to keep cool in the boiling heat. The temperature outside was at a record high, but my income was at an all-time low. It had been three long months since my last case. I had nothing. No leads, no loot. I was broke as a joke.

“It’s not the end of the world, Humpty,” said Alice as she placed a cold towel over my eyes. “Trust me, everything will come together.”

My wife’s always been this way, all sunny-side up and whatnot. True, she got her citizenship here because of me and I paid for her shell augmentation surgery. But even before she was a perfectly shaped egg, Alice lived in a fantasy land. As for me? Let’s just say rose-colored glasses never fit on this egghead of mine.

“No, it’s all over,” I told her. “We’re done, we’re doomed. The king’s men are gonna repossess the hatchback and toss us over the wall.”

She laughed, sliding her hands down my shell. “Are you mad?”

“You’re not hearing me,” I said, rolling away from her onto my face.

She picked the wet towel off the floor. “I heard you, but we must look on the bright side.”

“No!” I bolted up. “Don’t go there, Alice. I don’t wanna hear that happy-clappy horseshit.”

“Humpty, I’m just trying to help—”

“You wanna help me? How about giving me some space to clear my head. Is that so hard? I can’t think with you all in my grill.”

Offended, she lifted her hands. Then waddled away and I watched her round ass disappear down the hall. I felt bad about the outburst. Thought about apologizing, but right then, my phone rang.

“Dumpty,” I answered.

“Detective,” said the flustered female caller. “This is Goose. I’m in desperate need of your services …”

∙ ∙ ∙

I knew The Goose by reputation only. She used to be a big-time poet, poultry slam champion three years straight. Her debut album, The Golden Egg, dropped last Easter. I never heard it. Alice loved it. But when the king’s official review came out, calling the project “silly,” Goose couldn’t cope. She disappeared.

Some said she hanged herself. Others claimed she secretly donated her body to the pillow industry. But these were lies. She was just laying low. And now she needed help on a murder case. So I grabbed my fedora and gunned my hatchback up to the northside of this walled city.

I didn’t do much sleuthing in the fowl zone anymore. Not since the king made it illegal for eggs and birds to intermix. I couldn’t afford to pass this job up, but I knew I had to get in and get out. Quick.

It was half-past three when I pulled up to the address she gave me, a squat country cottage on Drury Lane. There was a wooden sign out front. Off-white lettering declared:

BIRDS OF A FEATHER nursery

< All birds welcome >

When I shut off my vehicle, The Goose stepped out on the front porch.

To be honest, her new look caught me way off guard. “Goose?”

The white bird wore a full nun’s outfit, habit and all. “Detective, thanks for coming so rapidly. But it’s Mother Goose now, actually.”

“Call me Humpty. Or Dumpty. Or any combination.”

She looked around, anxious. Then flapped at me to hurry in.

Inside, it was church-mouse quiet. All the little birds were sleeping in hanging cages for nap time. Mother Goose snuck around them on the tips of her webbed feet. I took off my hat, followed her into the kitchen. Carefully, she slid the wooden door shut behind us. I could see she was on edge.

“Can I get you any snacks? Curds and whey, perhaps?”

“How about a glass of information.”

“Oh, yes, of course, dear. I know you’re risking arrest coming here.” She clutched her rosary, self-conscious. “Forgive me, I, um… I’m still learning how to ssspeak without rhyming—”

“I’m not here to judge. Spit a verse, Ma.”

And, without missing a beat, she hit me with:

Hickety Pickety, my black hen

Used to wag her tail at all the men

Then the wolf introduced her to the game

She huffed and puffed until the pigs came

She’d strut her stuff like she didn’t care

But the fluff was just too much to bear

That’s when she came a-knocking in need of shelter

As a new mother, I knew I had to help her

I prayed that the King of Kings would save her

To clean her filthy, fowl behavior

But my black hen felt way too guilty

She said: “If I’m caught, the king will kill me!”

I begged her to stay at least one night

But her feathers got ruffled and she took flight

She left my nursery lickety split

Now Hickety Pickety’s one dead chick

Mother Goose kissed her crucifix, muttered a prayer to herself.

I was using my fedora as a fan. Like that would help. “You wouldn’t happen to have any brandy and ale…” She frowned at me, then I shook my head and asked: “So then what happened?”

“I tried to catch her, but I was too late. The king’s men found her by the southside gate.”

“Hmm. The southside gate.”

“By Piper’s Garden. Are you going to the crime scene? It’s likely guarded.”

“I’ll take a gander.”

“I beg your pardon?!”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that,” I tried to explain. “When I use the word, it means just— nothing, never mind.”

A hummingbird alarm went off in the living room. Mother Goose peeked through the door, then turned to me and whispered: “Excuse me, detective, I must tend to my flock. But if you solve this case, I’ll give you a lot.”

She offered to double my usual rate, fifty a day, plus expenses. I was speechless. With cheese like that, I’d be finally able to move up from the westside, put down on a saltbox with a moat view.

Mother Goose ushered me to the back door with one last rhyme of warning: “One last thing I have to add. Beware the wolf, he’s big and bad.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf?

“Not I!” I shouted to myself in the car.

The wolf was hogwash. A myth created to justify wrongdoing. I didn’t believe in him. If I did something bad, that was all me, not some made-up furry creature taking over my body, controlling my actions. I make my own bed. I’m Humpty Fuckin’ Dumpty! The best dick in town. The incredible, credible egg with an impeccable record: zero unsolved mysteries. Never been a case I couldn’t crack, from the disappeared (Miss Muffet) to the dearly departed (Cock Robin).

Who found out the identity of The Pumpkin Eater? Here’s a hint: It wasn’t the king’s men. It was me. I did that. I caught that sick Halloween child-abductor. I found out who drowned Little Boy Blue. Every case, I brought my Grade-A game. I wasn’t going to let some “big, bad wolf” throw me off.

∙ ∙ ∙

The kingdom wall loomed as I approached the southside gate. Took me longer than I expected. The main drag had been blocked off, which forced me to take a jam-packed detour and I hate jams.

Mother Goose was right. The whole crime scene was crawling with king’s men on horseback. Within the wall was their jurisdiction. I didn’t want to get arrested for poaching.

I got close, but not too close, pulled off the road nearby, reclined in my car, hat pulled low. Watching. Those fools—with their bright red clothes and plumed hats—were royal pains in my posterior. They couldn’t solve a puzzle if the pieces were right in front of them. In the distance, I heard the castle cannons fire five times. Five o’clock. Amateur hour, evidently.

They were interrogating Peter Piper. He owned the forty-acre plot along the southern wall. On weekends, me and Alice used to drive down to his farmer’s market to buy plum buns. We used to take trips like that all the time. Random outings. Adventures. Not so much anymore.

Peter was sweating, rubbing his white rabbit’s foot. I rolled down my window to hear better. They were trying to break him. Giving the widower the third-degree in a hundred-degree heat:

Did he know Miss Pickety?

Did he play cards with Miss Pickety?

Did he sell a peck of pickled peppers to Miss Pickety?

Peter was tongue-tied. Stumbling over words as he stared at the dead black hen sprawled out in his strawberry patch. Triggering bad memories, no doubt. Just last summer his bipolar wife, Mary, went to that same garden, put a revolver in her mouth and ate a round before breakfast. Poor Mary.

Call it a hunch, but I knew Peter Piper didn’t murder Hickety Pickety. The farmer was a compulsive gambler. Formerly henpecked, but not a hen-killer. My instincts led me to look elsewhere.

And that was when I spotted him.

See, the king’s men were so busy harassing the old man, they didn’t see the boy sneaking out the back of the barn, running over the hills. It was Tom, Piper’s son. The culprit? I didn’t know, but I followed him to find out.

∙ ∙ ∙

An hour later, I was in the crowded village square. Tom ran all the way there, clutching what looked to be a baby pig. From the car, I watched him, pacing on Main Street, muttering to himself. Conflicted about something. Nobody in the square paid attention. They were too caught up in the nightlife scene, namely the Cock-A-Doodle doo-wop group playing fiddlesticks on the main stage.

Through the herd, I spotted a grinning pieman coming through with his rickety pushcart, hollering: “Pies! Pies! Pies!” Which, I’ll admit, made me jump for second because it sounded like: “Spies! Spies! Spies!”

Tom ran up to the pieman. Pulled him away, into the shadows, disappearing behind the law offices of Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsey & Bess. I couldn’t see anything. I waited. And waited. And when I couldn’t wait anymore, I got out and shouldered through the howling groupies. But when I got to there, Tom was gone.

I grabbed the pieman. “Where’s Tom?”

He jumped. “Simple Simon! You scared the bejesus out of me!”

“What did the boy want?”

“What boy?”

“The boy. The boy who was just here.”

He looked confused. But then pushed his cart into me and bolted. He ran a good meter before I caught his crusty ass and slammed him against the law building. “You better open your pie-hole.”

“Okay, okay, he gave me this,” said the pieman, pulling out a small pink piggy bank, full of coins. “H-he-he wanted a pie. Special order.”

“How special?”

“He told me he was four-and-twenty friendly.”

“Four-and-twenty friendly?!”

“That’s a code for—”

“I know what it means. Where was he going?”

“I-I-I—”

“Spill!”

“He said the Queen of Hearts was gonna pay!”

I knew “four-and-twenty friendly” was street code for a pie with blackbirds baked inside. These illegal pastries weren’t made for eating. When you opened the box, the birds would burst out in a rage, plucking everybody nearby to death. As for the “Queen of Hearts,” I could only guess this was a reference to the boy’s intended target.

So I ran. I ran fast as my skinny legs could carry me. Ten blocks till I came to the biggest gambling hall in town: The Shoe.

∙ ∙ ∙

The Shoe was a boot-like structure, towering twenty-six stories, second in height only to the king’s castle (if you don’t count the city wall, which rises over it all). Its owner was an old lady who lived there, but never showed her mug. Word had it she used to be the king’s maid once upon a time, but I’ve never been one for gossip. The casino was the place to be on any given night. Cows with cash, white chicks, fat cats, you name it—all kinds of creatures, lured by loud noise and false hope.

I felt out of place as I moved through the first floor, the “sole” of the house. Slot machines and dealers and sheep were bleating in my ears. I wanted to walk away, but couldn’t. Not now. I had to stop Tom from unleashing those deadly blackbirds in this public place.

“Bingo!” shouted some dealer.

I passed flashing posters for the popular Three Blind Mice show. Alice had said she wanted to go see them. I told her I’d take her on a date, but never got around to it. Was Tom planning to open the box during tonight’s show, I wondered. But then I spotted him, near the broth bar, over by the roulette wheel.

I approached, carefully. Once behind him, I whispered: “Game over, Tommy Boy.”

The boy froze. Not turning around.

“Give me the box,” I told him. “Just pass it over, easy. Easy.”

“No.”

“Don’t be a fool. You don’t wanna do this.”

“Nobody cares.”

“How’s that?”

“A black hen is dead. She’s dead. And nobody cares. They just go on living their happily ever after lives. Not a care in the world.”

“You killed Hickety Pickety to send a message?”

Tom turned around, horrified. “You think I killed her?”

Slowly, I lifted my hands, keeping my eyes on the box. It was white with the words Pie in the Sky rising to clouds in the logo. “Look, I’m not here to judge—”

“I didn’t do it. I was in the barn bathing mom’s little lamb. I’m innocent.” He pointed around the casino and yelled: “These creatures are the guilty ones! The indifferent! The apathetic!”

Every time he shouted, he shook the box. My pulse raced. I needed him to calm the hell down.

“Tom, listen … let me buy you a cup of broth. You want broth?”

“I want justice. I want retribution. These donkeys are living a fantasy and I’m going to wake their asses up.”

“By killing them?”

“Death is real, but they deny reality,” he said, his voice shaking. “They don’t care about the truth. Nobody cares who you are, where you came from or why you died. They think they can just sing their little songs and move on. But it’s lies, I tell you. Lies, lies and more lies.”

I realize now this was deeper than Hickety Pickety. This was about his father, the gambling farmer, and his late mother, with manic-depression. He wasn’t the hen-killer. He was a lost boy, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But at the time, I was focused on that pie box.

“You don’t know what I saw,” he said.

“Give me the pie.”

He lifted his puffy eyes. “Up in the blue sky …”

“Up in the blue sky, what did you see?”

“I …”

I leaned in close. “Did you see who killed Miss Pickety, Tom?”

He nodded, tears streaming down his face.

“Who killed Miss Pickety?”

“The wolf,” the boy cried.

I sighed. “Listen, you have no idea the hell you’ll cause if you open that box. The crows in there will take us all out, understand? You included.”

“No. I’ll be free.”

“Think about your old man. How you think he’s gonna feel when he hears about his boy’s fatal beaking? The whole town’s gonna talk.”

“Nobody cares.”

“You just said all they do is sing little songs and move on. Do you want your pops getting tormented by everyone saying: ’Peter Piper’s got no pep in his step. Since the peck-picker’s son got pecked to death.’”

“The crows won’t hurt me.”

“You bet they will.”

“No. I bought them, they’re mine.”

“These crows ain’t loyal,” I told him. “We’ll all be on the floor. Red, dead and full of holes.”

Tom looked around at all the fake smiles, the oblivious players. Then I looked at the box in his hands, his trembling hands. Time seemed to freeze. I told myself: No sudden moves.

“Tom… ” I reached out to him. “We can call Dr. Fell. Let me help you.”

Tom wiped his eyes and nodded. He handed me the box. I exhaled. But I was premature because then, at the top of his lungs, he yelled:

“MURDERER!”

The crowd screamed and scattered. And I was caught in the middle, looking more red-handed than Bloody Mary. I tried to explain that I wasn’t a murderer. But the proof was in the pie. Within seconds, two king’s men had run up on me. One gently took the box and the other less gently knocked me down and started kicking me, right there, right in the sole.

∙ ∙ ∙

It was the worst beating I ever got in my life.

They dragged me to a dark room under The Shoe. Showing no mercy. Hit after hit. Blow after blow. B-I-N-G-O. My head spun, thoughts rolling like balls in a rotating cage. I couldn’t get a word out. The king’s men kept swinging their lances like there was no tomorrow. Trying to break me:

“This is our jurisdiction, you poacher.”

CRACK!

“The king doesn’t like you meddling in his affairs.”

CRACK!

“You shouldn’t stayed in your place, Dumpty.”

CRACK!

“You thought you were tough.”

CRACK!

“Now you’ve got egg on your fat face.”

CRACK!

“But the king’s willing to strike a deal.”

CRACK!

CRACK!

CRACK!

“Either you confess that you killed Hickety Pickety.”

“Or you’ll get tossed over the wall.”

“You’ve got until cockcrow to choose your fate, fatty.”

∙ ∙ ∙

The long, lonely walk of shame to the westside gave me time to think: take the fall or get tossed? A lose-lose situation, no matter how you flipped it.

Back home, as soon as I walked in, Alice freaked. “Oh my God, where’ve you been? I was worried. I saw the news about that black hen and—why didn’t you call me? I thought you were dead.”

I winced. “I’m here now.”

She gasped at all the dents in my shell. “Oh dear, you look like you fell down a rabbit hole!”

“Just a wild goose chase.”

Alice frowned. “Why so cryptic?”

“Baby, I’m beat,” I said. “Let’s go to bed.”

I’d explain in the morning, but I didn’t want to spoil our last night together. All I wanted was to rest in peace. But those plans flew out the window when my wife said: “I have a confession to make.”

Time stopped. My heart skipped. My mind raced with all kinds of possibilities, an infinite number of word combinations that could come out of her mouth.

She looked at the floor. “I, um…I don’t know how to say this…”

“What’s this about?”

“The black hen. Hickety Pickety. I think, perhaps, I might have possibly killed her, maybe.”

“What do you mean you think, perhaps, you might’ve possibly killed her, maybe?”

Trembling with fear, Alice went to the kitchen to take a swig from a bottle to calm her nerves. She couldn’t even look at me.

“Just tell the truth,” I said. “Is that so hard?”

“Yes, it is hard! It’s hard being married to someone so, so … so guarded.”

“I’m not guarded.”

“You’re impenetrable! Heavens, I’ve tried for so long to get you to open up to me, but you shut me out, Humpty. Talking to you is like talking to a wall, and I don’t much care for walls.”

“What’s this gotta do with Pickety?”

“I slept with her.”

I couldn’t feel my face. “You what?! When?”

Alice stared at the floor. “Last summer. We met at the market. You were consoling Peter Piper after he lost Mary. And I told her to try the plum buns, and she said she would if I tried the pickled peppers and—and I just wanted to feel loved, Humpty, and you and I… we’re unequally yoked—”

“Oh my fuckin God.”

“And the big, bad wolf consumed me—”

“No, no, don’t you put this on the wolf!”

“I can’t explain myself. I wasn’t myself,” she said. “I was… curious.”

“You were curious?”

“I’d never been with a chick.”

“And I’ve never stabbed myself with a fork, but it’s not on my bucket list.”

She looked up with wet eyes. “Are you mad?”

I laughed to hide the pain inside.

She raised her hands. “Don’t you dream of new adventures? I want to experience life to the fullest. To explore. To seek answers to big questions. Like which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“Spare me.”

“That’s not what I meant, Humpty.”

“I don’t care. What happened with the hen?”

“Hickety… she said I was the best lay she ever had. And she couldn’t get me out of her head. She asked for advice from The Goose, who’s a nun now, but she rejected her and said: ‘The King of Kings didn’t make chickens to sleep with eggs.’ Or something or other.”

My head throbbed. Was Alice telling the truth? What about Mother Goose? Was that why she called me? To clear her conscience? Or her name? I didn’t know what to believe. Who to trust. And I still couldn’t feel my fucking face. “So you killed her?”

Alice took a deep breath. “Well, you know last week when I told you I was going to a tea party? I really went to the Three Blind Mice show. With her. Near the end, she leaned over and asked me to run away with her, but…” Alice shook her head. “I said I couldn’t. And we had a fight.”

“And you killed her?”

“She called me a coward, said I was yellow on the inside and that she was gonna fly away and… and I yelled at her in the middle of the theater: ‘Chickens can’t fly!’ And that was it.”

“What was it?”

“That was the last time I saw her. And now she’s dead and it’s all my fault.” Alice buried her face in her hands. “I’m sorry, Humpty.”

“Listen, it’s not your fault.”

“It is my fault.” Alice sobbed. “She wanted to be free. If I didn’t turn her down, she never would’ve climbed into that cannon to try and fly away.”

The words caught me off guard, but they rang true. And in that moment, I wasn’t mad. Not about my wife’s deception. Not about the king’s ultimatum. I felt accomplished. For solving the case of the death of Hickety Pickety. I did that. The incredible, credible egg still with an impeccable record.

“Don’t cry,” I said. “It’s over.”

Alice nodded, sniffling. “I know,” she said and then went in the bedroom, I figured, for tissue. But when she came back out, she wasn’t holding any tissue. In her hand, she had a folder and in that folder were papers with gold letterhead that read Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsey & Bess, Attorneys at Law. And Alice wiped her eyes and said: “I want a divorce.”

∙ ∙ ∙

That’s the story, the whole truth. Now, I’m way up here, sitting on this wall in the dead of night. I can see the whole world. The king’s castle. The Shoe. Everything’s clear. Everything but my head.

How was I so blind? How could Alice cut me so deep? Why me? After everything I’ve done to make her happy. The citizenship. The surgery. I worked so goddamn hard. Too hard? Maybe. Probably. But I never lied! Meanwhile, the love of my life, my precious egg, was getting laid. Oh God! I can’t shake the visual. I never thought I’d end up here. A bad egg. A bald, fat failure. Grade F. Fuck my life.

Yes, you’re gonna hear things about me. Fabrications. Exaggerations. But that’s why I’m leaving this note: to set the record straight. If you’re reading this, don’t feel bad for me. I make my own bed. This isn’t the “big, bad wolf” talking. This is all me. What’s left of me. And when all’s said and done, maybe you’ll care enough to tell people the truth. Or maybe you’ll just sing a little song and move on.

In any case, my time has come.

In the distance, I can hear the cannons firing once, twice. So I’ll leave you with these last words, a verse from Mother Goose:

Bell-horses, bell-horses,

What time of day?

One o’clock, two o’clock,

Off and away.

ABOUT RUSSELL NICHOLS

Russell Nichols is a speculative fiction writer and endangered journalist from Richmond, CA. His story about a Black vampire on trial in Boston was included in the Best of Apex Magazine: Volume 1. Find his work in Terraform, Nightmare Magazine’s POC Destroy Horror special issue and other anthologies. He left the States in 2011 to wander the world, living out of a backpack with his wife. Look for him at russellnichols.com.

THE BEEKEEPER’S GARDEN

By Christopher Caldwell // 4568 words

Overwhelmed by the intermingling scents of jasmine, wisteria, and gardenia, the girl slammed shut the sash window in her tiny room. The lace-trimmed curtains still reeked of the four-o-clocks that bloomed in the window box the evening before. From the kitchen she could hear the woman—she would NOT think of her as Mother Bea—humming her song as the kettle whistled. The girl knew after the woman had her tea, made weak with milk and sweetened with honey, she would take out the straightening comb and place it on a burner until it glowed a dull red. Counting on having maybe four minutes to herself, the girl pushed her little bed away from the wall, steadying the brass headboard with one hand so that its creak would not give her away.

On hands and knees in the little space behind the bed, she pulled back a strip of floral wallpaper near the baseboard. Along the bottom of the bare wall were the names: Dear, Auntie Denise, Mama, and Big Nanny written in a childish scrawl in rust-brown letters. She bit down hard on her thumb, wincing a little, but not daring as much as a gasp. Blood beaded in the ball of her thumb, and she added the name Gramma Augusta to her list.

The humming from the kitchen stopped. She replaced the strip of wallpaper—it darkened slightly where it touched the fresh blood—then she pushed the bed back into place. The girl heard the teacup clatter in the sink. The click click click of the gas burner. The fwoomp of its flame. She smoothed down the front of her dress, hoping that she had swept beneath her bed well to keep her stockings white. There were no mirrors in the house. Right on schedule, the woman’s voice rang out from the kitchen: “Come and let Mother Bea comb that tangled hair, Sarah sweetheart.”

Not my name, the girl thought. She clenched her fists, but made her voice as sweet and light as she could. “Yes ma’am.” She forced a smile on her face and skipped into the kitchen.

The woman stood behind a battered chair with her back to the door. Her cobweb gray hair was not in its usual bun, but was parted in the middle, and hung long down her back. She turned to take in the girl. Her thin lips curled up at the corners. “Look at the state of that hair, child. Full of snarls and tangles and—” the woman trailed off.

Naps, the girl thought.

The woman gestured to the chair. The girl sat down, placed her brown hands on the white knees of her stockings. “Lean back,” the woman said. The girl complied. The woman yanked back a section of the girl’s hair with one hand. The teeth of the straightening comb slid in hot, prickling her scalp, and singeing out the kink. The girl wrinkled her nose at the smell of burning hair.

Gramma Augusta always wore rings on her fingers. The girl could not remember their colors. The woman sighed. “Soon, you’ll have hair as pretty and straight as mine. Won’t that be nice?”

“Yes,” the girl said as the woman yanked back another handful. What did Gramma Augusta’s hands smell like after she made gumbo?

“Yes, what?” The woman’s tone was sharp with correction.

“Yes, Other Bee.” The girl had learned that the woman would hear what she wanted to, as long as it was said sweetly.

“That’s right, my darling Sarah. And soon you’ll be as pretty as your Mother Bea.” Yank.

I’m not Sarah, she thought, even if she could no longer remember the names Gramma Augusta called her. The woman dragged the comb through another section of hair. More burning, another memory singed away. The girl began to count the empty places inside her head, but had to stop when she got to twenty. She bit her lip, careful not to move her head as the hot comb passed her ear. Not Sarah. Never be Sarah.

When she was done, the woman stood back and said, “Stand up. Let me have a look, sweet Sarah.” The girl stood and twirled, the skirt of her dress flaring out. The woman cooed. “Look at us, darling. Just like twins.”

The girl looked over the woman’s tall, austere figure. Even without a mirror, she knew her own nose was broader, her lips thicker, and her skin much darker than the Other Bee.

The doorbell rang. The Other Bee sighed once and went to the pantry. Pulled open the double doors. Grabbed a jar of honey from the middle shelf. “Just a moment, Sarah dear. There’s a customer.” The Other Bee strode down the hallway towards the front door, jar clutched close to her breast.

The girl looked into the open pantry. There were three shelves stocked with mason jars full of honey. Each jar was hand-labelled. On the very top shelf the jars had bright, red labels, and that honey the Other Bee never sold. Only used to sweeten her morning tea. On the second shelf were white-labelled jars she took with her to the door whenever someone rang. On the bottom shelf: blue-labelled jars with the honey she spooned into the girl’s porridge and spread across the girl’s toast in the afternoon.

Polite voices and pleasantries at the door echoed down the hall. The girl darted across the kitchen. She climbed onto to lowest shelf and steadied herself by nudging her hip against the wall. She grabbed a jar of the red-labelled honey, unscrewed the lid, and stuck a finger in. The front door cracked closed. She heard the turn of its lock. The girl screwed the lid back on the jar, then clambered down the shelves. She made a fist, hiding her honey-coated finger. She tiptoed across the kitchen floor and took her seat only seconds before the Other Bee returned to the kitchen.

“Are you hungry, dear heart? Shall I fix your breakfast?” The woman said, smoothing down an unruly lock of the girl’s hair with a blue-veined hand. The girl was hungry. Her stomach rumbled.

“No thank you, Other Bee. May I go outside and play?”

The woman smiled with colorless lips. “You are being very sweet today.”

The girl cringed. Could the woman tell what she had done? The woman stroked her cheek. “Very sweet,” she said. Her eyes were approving. She moved to shut the pantry.

The girl glanced behind her, saw Other Bee facing away, knew she wasn’t being watched. She crammed her honeyed finger into her mouth. The honey was sharp and bright on her tongue. For a moment all the colors in the kitchen seemed richer. She could smell the Other Bee’s hand soap and shoe polish from across the kitchen. She licked a small trickle of honey from her palm.

“Tomorrow, I’ll bring you some ribbons to tie up your hair.” Other Bee said. She walked back over to the kitchen table and sat down across from the girl.

The girl turned in her chair to face her. “Can we get some for you, so we can always be like twins?”

Other Bee smiled. The lines around her eyes interlaced like spider-webs. She leaned over and kissed the girl on her forehead. Her lips were cold. “Yes, my dear one. We’ll both wear ribbons in our hair.”

“May I?”

“Play outside?” The woman’s brow furrowed briefly, a suspicious look that quickly passed. “Of course, my love. But Mother has some work today. The bees will keep you company. They are industrious, good-hearted creatures. Not like the silly flowers; flowers only know how to lie.”

The girl felt an itching behind her eyes. Flowers. She knew the flowers were important, but could not remember why. The girl kissed Other Bee on her papery cheek. “I’ll do my best to play quietly so’s not to interrupt.”

“That’s my good girl.” The woman stood and unlocked the kitchen door.

The girl, stomach rumbling, sweetness on her lips, skipped out of the kitchen door into the garden’s forking paths humming a joyful song. Her eyes did not smile. She knew the names of the flowers. Could tell the hydrangeas from snowball bushes at a glance. Could name the hardy hibiscus and false indigo and frangipani.

Throughout the garden’s expanse were three white boxes, each containing a different hive of bees. The nearest was just beneath the girl’s bedroom window. She stood for a minute in the sunlight, watching the bees in flight. She watched for a shadowed space where they did not busily attend the flowers and made for it, all the while humming her joyful song. In the shade of a willow, the girl bent over and brushed a purple hyacinth. She looked behind her. Satisfied that the Other Bee was not watching from the kitchen window, she whispered, “Tell me your story.”

The Hyacinth bristled. “I knew a girl the color of sand. She loved a boy red-brown as the clay. The girl sang in the church. The most beautiful songs.” The Hyacinth’s star-shaped blossoms trembled and it began to sing. “’Get on board, children. For there’s room for many-a-more!’”

The girl smiled. She had a flash of memory. A gray room with motes of dust dancing in the sunlight. A tall brown woman with round glasses in a long skirt singing those same words.

The Hyacinth murmured. “Clay-brown boy was a sinner. He never went to church. He missed the choir. Missed sand-colored girl’s songs. But one day he was on a river fishing nearby the place sand-girl was doing the Monday washing. Heard a voice clear and strong and pure sing out. He forgot about his fish. Forgot about his pole. Knew he loved the singer. He loved sand-colored girl.”

Other Bee’s voice echoed in her head. The plants will only tell you lies. The girl stroked the Hyacinth’s stem. “And did they kiss? Did they get married?”

The Hyacinth sighed long and low. “Purple Hyacinth only knows sorrow, child. If you would know my tale, understand that it is not a thing of happy endings.”

The girl nodded. “But if you told only lies then the story you tell could be happy. If it is sad, it might be true. Tell me what happens?”

The Hyacinth continued. “They met at nights on the banks of the river. Their kisses were sweet and their eyes saw only each other. They made plans to run away and set up house.

“Sand girl’s father was a minister. His skin was the color of beechwood. Minister’s wife was the color of ashwood. She taught school. Neither would approve of their sweet, good daughter kissing that brown clay boy, who had no schooling and went on sinning far from church. So the girl and boy met together at dusk in secret, before the church bell rang, and before the school teacher had finished supper.

“Now, in those times there were riders. They wore all white and they brought death. They hated beechwood, sand, or ashwood. And even more they hated clay-brown, or the brown of the good earth, or the black of the night skies. In the dusk it’s hard to see that sand is brown, not sugar white. And the riders came upon the brown boy and sand-colored girl, and saw their kisses and hated them. They thought the girl was one of their own, sugar-white, and they tied up the boy, and beat him, and took him to a sycamore tree.

“The girl wept and ran after them until her feet were bloody. But the riders laughed, and knocked her to the ground and hanged the boy from the tree. His hands and feet turned purple. The girl weeps by the river. Never sings her songs. And my flowers bloomed the purple of the boy’s hands. This is my story.”

The girl sobbed and knelt in the dirt. Shaken by the unfairness of it she clenched her fists and pounded them into the earth. She whispered, “This must be true.” She knew that Other Bee had lied to her again.

She wiped the tears from her eyes with the pinafore of her dress. “Hyacinth, can you tell me my name?”

The flower quivered. “I only know my story, child. Even the sand-colored girl’s name is lost to me.” The girl kissed the Hyacinth and said, “Thank you.”

The girl wandered deeper into the garden, under trellises strewn with clematis. Across a bridge over a slow-moving stream choked with lotuses. Past jacaranda trees that showered her with purple-blue blossoms. They stuck in her hair and crunched beneath her feet. Each of these had their own stories, she knew, and they whispered and swayed in the wind. But their stories were not hers, and the songs they sang were unfamiliar.

She walked until she stood beneath the magnolia tree at the garden’s heart. It towered above her; even if she craned her neck upwards she could see only the barest hint of sky between its dark, waxy leaves. Its huge white flowers were wider across than both her hands with her fingers spread. The girl sat down cross-legged on the grass beneath the tree and reached out to stroke its trunk. “Sister Magnolia, will you tell me your story?”

The branches of the tree shook. A solitary white flower as big as a teacup saucer drifted down from the tree’s crown. The girl caught it, and cradled it gently in her hands. The voice from the blossom was deep, smooth, and sweet as cane syrup. “There was a gal used to sing the blues. She’d come home at night from waiting tables, and washing floors, and listen for the sounds of traffic to quiet. Then she’d sit at her table with its red-checked cloth. With her radio turned low, and the window opened wide, she’d sing to the moon. And the moon would sing back.” The tree rumbled low and sad, in counterpoint to the flower. “Because the moon was lonesome in the sky, and just as weary as any table-waiting gal. They’d sing out their heartaches and tribulations. They were friends. The moon was that much less lonesome; so was the gal.

“But one night the moon lit the way to a fella in a fine felt hat, and a long winter coat. He heard the gal singing. The fella took her to sing out her heartache and tribulations on a stage lit up near as bright as the moon. She wore a dress that sparkled like the stars. Everyone who heard the gal sing loved her as much as the moon did. Soon the gal had a driver in a long moonbright car, and jewels and someone to wash her floors and bring her meals. The gal had love, and no more reason to sing the blues. But she missed her friend. Nightclubs had no place for the moon to sit, and the house band drowned out the moon’s songs.

“So one night, wearing a string of pearls, each perfectly round and glowing, the gal walked straight off the stage, and went outside. Was a cloudy night, but she threw out her arms just the same. She sang out to the moon just as she did back in her cheap little room with its red and white checked table. The moon peeked through the clouds. Saw her old friend wearing little moons around her neck, singing their same old songs. The moon shone her light down and the gal glowed, so did a tree with night-dark leaves. Where the moon touched it, flowers big as any you ever did see, opened to touch the moonlight. ’For you,’ the moon said.

“The moon gave my flowers to the gal; the gal gave her songs to the moon.”

The girl tucked the magnolia flower into her hair, just above her ear. She remembered Gramma Augusta’s wrists, dabbed with oil that smelled like magnolia, mingled with garlic, onion, and bell pepper. Those wrists and strong hands that glittered with rings. The girl remembered those hands setting flowers that looked like green-beaked birds with feathers made of fire in a vase. She said to the magnolia blossom, “You flowers only seem to have one story. But do you remember other flowers? You ever seen a flower that looks like a bird, all orange and blue and green?”

The magnolia blossom whispered, “From my highest bough I’ve seen a flower that looks like a bird. But it was cast down. Pushed beneath the earth.”

The girl followed the garden’s winding path past sunflowers whose bright yellow heads turned to follow her. Bees buzzed around ankle-level sea lavender. Dense perfume rose, disorienting her. Her limbs felt heavy.

“It’s so hot.” She said to no one. A mimosa tree stood just beyond the sea lavender. “Maybe if I just lie down beneath that tree.” The shade of the tree’s pink and green canopy seemed to promise coolness and rest. Her tongue and lips tingled with a hint of remembered sweetness. She had only taken a foot off the path when the magnolia hummed in her ear. “It’s just a little bit farther to the birds you was looking for.”

The girl wiped sweat off her brow then put both feet firmly on the path. She clamped a hand over her nose and mouth. Weariness fled from her limbs. The bees’ buzzing rose in pitch and menace. She ran along the path, pinching her nose shut with one hand, the other holding onto the magnolia in her hair. Bordering plants crowded onto the edges of the path. The girl ran past pink and red floribunda roses that snagged her skirt and pinafore with thorns. Panting, with a stitch in her side, she came to a high brick wall festooned with honeysuckle. A small patch of dark, damp smelling soil lay just before the wall. “Here,” the magnolia said. The girl knelt down. The dampness of the earth soaked through the knees of her stockings. She rooted around in cool soil feeling for hidden plants or roots. After a time, she sat back on her heels and pulled out her hands. Tired, she wiped the dirt from her hands on the skirt of her dress. She looked at her thumb, still tender in the place she had bitten it. She squeezed it until she managed another drop of blood then flicked the blood onto the soil. Nothing happened.

The girl began to cry. This was stupid. “Bird flowers, I remember you. Nothing else in this whole garden stays underground. How can you?”

The soil churned and frothed like hot chocolate just off the stove. Green stalks poked through and up, each with a brilliantly orange-red crown of petals. Broad leaves unfurled like wings. The flowers preened. “We are the most magnificent of flowers: Strelitzia, the birds of paradise!”

The girl sniffled once, then wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I remember you. Please tell me your story.”

The tallest of the flowers, with a petal as blue as the fire on the Other Bee’s gas burners in his fan of orange-red, turned to regard her. “Can you not tell my story just by looking at me? Why are you not struck silent by my beauty?

“When the world began, it was a dance. And I was one of the dancers, the first child of the sun, the firebird. I burned brighter than the moon herself, and she was jealous of my beauty.”

The magnolia scoffed and the bird-of-paradise stretched on its stalk. “Pardon, did I hear something?”

“Please don’t stop your story,” the girl said.

“As I was saying. My beauty was painful to gaze upon, but I burnt too bright. No flowers could grow, no rain could fall, and the earth was cracked and ugly. The moon whispered dark things to my mother the sun, and the sun was struck with compassion for the poor, dirty earth. She ordered clouds to form for rain, and she gave the earth a robe of green to cover itself, speckled with flowers to bring out beauty and color. Such beauty that the cracked, dry rock even outshone the moon. But such was my radiance that I would burn up the earth’s new garments in an instant, so my mother transformed me into a mere plant, to take my place as the most beautiful of the flowers.

“Poor me, my beauty reined in, my heat taken. But one day, I will regain my true form and fly away from this ordinary ball of dirt in flame and glory!”

The girl smiled at this, but she remembered her grandmother and the table set with the birds-of-paradise, and the number of them that grew just outside her front window. They were beautiful, but no more so than the sweet pea that grew in a pot hanging from the back porch. She caressed one of the bird-of-paradise’s leaves. “Wanna fly away from here, you and me? Ain’t afraid of fire.”

The crowned head of the plant seemed to sag. “Today is not the day for flame and glory.”

The girl closed her eyes. She could remember the rings on her grandmother’s fingers. Garnets, rubies, an amethyst, and a pearl that shone like the moon. She remembered her grandmother’s voice. “Baby dumpling, your mama named you Cleopatra like the queen, and your great-grandma call you Cleo because you carry history. But to me you a baby dumpling, soft and sweet, near good enough to eat.” She remembered laughing as Gramma Augusta tickled her ribs. She leaned over to kiss the bird-of-paradise. “Thank you, little firebird.” The flower seemed to stand up a little straighter.

Cleo walked along the wall, pushing her hand through the creeping vines feeling for an opening in the brick. All around her she could hear the buzzing of bees.

After trampling through irises and crocuses, Cleo came to a place where one brick wall met another. There was a whitewashed wooden gate, half-hidden by Madagascar jasmine. Cleo pulled at it. It was locked. She kicked at it. The gate creaked loudly and groaned on its hinges. The buzzing of the bees grew louder. Cleo lowered her shoulder and prepared herself to take a run at the gate when she heard a voice from behind her. “Sarah darling, you’ve certainly been busy.” The bees hummed in agreement.

Cleo turned around. The woman who called herself Mother Bea stood there, hands templed before her, cobweb-colored hair streaming behind her. Her eyes were shaded by the broad brim of a sun-hat. Her shoulders were bare. A bee landed on the woman’s right shoulder, just covering a freckle. Cleo scowled. “All you do is lie. Who’s Sarah?”

“I’m not sure I like your tone, young lady. Look, your hair’s all a-tangle again.”

“This is my hair. This is how it grows!”

“Young lady! This sort of tantrum is not at all becoming. If this is how you’re going to behave when I allow you—”

“Allow nothin’! I look like me.”

Mother Bea spread out her hands in supplication. Her fingers seemed far too long. “I trim and prune the plants. Water them, help them become their most beautiful. Should I do any less for you, my dear one?”

“I’m not a plant. I’m a girl.” Cleo moved over to the gate and shook the latch.

The woman smiled her thin smile. Two more fat bees landed on her shoulder and a third hovered near her cheek. A vine from the Madagascar jasmine snaked out to wrap around Cleo’s wrist. She shook it off. “Open the gate.”

Bees wreathed the woman, covering her mist-colored dress, flitting in and out of her long cobweb hair.

“Ain’t gonna scare me with your bees. I’ll turn into smoke.” Cleo kicked at the gate. Hard.

The bees intensified their buzzing. The woman laughed, not unkindly. “Smoke. You can’t do that, Sarah.”

“My name’s not Sarah. It’s Cleopatra Khadija Arceneaux. And it’s Cleo and Baby Dumpling. But it ain’t Sarah. And you don’t know what I can do.” Cleo kicked at the gate again. The wood splintered.

“I only want to keep you safe.” The bees hummed with the woman’s voice. “You can be my pretty daughter and I’ll show you all the secrets of the garden, and one day it’ll be yours.”

Cleo kicked the gate. “I’m not your daughter.” Kick.

“Sarah, sweetheart, the world outside is a terrible place. They won’t care for you like I can. They won’t protect you and love you. They can’t teach you the things I can.” The humming of the bees grew as her voice cracked and lost its characteristic smoothness. “Look how you came to my door, ragged and dirty, with a sad cardboard box of chocolate. I fed you. Clothed you. Burnt your rags.”

“Those were play clothes, not rags!” Cleo slammed her body against the gate. “I was selling candy bars for a field trip. Gramma Augusta never let me go hungry.”

Other Bee held out her arms for an embrace. The bees sounded frantic in their buzzing. Other Bee’s eyes plead with Cleo. “The world is an unkind place for little girls. Especially little negro girls. Even ones with your gifts.”

“Maybe the world is a bad place.” Cleo sighed, knowing that some of what the Other Bee said was true. “Maybe it’s mean. But I’ll be badder and meaner if I have to. You can’t keep me here.”

The gate crashed open. The bees dispersed in a cloud from Other Bee, who looked frail and tired. The Madagascar jasmine looked brown at the edges. The sun hat was in her hands. She had tears in the corner of her eyes. “If you leave here, you can never come back. Stay for just a little longer, and I’ll teach you how to grow fire strawberries and the sweet fig of wisdom. This place is safe from the ways of the world. Only I can give you this safety.” The woman brushed Cleo’s cheek with one of her long fingers. “I won’t comb your hair anymore. Just stay.”

“No,” Cleo said.

She stepped out of the garden and closed the gate behind her. Beyond Other Bee’s enclosed space, the air was cool. Ordinary smells: car exhaust, cat piss, the garlicky odor of the Chinese delivery place down the street, assailed Cleo. She let out a bark of joy; she was on her own street. The sun had just set; the sky to the west was a lurid rose-gold that dripped over the hills and deepened into black.

The sidewalk in front of the Other Bee’s bungalow had buckled and cracked where the roots of a ficus had tunnelled beneath. The streetlights glowed, muting the reds and yellows of the cars on the street. Ahead of her, only four doors down, was her grandmother’s house. Its porch light still lit for her. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Gramma Augusta would be so worried. Cleo had never stayed out past the streetlights’ first glow. Would Gramma yell? Would she cry? Would she ground Cleo for a month? Behind her the thick, sweet smell of tuberose lingered. Cleo made her way home over the broken sidewalk, holding onto the magnolia tucked in her hair, careful not to step on any cracks. She did not look back.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

Christopher Caldwell is a queer, Black American living in Glasgow, Scotland. He is a 2007 Clarion West alumnus and Octavia E. Butler scholar. His work has appeared in Obsidian Literary Journal, Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars, and Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado GLBT Voices.

HOME IS WHERE MY MOTHER’S HEART IS BURIED

By Wole Talabi // 4568 words

The tiny droplets of carbonic acid rain descended onto the crystalline terrain below us softly, soundlessly, almost like they were caressing the planet’s surface, trying to coax it into yielding something; hyaline grass or fractal flowers or vitric worms, perhaps. The rain here is nothing like the rain back home in Lagos, millions of miles and millions of memories away, where heavy grey curtains of cold water attack everything relentlessly, loudly. Everything I remember of Nigeria is stormy and loud.

It was the twenty third of Aries, which meant it was the first of October back on Earth; Independence Day back in Nigeria. As was usual for us, my sister Arinola and I were sitting on the corrosion-shielded balcony of my serviced apartment in the Chang-Duong sector, drinking rooibos tea, watching the rainfall, listening to the sultry tones of a long-dead but eternally-talented Asa in the background and talking, just as we had every day for the past eleven years. In the distance, above the geometrically precise cityscape, I could see several faint trails of superheated steam rising like arrows up and through the rain, the ships ahead of them headed for the Qenova Homopolar Spaceport on Deimos.

Arin was wearing a white polyplast jumpsuit, her mane of curly, natural hair wrapped tightly in a green silk scarf and finished with a bow flourish like a gift of brambles. She looked so beautiful and confident and hopeful. Nothing like the little girl that used to hide from visiting uncles and aunties in the storeroom of our tiny family bungalow in Warri, refusing their attentions because she thought she was ugly.

“So come now, you’re serious about this ajeeji girl?” she asked me, throwing her voice carefully over her mug and through the rising steam from her tea. I allowed myself a smile.

“Quistis,” I said, emphasizing the musical quality of her name despite its alien sound. Quistis wasn’t even technically a she—the Chironi are gender-neutral and both extremely emotionally perceptive and anatomically adaptable—Quistis only appeared in the typical biological structure of a human female because she finds the form aesthetic and I subconsciously projected my approval and desire for it when I first met her. Still, I went along with Arin’s gender assignment anyway, as most of the humans here did. “Her name is Quistis and yes, I’m serious about her. I love her very much.”

“Love eh? It really knows no borders.” The mocking, strained smile stayed on her face only briefly. “But you know it’s dangerous what you’re doing, sha? I know you don’t care, you’ve always been different, but have you seen the way the other humans, especially our people here, look at you? Maybe it’s safer to just stay—”

“—with my own kind?”

I took a sip of my rooibos tea to let my interruption sink in. It had gone tepid. “I don’t feel particularly safer, loved or comfortable with them. I never have.” And neither should you, I thought, but didn’t say as I was struck with the oblique realisation that I really shouldn’t drink rooibos so often here. The import tax on tea from Earth is obscenely high.

Arin said nothing and sipped her tea, too. I could tell that she was weighing and arranging her words, she would reveal them soon enough. She put her mug down, drummed her lacquered nails across the table, once, and asked the question I’d known she would ask since she first arrived in my apartment with that hopeful glint in her eye, “Are you ever going to move back home? Are we?”

I looked away as I felt something come over me, a sensation of loss and familiar bitterness. I have always kept my bitterness to myself because I did not want to taint her with it. She was young enough when it all happened to not be resentful of it. I wasn’t. With a forced smile, I answered her question with a question of my own, such a Nigerian thing to do. “We’re doing well and we have a good life here. Why should we?”

“I don’t know, Tinu. But Nigeria is still home no matter how good or bad things are there, it is still home. Earth is still home. You know what I mean. We can’t stay here forever.” She wasn’t smiling anymore.

Home. She knows Nigeria only in caricature; she only ever saw it through a child’s eyes, its dark side filtered out by the love of our parents... and me.

“We should go home for Christmas this year at least,” she told me. “We can eat amala and gbegiri in Surulere and see everyone again and attend all the amazing parties on the Island. We can even go to the village! Haven’t you missed the village?”

Arin’s Nigeria was not my Nigeria. Death had induced a premature adulthood that had in turn, tainted my memories. She did not know what it was like to have a government that either did nothing for you or actively antagonised you, what it was like to lack security, safety. To know that justice and dreams could be traded for paltry sums and important issues were decided primarily by whom you knew and how much you were willing to pay them and that even the love of friends and family was a thin, fragile thing that could be easily broken with fist full of Naira. I’d never told her about the people that had failed us and abandoned us. There seemed to be no point by the time she was old enough to understand, and I loved her too much to ruin her childhood illusions of them.

“Let’s just stay here. Home is wherever we are when we are with each other.”

Arin put down her almost empty mug and said listlessly, “Of course. You’re right. Let’s stay here.” She pushed away from the table, smoothed her jumpsuit and went indoors, leaving me to the sounds of Asa and the gently falling artificial rain.

I understood her sentiment. She longed for and dreamt of a place that didn’t really exist. Not in the way I knew it to be, anyway. I understood because I was constantly haunted by dreams and memories. Dreams of what my mother wanted to be back in Nigeria, back on Earth. Dreams of what she could have achieved if our country had let her.

Earth. Nigeria. I love the idea of living in Nigeria but my mother’s dreams died there. I’m not sure I can build my life in the graveyard of her dreams even if that graveyard is supposed to be home.

∙ ∙ ∙

A few hours after Arin left my apartment, I made love to Quistis in hers, leisurely and deliberately. Usually, when we made love, we were a tangle of tongues and limbs and laughter and long, deep moans of pleasure but that night, I took my time to breathe her in. Her green, lush, hairless skin smelled clean and warm and earthy. It was the scent that trailed a rainstorm on Earth, especially the kind that breaks a long dry spell; the smell of petrichor. I wasn’t sure how much of it was her own scent—and how much of it came from my own memories and her evolutionary response to them—but I savoured it, anyway.

When we were done, she placed her head between my breasts and threw her left leg over my thighs in that unique after-sex embrace that all lovers seem to know by instinct. The low hum of her building’s oxygen recycling system framed her steady breathing. Her head calmly rode the beat of my heart as I stared at the ceiling. The metallorganic plexium finish curved in several misaligned sinusoids, visually increasing the space in the dim light and lending it an eldritch reflection and form.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Arin’s question.

I couldn’t stop thinking about home.

“What’s wrong?” Quistis asked, startling me a little. I’d thought she was asleep.

“Nothing,” I told her.

She didn’t believe me so she asked again. “Come on. You know I can feel it like an itch in my own mind. What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, and that was as honest an answer as I could give.

“Is it your sister?” she probed accurately, working our emotional connection.

I wanted to tell her but I wasn’t sure she would understand. We are all immigrants to Mars but we are immigrants of different cadres. She and her people came here from a faraway galaxy, seeking adventure, experience, knowledge and understanding of their place in the stars. But I came here seeking escape, new opportunities and a new beginning, a way to leave my past behind. Often, she asks me what it was like living on Earth. I never really know which part of it to describe to her so I usually deflect the question with humour, making a joke about Nigerian music or American food or Malaysian politics.

I couldn’t deflect her question this time so I tried my best to explain to her that Arin just really missed home because of her childhood memories, and all she’d seen and heard about it from her friends.

“My sister wants to go back home, to Nigeria, the place we come from back on Earth.”

“Why?” she asked, naturally.

“Honestly, I’m not very sure.”

“Is she not happy here? She certainly seems to be doing well at Plexicorp. She lives well here, right?”

“She is. She does. She just longs for home.” I only triggered more questions in my own head.

Where is home? Is it the place you were born even if you only ever experienced it as a child? Is the place where you grew up still home if no one that really matters to you or loves you lives there anymore? What about the memories? Is a place still home if all you remember of it brings you to tears? What about the sense of belonging and heritage and attachment to the air and the food and the land and its people? How much of these things need to be in a place before it starts to feel like home? How much of them can you lose before what used to be home no longer is?

“I’m sorry Tinu, I don’t understand.” Quistis’s verdant body went tense with thought. I leaned down and kissed her forehead, lightly, a kiss of both comfort and apology. She rolled onto her side and slid her lips across mine, squeezing my thighs with her leg. She wrapped her arms around me tightly like a scandent calabash vine wrapping itself around a tree trunk.

“I want to understand. Tell me what you remember when you think of home,” she asked softly.

My eyes glistened as I fought back the memories and the tears. “I... I remember hope and disappointment. I remember my parents. I remember death.”

The words were hard, like so many marbles in my mouth. Speaking them sent roiling waves of raw emotion through me and it took a great effort not to stop.

Quistis placed her palm in between my breasts as though she were taking a reading from my heart, “Tell me.”

And so I did.

I told her about my mother’s warm, broad smile and her love for nature and how she used to tend to our little hedge of hibiscus while I played around her feet.

“You still miss her,” she said. I agreed.

I told Quistis the kind of person my mother was, explaining how even though she was the one of the first humans to attend Nexus University off-world, she never even considered working for one of the multiplanetal corporations looking to expand trade between our two species, which was what almost all her classmates did.

“My mother returned to Nigeria and attempted to apply what she had learned about terraforming and planetary resuscitation in the Niger Delta, a place whose soil and water had been so poisoned by petroleum during the Second Oil War that nothing grew there anymore. She thought it was noble, important work and that her government would support her. But she was wrong.”

“How long ago was this? Before we established the compressed exergy trade systems?”

“About twenty-five years before the first XG-compression station was set up on earth. Before then, we mostly used hydrocarbons like petroleum for energy. We used to produce it in Nigeria. We had so much of it. In the Niger Delta, in the Mid-West, in the East. We had so much of it all and we moved it all across the country through a huge system of underground pipelines, like black blood through our national veins. And then the war came and the Federal soldiers sealed off and sabotaged the network at the source, spilling oil into the soil, poisoning everything. Even when the fighting finally stopped, whole towns and villages in the Delta had to be abandoned, their people made refugees.

“It could have been cleaned up, the land revived. It would have taken money and time and effort but it could be done. No one just seemed to care enough to try. Except my mother. She had gotten so many ideas while studying here, and she believed she could apply them to reclaim the land easily and quickly by combining Chironi planetary alteration technology with our own existing bioremediation capabilities. She thought everyone would support her once she presented the methodology. She was wrong.”

I paused and closed my eyes, welcoming my internal darkness. In my mind, I saw an ocean of black with rainbows reflected in its surface, its waves ceaselessly swelling and sweeping against a wall of metal rocks, my mother atop them, looking out into a dark horizon. A fragment of a half-forgotten dream.

Qusitis’ voice dragged me back to the low hum of her room with a question, “I don’t understand. Your government did not want to resuscitate the land?”

“No. At least it looked like they didn’t, judging by how hostile they were to her attempts.”

“But that makes no sense. Why not?”

The answer was, as with most answers about things in Nigeria, complicated.

I told her, “There are many things about Nigeria I have never understood. This is one of them. Some say the government was punishing the Delta people for trying to secede when the Oil wars broke out. Others say the large multiplanetal corporations were paying government officials to prevent anyone except them from utilizing modified Chironi technology, enforcing their monopoly. They paid her lip service and praised her work while ensuring she never managed to actually get anything done. In the end, the ministry blocked her path with obscure policies and red tape until she was too exhausted to keep going. And then, there was the accident.”

I stopped abruptly, almost overcome with memories. Memories of my mother lifting me up into the air and laughing, her mouth an open cavern, her teeth perfectly aligned like piano keys. Memories of her warm reassuring hugs and thin, smooth hands that conducted her words into place when she spoke. Painful memories of her still, lifeless corpse - a useless shell, with all that had made her who she was scraped out.

Quistis didn’t press me to continue. She only turned her head to look up at me. Her gaze hurt. She looked at me with too much emotion, taking all that I felt and reflecting it from multiple dimensions like an emotional house of mirrors.

And then, almost a whisper, “Tell me how she died.”

I closed my eyes again. It seemed easier to talk with my eyelids shutting out everything but my memories.

“After the ministry rejected her fourth application for an enhanced bioremediation pilot project, she tried to visit the minister’s brother. He had gone to school with her on Nexus. She hoped that appealing to the minister personally through his family, would make him more receptive. Perhaps it would have worked. Who knows?

“The accident was caused by a magnetic grid failure on the Abeokuta superhighway. It only lasted two seconds but it was enough to kill thirty four people. My mother died instantly; at least that’s what the doctors said.”

I stroked Quistis’s long, silky hair as I paused. The action anchored me to the present, preventing me from drowning in the past. Quistis must have sensed what I needed and did not move or say anything to fill up the silence. I wondered briefly if she would stop loving me if I ever really wanted her to.

I continued, “All the responsibility fell to me. I was only nineteen but by many local standards, already a woman. Arin was only seven but she was my responsibility.”

My mother had never explained why she’d waited so long to try for another child. After she died, I found a birth certificate for an older sibling I had never met. There was a death certificate in the same name in the same drawer. The latter was dated two days after the former. The birth certificate was dated almost exactly two years before I was born.

“I thought her siblings, her colleagues, her friends, would support us after the accident. But I was wrong. They sent condolence messages, made a big show of weeping at the funerals and then disappeared.”

Quistis paused again at this and seemed to be thinking deeply about what I had just said, and then, she asked, “But why? Other human families I have seen tend to be very supportive of each other. Like you and Arin.”

“Families can be complicated, Quistis. Especially Nigerian ones.”

I wished I could explain to her how confusing and disappointing it had been to watch the people that had laughed and danced and shared big meals of jollof rice with plantain and chicken with you suddenly fade away when you needed them most but I didn’t know how and my memories were beginning to hurt so I stopped talking, with Quistis’s breath heavy on my chest.

And then, after what seemed like hours, she spat out a word like she was choking on it: “Trapped.”

In that single word, I heard regret and sorrow and longing and pain, absorbed from me, and refocused with intensity.

“Trapped?”

She sat up in bed beside me, gazing at me and bringing to bear the full power of my own emotions like the sun in my eyes. “Yes. Trapped. I think I understand now what your mother meant to you and I understand why you don’t want to go back. You feel trapped between what-could-have-been and what-was. The sense of betrayal, bitterness and disappointment I get from you is almost overwhelming, cloying. I understand now that it is easier to leave that kind of place behind and start afresh, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, about half a blink away from tears.

“Arin is free from that. Free from the burden of memories. She is attached only to you. But now she also feels trapped, between her need to remain with you, the only real family she has ever known, and her longing for the place that the Lifecasts and holovids and histories tell her she belongs. She will only do what she wants if you approve.”

Quistis took my hand into hers and said, “Tinu, I can show you something. Something that I think you are trying to hide from yourself. But I need your permission. Will you let me show you?”

Weakly, I whispered, “Yes.”

Quistis’s fingers melded into one and then extruded, like plastic, reaching for my ear. It felt strange, having her penetrate me like that but I did not feel uncomfortable, perhaps because I trusted and loved her, perhaps because she was careful not to make herself too intrusive. The part of her that was in me touched a part of me I could not identify.

Suddenly, my mind birthed a parallel world of perception.

I was alone and in a place that felt like it was made of water. There was no sensation there except feeling, pure feeling. I sank, my lungs filling with emotion.

My life began to flash before my eyes, not in image, but in feeling. Joy, sadness, anger, love, fear, confusion, hope.

Overwhelmed, I called out for my mother.

I stopped sinking.

My feet bounced lightly on what seemed like seabed and I was at peace. I felt every emotion all at once so intensely that everything was in equilibrium. It was like freezing and burning at the same time. Turbulence without net effect. In that place, there was clarity.

Then everything shifted. Like reality itself had pulsed. I began to feel again. Emotions like so many tentacles, touched me everywhere. Where the tentacles touched me, I felt happiness like an embrace, I felt pride like a crown, I felt yearning like music, and I felt restriction, like a chain. And I knew then that I was Arin. That Quistis had searched through my life and memories and extracted her pure emotional states from every interaction we had ever had. I understood then what Quistis was showing me, in pure feeling.

Then, as in a dream, the place that was like water was gone and I was back in my room, Quistis staring at me.

“Trapped.”

Hearing it, after feeling all that, with all of Quistis’s emotional power of perception and reflection behind it, I allowed myself to feel guilt and shame at my selfishness. It was a guilt that had always been there, but for the first time in years, that guilt finally overwhelmed my own resentment of events past. I had no more right to make Arin stay here with me and my scarred memories than the Nigerian government had to keep the oil-poisoned Niger Delta untreated. So, full of that potent guilt, I asked, “What do you think I should do?”

She lay her head back down on my chest where it had been a moment earlier and said, “You already know. When my people send out a new exploratory pod, everyone on the planet is given the opportunity to go on with it or stay on the terraformed world.” She paused, and then a breath later, said, “One day, I may want to leave this place too, just like Arin. I wouldn’t want to feel trapped by anything, especially not someone else’s memories. I think you should let Arin make her own decision. All you can do is remove the chain. Let her decide if she wants to follow the music.”

We lay there, silent in the wake of her words in the darkness of her flat, my face wet with tears and her head heavy on my heart.

∙ ∙ ∙

I arrived at the Qauron Interplanetary Transit Hub one hour before Arin was due to check-in. I don’t know why. I suppose, now that I think about it, I needed to feel like I was the one sending her off, like I was the one guiding her just I always had for the past sixteen years even though I knew it was not true anymore. This was where she would leave me.

I entered the violently angular prism of glass and metallorganic plexium, walking behind a middle-aged woman in an ankara head tie and too much mascara. Beside me, a green, four-legged Chironi shaped like a large centaur with a turban around his head walked beside what appeared to be a woman in a hijab and long flowing polyplast gown. I could not tell if she was human or not but I suspected she was. We marched through the station until we reached the electric-white Departures lounge. I took a seat. The couple and the woman in the mascara went ahead to check-in. I surveyed the area briefly and then started to read a news bulletin from my Lifedock as I awaited Arin’s arrival.

It had taken me almost three full days to tell Arin what I had decided that night in Quistis’s arms. She had kept asking me if I was sure and if I would still love her if she said she wanted to go. I’d kept saying yes until she believed me. So there I was, waiting to say goodbye.

Arin arrived about half an hour after I did, carrying only a small bag. When she saw me, she stopped suddenly, then walked over and sat awkwardly beside me.

“I wasn’t sure you would actually come,” she said.

“Yeah, well, I have to see you off. I brought you to this world—”

“—and you will watch me leave it.”

I smiled a strained smile, my cheeks taut like a dundun drumskin.

“So, you know what you’re going to do when you get back? You have it all planned a bit more now?”

She brushed a stray strand of her from her cheek, hooking it behind her ear and shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Plexicorp said the only position they have for me in Lagos is in marketing. I’m not sure if I’ll like it but I’ll see how it goes when I get there. And they are covering my accommodation so that’s sorted.”

Two amoeboid Chironi younglings moved past us, growing an extension of their bodies in the direction of their waiting parent and then flowing into it, quickly, their green, fleshy membranes stretching and contracting continuously. Their parent was mostly shaped like a human male, except for the short tail sticking out from behind him. I wondered briefly what part of earth they were going to, and what they were going to do there.

“What about you?” Arin asked. “Will you be alright on this world by yourself?”

I nodded.

I could tell that she was waiting for me to say something more, perhaps beg her to stay because I needed her with me, or invoke the transcendent bond of sisterhood and insist that we had to stay together because all we had left was each other, or even just break out into warnings about Nigeria and what had happened to our mother when she too had turned her back on the opportunities Mars offered to return home. But I said nothing, I only smiled wanly.

As though sensing my thoughts she sighed and said, “Thank you Tinu, for not making me feel guilty about this. I know it isn’t easy for you.”

“I love you Arin, and I just want you to be happy, above all else. Even if it’s not in the same place I am. I’ll miss you desperately, but I will be glad to know you are doing what you want, and that you are happy doing it without feeling trapped by anything or anyone.”

“I love you, sis.”

I handed her an interplanetary communications brochure I’d picked up that morning and explained to her what I’d found out. “Staying in touch is not going to be easy. Earth is too far away for standard real-time conversations, so you’re going to have to get an ansible extension for your Lifedock. You won’t get anything good at the Homopolar Spaceport so don’t buy there. The moon-to-moon railgun shops don’t have many trade agents but as soon as you get to Lagos, buy one, please. There used to be Comms agents just outside the Fashola Transit Station. You should be able to...”

My voice trailed off as Arin started to laugh with a loud, howling sound that confused me but made me smile at the same time.

“What’s so funny?”

“You. You’re being such a big sister! Going on and on about where I should do this and where I can buy that. You’ve become a real auntie.”

She threw an arm around my shoulder and squeezed a small self-aware laugh out of me.

“Abeg, Abeg,” I said, gently taking her right hand in mine and doing my best impression of a typical Yoruba woman, accent and all. “I know I basically raised you and all but don’t call me that. I’m still a young sisi. Understand?”

“Yes auntie Tinu!” she shouted, giving me a faux-serious look. We both broke into laughter.

The other sentients in the lounge looked in our direction, wondering what was going on but their eyes didn’t linger long.

When our laughter subsided, I told her, “There are many things about Mum and Dad and our family back in Nigeria that I never really explained to you. Things that I never...”

“Come on. Do you really think I don’t know, Tinu?”

She’d caught me off-guard.

“Huh?”

“Do you really think I don’t know about Mum’s company and where she was going when she had the accident? You think I didn’t notice when all our aunts and uncles stopped coming? When things got so hard for us that you had to sell the furniture in the old house? All the compromises we had to make before you got the scholarship to Nexus? I was young, Tinu but I noticed and as I got older I did some investigation of my own. I just never wanted to press you to talk about it because I knew it was so difficult for you.”

I paused to consider what my sister had just told me and realised that I had been treating her like a child when in fact she was a woman with needs and feelings and hopes and questions of her own. She had been so for a long time. Quistis had fully opened my eyes to it. I felt even more ashamed than I had under my lovers’ gaze.

“You need to stop trying to protect me, Tinu. I’ll be okay. Come to Lagos and spend next Christmas with me, okay? I’ll stock the house full of authentic rooibos tea, straight from the Western Cape for you and you can tell yourself you’re just checking up on me, nothing more.”

I nodded.

The sweet, thick voice of the station’s AI called for all passengers of pod DG-098 to Luna to check-in through the sonic vibra-sensors distributed around the lounge.

Arin rose to her feet and said, “I guess I have to go now.”

“I know,” I said, staring at the space in front of me, watching nothing in particular, my mind in a nebulous non-place, where everything—time, distance, memories, my thoughts and hopes and dreams seemed to have been separated from each other and untethered from me.

“Tinu? I really need to go.”

I listened to her voice try to get my attention for a while, noticing just how much her voice sounded like the voice of our mother as I remember it. Or perhaps my mind was just conflating the sound with my memory, bonding them to each other so I would never, ever forget. “Yes, time for you to go home,” I said at last without looking at her.

“I’m not going home,” she said, wiping away tears. “I’m going to Nigeria but I’m leaving the only home I have ever known.”

Standing there in each other’s arms, I remembered my mother and her warm hugs and her strength of will and her fierce consuming determination. I wanted to hug my mother again, pull her and Arin to my bosom and hold them there forever. I would have to settle for holding them in my heart.

“Oya, Arin. Go.”

Tears rolled down her cheek like little drops of liquid soul as she pulled back, nodded vigorously and turned away, heading for the check-in counter. I left the lounge immediately, breaking into a short, quick-footed run when I stepped outside the plasmium door and into the sheltered walkway that led to the magnetic transport network below the station. I stood there and did not move, waiting and watching the clouds through clear glass.

After almost twenty minutes, a sleek, black delta-shaped ship breached the carbon dioxide sky, one hundred tons of metal, fuel and cargo, including my sister, roaring, accelerating, and ascending steadily, a bright tail of light, heat and water vapour behind it.

I closed my eyes and wished my sister well from the bottom of my soul, imploring my mother’s spirit to welcome her, when she arrived, to the world where her heart is buried.

The black delta finally escaped the thin Martian atmosphere, leaving nothing but a dissipating tower of water vapour behind, like a painful memory being forgotten. I looked down and away from the sky, taking in the place I’d chosen for myself, for better or worse, and began to head…home.

ABOUT WOLE TALABI

Wole Talabi is a full-time engineer, part-time writer and some-time editor from Nigeria. His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omenana, Lightspeed, Terraform, Abyss & Apex, The Kalahari Review, the anthologies Imagine Africa 500, Futuristica Vol. 1 and a few other places. He edited the anthologies These Words Expose Us and Lights Out: Resurrection and co-wrote the play Color Me Man. He likes scuba diving, elegant equations and oddly-shaped things. He currently lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

WE LAUGH IN ITS FACE

By Barbara L. W. Myers // 2720 words

There was a small, dumb bird in the woods today. It sang as though the world wasn’t ending. The rock was cold and sharp in my palm, and the bird long gone by the time the rock hit its perch. But I threw the rock, and I can’t remember if “You might hit the bird!” raced through my mind as a warning, or as encouragement. I raised my eyes to watch its wings clear the tops of the trees and mar the cloudy sky. The cottony sky.

The cottony clouds.

Annie.

I’ve had a long time to review the sequence of my life, the roads taken and those not, full of muddy possibilities and infinite alternatives. But it’s pointless to spend so many hours pulling it all apart, because while Annie and I made a great thing, we didn’t make a means to change the past.

Annie and I lived in the sort of neighborhood one liked knowing existed, but didn’t want to live in: bushes pedicured like carefully prepped and parted toes, doors buffed, shined, and lacquered. A place where people knew how to save for what they wanted, but couldn’t afford to replace what they had if it broke. My father and Annie’s parents worked hard to move us there, so we knew the language of opportunity and recognized second-hand cardigans when we saw them. We were now suburban, but not truly of the suburbs, both transplants from parts of the city you read about daily in the police blotter. Our partnership was borne out of the high school Aquarium Club; when Annie smiled and introduced herself, I shook her freckled hand with my brown one and smiled back. Despite our enthusiasm, the fish kept dying for typical, asinine reasons, and we grew tired of flushing them away.

“This one’s eyes look like cotton balls,” Annie said as she chased the corpse with the green wire-and-mesh net.

“More like clouds,” I said. “Cloudy.”

“No,” she insisted as she lifted the stiff body from the water and examined it closely, despite its odor. “Cottony.” Her conviction was calming.

“Dead, anyway. Another one bites the bowl.”

“What a waste.” She crossed the linoleum tiles to the bathroom door, holding the small net close to her chest.

“They’re cheap,” I said. Her look of alarm stung my face like a shock of static.

“But life isn’t.” She swung the bathroom door open with her sharp elbow and slipped into the lavatory. The toilet flushed once, twice, thrice. I listened to her wash her hands while I stared at the algae we couldn’t kill in the tank. I wondered how her fingers felt when slippery with soap. I heard the door, and felt her breath on my ear as she peered over my shoulder at the verdant coating on the glass.

“Death is meaningless,” she said.

“Death brings life,” I said. She laid her hand on my shoulder, and I succumbed.

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”

We were on the brink, that time when the invincibility we were so sure of in childhood began looking foolish given the years and challenges ahead of us. But we were wrapped in the throes of our own great potential: it was a fact, like the color of the sky and the temperature of boiling water. I was stout, dark, and determined, and had always been treated as an outsider in a world that didn’t like how loud and visible I was. Finding someone who understood true confidence, who also had that deep knowledge that she was destined for greatness, was an amazing thing. Aside from her stunning mind, Annie gave me the gift of being myself. When I was with her, I stopped worrying about my skin, my hair, my clothes, my teeth, and I just became a series of firing neurons and a thundering heart. That peace, that space to be outside my body, to be my essence instead of my corpus—I don’t know if I ever thanked her for that.

And, gods, she was beautiful. Annie made me wish I knew what to do with a paintbrush and oils.

It’s hard to remember who got their admission letters first. I spent months worrying that Annie would be accepted to all our universities and I would receive slim envelopes of rejection. She didn’t believe in backup plans, so our application fees went straight into the coffers of the top biomolecular engineering and biogerontology programs, paired with excellent test scores, solid transcripts, and passionate essays. Annie would speak of “when,” and I always countered with “ifs”: if we got into the same program, if we received financial aid, if we graduated top of our class. But she was right to be so sure—we were accepted everywhere, with offers for all the money we needed. We began our research before we really knew what we were doing.

There was a boy in our freshman organic chemistry lab who loved Annie, painfully and obviously, and I couldn’t blame him. She was empirically and poetically beautiful. Assuming she was only enrolled in the class to fulfill the STEM requirement, he offered to do her homework for her.

“I took a lot of advanced science classes back at my high school,” he said.

“Oh, really?” I said. “Do tell.”

He looked past me to Annie’s visage and her armload of books. “I’d be happy to help. I remember how overwhelming this can all be in the beginning.” He reached around me and grabbed her textbooks, setting them at the spot next to his seat. He stared at the top book and froze.

“Wait, ’spectroscopy’? This one’s not on the list for this class,” he said.

“Oh, it’s not on the list for any of my classes,” Annie said. She sat in the seat next to him and arranged her supplies. “It’s just a bit of light pleasure reading. Just like this one, this one, and this,” she said as she pointed to the other books she and I were working through on our own. “I imagine I’ll do fine in this class this semester.”

“Maybe I should ask you to do my homework for me,” he said. He gave a weak chuckle.

“Oh, chickadee, I don’t think I’ll have the time,” Annie said.

He spent the semester trying to prove that he was indispensable. She believed him for a while.

There’s a dorm room in a brick building on a small campus where the most important moments of my twenties happened. It was institutional and cold, but when I bent Annie back over the low twin bed, it felt like home. Walls lined with posters of zebrafish and Audubon prints, throw rugs to soften the small nap carpeting, discoveries, illegal hot pots hidden in desk drawers, revelations, the oily acrid stench of microwave popcorn in the air, the taste of Annie’s lips on my tongue, her body a rippling expanse of swells and hollows, low fall moonlight and high spring daylight, long winter shadows and short summer shades.

By thirty, I was accustomed to my place at her elbow. We were favorites at fundraising events for our university, two female faculty members conducting groundbreaking research. Annie would stand, and be presented, and smile, and shake hands, and introduce me. And I would grimace, and shake hands, and step one foot protectively in front of her, and guard her from their prying eyes and absorb their words about our findings and our work. Sometimes Annie would bring dates to these events, and they’d play along, trying to keep up, tuck her hair behind her ears. She made room for them between us.

∙∙∙

Annie and I never doubted that we would solve the problem of death. As a species, humans have been obsessed with the idea of immortality ever since we created the gods that lorded it over us. Forever was ours, our right, a treasure sought by the most devout believers, and Annie and I were on the hunt.

The headlines declared “Female Scientists Defeat Death,” but that’s not entirely accurate. When I think of defeat, I imagine Death lying in a pool of its own blood, Annie and I standing over it brandishing shiny, sharp weapons, sneers on our faces, cheers rising from the hoi polloi, the emperor’s thumbs curving enthusiastically in the air. That’s not what happened. We devised a method to cease senescence, mitigate the occurrence of disease, and augment the body’s healing capabilities. Death was not defeated—it was a non-issue, a thing of the past, a nuisance humans dealt with in a less enlightened age, like diphtheria. We rendered it obsolete.

Interviewers, colleagues, everyone asked, “Is this right?” And that was easy to answer, because, yes, we were right: our serum, when injected into the bloodstream and activated, did scour the human body of decay and corruption. But that’s not what they meant. That’s not what anyone ever means. They were talking about universal rights and wrongs, moral obligations they thought should have steered us as we kicked open Pandora’s box without apology.

Annie and I were the wrong people to answer this question. Ours was not to wonder, “Should we?” Ours was to answer “Can we?” We were not philosophers or religious zealots; we were cartographers, frontierswomen, conquistadors.

∙ ∙ ∙

My home is far from everyone else. Our discovery brought us money that bought me space. Everyone should have the luxury of living two miles from another human. Occasionally I’ll hear a story over the airwaves about how Annie and I ruined or saved the world. Sometimes I listen, sometimes I don’t. I hear so little discussion about the true nature of discovery, where we looked at death and said “no,” as anyone else would have done if they’d had the ability.

They come and find me, in long shuffling columns. They come to my door, and ring the bell, and speak through my panes, asking me why I did it, why I cured them.

I don’t know how they find me. Nothing is in my name, the titles are buried deep, the road is unmarked and the house is unnumbered, and yet they find me. They are devout, too, I suppose. A few come to express their appreciation, but most come to look me in the eye before going through with their final decision. They haven’t done their research, so they ask me if there’s any release from the serum, any way to escape its bad-patching and circumventive mending. No matter what reason brought them to me, their faces are so full of relief when I open the door.

They arrive in varied states of dismantled chaos. Some are missing limbs; some have lost eyes, ears, skin. Others appear fine, but point to the spot where, inside, there is a hollow where something vital should be.

I am as intact as the day I guided Annie’s hand as she injected me with our unsanctioned serum. I have lost hairs and clipped nails, and shed eggs month after month until there were none. I have stretched, I have run out, I have been depleted and cut and broken, but I am alive with centuries behind me and more ahead of me.

And I can’t leave, because if I go, the memory of Annie goes with me.

It’s odd now, to think that I loved her. I adored Annie, but didn’t know that adoration could be the basis for love until, decades later, I realized I’d never felt that way about anyone else. I just hadn’t known what to call it.

But humans are superior because we have the ability to broadly and deeply name things. Soft cold crystals fall from the sky and accumulate in drifts we have a name for. Electricity leaps through the atmosphere and we have a name for the mild, moderate, and significant bolts. We name to understand, and we name to show we’ve defeated ignorance. We name to hold dominion over the named, to pin it down and whisper to it, “I know what you are, and no longer fear you.”

Annie named our treatment, but the press’s nickname was the one that caught on. The Immortality Vaccine was inaccurate and inane, but Annie found it endearing.

She said, “They have to name it themselves, Octavia, to feel they understand it and own it. Pity them for thinking it makes what’s ours theirs.”

∙ ∙ ∙

The first one hundred years, things change so slowly. You remember so many details. You can recall the path that led to this crossroad, the sequence of choices that built this life. It all feels so intentional, the sum of moments that mean something.

And then you pass what should have been a lifetime, and you run out of room to hold it all. It seems my mind doesn’t have space for new things. My land moves slowly, and so I choose to remain within it. I walk among my huddled ancient trees and palm my prehistoric stones, beneath an endless sky on feet that don’t grow weary. My memory is cottony. The line blurs between what happened yesterday and what happened fifty years ago, like the horizon at dusk.

I was put here to do two things: to overrule death and to love her. I knew when I’d accomplished the former; how can I ever be done with the latter?

There are many ways to forget someone. Sometimes you forget them all at once, like a face among millions. Sometimes you forget them in crumbling pieces from a hole in your mind where the foundation of your relationship was laid. Sometimes I forget Annie without realizing I’ve forgotten her. We weren’t made to hold on to people for lifetimes. There is so much I’ve learned, so much that I remember, but on cold mornings Annie’s face escapes me like the name of the tenth article we published, or the color of my mother’s eyes. Like trivial, irrelevant things that no longer bear any weight. But I’m not supposed to still be here, with my amalgamated woes and wounds. My memories should be leaking from me like embalming fluid poisoning soil six feet underground. I ask too much of my heart with every breath I take.

I took the serum because I was audacious. I took it once we knew it worked but before it was approved. I took it because I wanted to be around when the praise came. Annie waited because she was scared. Then she waited because the world was watching her. Then she waited because it was outlawed.

“I don’t care who approves and who doesn’t, what’s legal and what isn’t,” I said. I took her lined freckled hands in my smooth brown ones. “Life isn’t cheap. Pay the price, and live forever with me.”

“Please, don’t ask me to do this,” Annie said. “It’s not right.”

“’Right’?” I said. “Since when do we worry about ‘right’? It’s ours, and—”

“It’s an abomination, and I regret—”

“Don’t you dare,” I said. “Don’t you dare try to take back what we’ve done!”

“We were wrong,” she said. “Death brings—”

“Death is meaningless,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

In the end, she couldn’t take the weight of it, couldn’t deal with the responsibility for the fallout and ramifications. I found her in her bed the day after I’d reported her missing. There was a suicide note, but it wasn’t enough. She’d delivered the bullet with precision, which was wise, because if I’d found her faster, I’d have given her the treatment. Her life wasn’t hers to take.

∙ ∙ ∙

The day I met Annie, I bought a diary and struggled to write the first entry. In the end, all that worked was a poem:

This isn’t right.

This isn’t what goes here.

This area isn’t for marigolds

turning hopeful heads toward the sun.

This space is for brimming data exchanges

and facts, theorems.

The flames of her hair whip in the wind,

then smother all at once.

Stars have collapsed for lesser reasons than this.

I like to think I’d give it all back for her: the moment of discovery, the clinical trials, the publications, the parades, the good parts. I like to think I’d trade it all for her life and well-being. I really like to think that.

ABOUT BARBARA L.W. MYERS

Barbara L.W. Myers is a reader, writer, language lover, translator, and library enthusiast. She earned her BA at the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, a Postbacc in Creative Writing from the same institution, and is in her final semester of an MA in European Union Studies at UIUC. Her work has appeared in The First Line, Nth Degree, and Sally Hemings Dreams. Barbara currently lives in central Illinois with her two kids, and is an enjoyer of Bananagrams, fika, Hefeweizen, ciders, and frieten.

GRAVEROBBING NEGRESS SEEKS EMPLOYMENT

By Eden Royce // 3995 words

I pried apart the corpse’s lips, their slackness telling me she’d been dead more than two days, and worked the tip of my finger inside her mouth. It opened enough for me to wedge the funnel in, its tip clinking on her teeth. I tipped my porcelain-lined hip flask—metal was a no-no—to spill the tea into her mouth. She didn’t have to swallow; enough would make its way down for the magic to work. I leaned back from the shallow hole she lay in, my aged joints protesting something fierce, then recapped the hip flask before hiding it away with the funnel inside my stocking. Wasn’t nobody looking up these skirts.

Tonight was kind. The temperature along Charleston harbor had dropped, creating a soupy fog the moon couldn’t quite cut through. Enough light to see my way home, but too little to give busybodies a clear view. My ear was always open to the rustle of feet or the clop of hooves approaching, except I wouldn’t have to worry about avoiding carriages tonight—those horses’ eyes weren’t good in the dark no way. Even so, I looked around me as I crouched on the pile of fresh turned dirt next to her, waiting.

She stirred. A brief jolt like she’d been run through with a tease of lightning. When her eyes opened—the first thing they all did was open their eyes—they were just starting to turn milky. I took her hand and helped her rise from the pit she’d been thrown in.

“Come on, honey. Maybe in your next life, you’ll learn to pick better men.”

Her dress was ripped, exposing one small breast; her hem was stained stiff with blood and fluids. Did the best I could with arranging the little coils of her hair to cover the angry rope burns around her neck and the hole in her skull, ’cause tea don’t fix everything. I wrapped my cape around her narrow shoulders and leaned her back against a tree while I filled in the hole. Then we started walking, her with an awkward bow-legged hobble and me not much better.

Chilled wind blew in, clearing the dense blanket of fog, and I hurried our steps. A hurricane lantern burned in the back window of one of the little shotgun houses off Maple Street and we headed toward it, avoiding the backyards because of the dogs yowling, torn between the need to protect their territory and their fear of the dead. I tapped on the closed screened door with a ragtime rhythm and after some scrabbling and heated whispers, it opened.

“Oh, thank you, Jesus.” The woman inside, young-looking with old eyes, sagged against the uneven doorframe when she saw the pair of us. Her man stood behind, large and silent and watchful.

“You got a place for her to be?” I asked. The effect of the tea wouldn’t last forever and having a dead body lying around wasn’t good for no one, especially not Colored folk.

“Baby?” the woman asked.

The girl turned toward the voice. “I’m so sorry, Mama.” The words came out thickened and slow, pushed past the decaying tongue. The girl’s mama broke down, sobs wrenching from her throat as she pulled and tore at the scarf covering her head.

Her man came to her, took the woman and her daughter each by an arm and led them to a sturdy, homemade table. He set a kettle on the stove to boil, then slid my cape off the girl’s shoulders, folded it, then returned it to me. As he pressed coins into my hand, he said, “Reb Fielding got a special little place for her to rest in the St. Matthew graveyard now that she home.” His eyes skitted away from mine. “How long we got?”

I reared back to look at the sky. The moon hadn’t reached its high point yet, still a ways to go before sunrise. “Til day clean. ’Round five or six hours.”

“Thankee now.”

I nodded and headed off home. Cold was creeping in on the evening, and I pulled my cape tighter. Time for my own cup of tea.

∙ ∙ ∙

The sandy-haired Negro boy gave me the signal. Casual-like, I turned to notice the street cart where it sat with its hand painted sign—P’nut Man & Hot Fried—and made my way over.

“How much for a lil bag?”

“Half penny, Miz Prosper.” He shook his head slightly as he said it and I knew there was news. “Got some hot fried that’s good today, though.”

“Please for some.”

I watched as he dropped a scoopful of chicken gizzards coated with seasoned corn meal into the hot grease and set the lid back on the cast iron kettle. Sun was blessing the day with a warm breeze, but the heat coming off the cart felt good in my bones. He sold a couple steaming bags of boiled peanuts to some longshoremen, who clomped away to put in their time loading and unloading the ships, leaving empty brown shells sucked dry of briny juice to litter the walkway. The boy fished my hot fried out, sprinkled them with salt, then placed the crispy bits in newspaper, folded real careful-like. I handed him five pennies and he started to refuse, but I pressed them into palm. He looked at me with damp eyes and closed his fingers around the money, the back of his hand marked with scattered grease burns in circles and lines, a dark Morse Code on his light brown skin.

“Keep that. If you get the chance, you look out for me, hear?”

“Yas’m. Thank you, ma’am.”

I knew he already did, like most of the other Coloreds ’round here. If they didn’t, I mighta been caught long ago. Even though most church-going Negroes claimed to be scared of me, saying what I did wasn’t natural, I eased their minds by returning their kin to them so they could rest on blessed ground. Whispers about me had been going around the city for years, in the parlors and in the paper mills, on the farms and in the ironworks. If you can find your dead, then you better next find Miss Prosper.

Most of my work was from lynchings—Negroes dragged off to their ends for talking back, for having a business that started to cut into the white man’s, or for having independence of mind. Sometimes an unwelcome suitor who after the fire of passion died, dug a shallow grave to hide his shame. Might think it gets easier over the years, but no.

Even though my customers welcomed their dead back, I could see their deeper thoughts—anybody messin’ with life and death can’t be right with God. Of course, I ain’t evil, but what most minds can’t get a grip on…they call the devil’s work. I don’t work for Old Scratch, though I expect I’ll meet him one day if talk makes things true.

I turned my attention to the paper as I walked away, popping a steaming hot gizzard in my mouth. The chewy meat split as it bit into it, letting a stream of rich juice coat my tongue. Searching for the line that spoke directly to me, I found the young man had kept it just out of reach of the grease splashes.

Employ Available – Negress Preferred

A remover for a large number of fragile items is promptly needed. On the main street of this city, a few doors down from the courthouse. The terms may be known by applying therein.

The word ‘courthouse’ was run through with two lines, striking it out. Next to it, written in lead pencil was the word ‘blacksmith.’ After reading, I rolled the rest of the chicken onto the marked paper, letting the grease cover up the pencil marks. Then I finished my lunch and headed home to make the Life Everlasting.

Big Mama taught me how to make the Life Everlasting when I was a girl. It was from a recipe brought over here from Senegal, or somewheres. Like their jollof rice became our red rice, the recipe changed from family to family until nobody really knew which one was the first. I’d heard her and my gran, both strong root ladies, talking about it when they was making other teas to keep away fellas the ladies didn’t want, to keep bosses sweet, to win at the numbers… But I’d had to prove myself time and time again before they would teach me this blend.

“Never use this ’less you have to, hear?” Big Mama told me before she lay out all what went in the tea. “Little glugs, Prosper…only little glugs ’til you’s sure how much to take. And make it weak at first.”

I still lay out the ingredients for the tea like she taught me that first day so long ago. What was it? Ninety years or so now? I wondered what they would think of me using their tea to move the dead. Shoot, maybe they already knew what I used it for.

It was getting harder to find everything now, but I found I could make small changes and have the tea work just fine. Long as I could get pepper berry and sun gold root, it’d be okay. The redbush tea leaves and kola nuts I grew myself.

I steeped everything in my clay pot, no metal could touch this blend, then left it to cool. Once I strained it through two layers of muslin, it would be ready. I stoked the flames in my fireplace to warm the room and keep my hands from shaking. I had to fill the jars careful-like, not wanting to waste a drop of my hard work.

A knock came on my door, gentle like it was scared, but firm like it had run outta choice. If they stood at my door, they likely had.

I opened the door to see a wide-eyed boy, not more than eight or ten, on the step. He was breathing hard, musta been running like a bat outta torment. His high water pants with no socks told me all I needed to know.

“Come on in here now, chile.”

He was scared, and I couldn’t blame him. No idea what kinda stories he heard about me. But I knew what I looked like, right ’round forty or fifty some odd years old—old enough to command like a wise woman but spry enough to do the job. When the cold got in these bones, though, I felt every one a my hundred years. I never was pretty, but that was a blessing my mother had given me. Pretty women caught too many eyes. And hands.

The boy edged inside, keeping his hand on the doorknob. His eyes darted around like flies on road kill.

“You want something to eat? Drink?” He shook his head roughly. “Didn’t think so. Well, why you here? Crack ya teeth, son.”

“They foun’ my brother.”

“Who chile is you?”

“Francis Station, ma’am.”

I whistled long and low. Francis Station’s son had been missing for years, since Mayor Bradley found out his daughter had been sniffing around him. I can’t say he wasn’t sniffin’ too, but he shoulda known not to let nobody see them together. Heard some white man dragged him from behind one of them machines he used to work on at the paper mill and nobody seen him since.

“Where?” I asked.

“Out the marsh by Runnin’ Jack place. ’Neath that sick-looking poplar tree. I made a mark like they said I was to.”

I sat back in my chair. Dangerous. Jack ran numbers and liquor, but he wouldn’t stand for nobody on his property. I don’t know how the boy got out there and back, ’cause Jack tended to shoot first and never ask questions. They say not to trust crackers who live near Negroes. I had to hope I could get in and outta there quick and not let him catch me.

“All right, chile.” The job in the paper had to wait. Had to hope they’d understand. “I’ll go, but—”

The boy held out his hand, stopping my words. Two Stella coins lay in his palm. “Mama said she know it ain’t safe, so she’ll pay you first. And two more when you get him.”

Sixteen dollars total. Christ rising. I took the coins and patted the boy on the shoulder. “You tell her I’mma go there tonight.”

“Yes’m.”

After he left, I sat there for about an hour, looking at the door until nightfall, the moon and stars lighting up my table. Then I filled my flask, tied the funnel to its neck, got my shovel, and left the house. The tea was still warm where it pressed against my inside thigh. I’d had a swig of it myself earlier and it erased the ache in my joints, gave me a bit more energy. The shovel I tied to the inside of my cape and it bounced silently against my generous bottom as I walked to where the marshland met the dirt.

Outta the corner of my eye, I could see Runnin’ Jack’s place edged up against the marsh, where fireflies dove in and around the reeds. Big ol’ house, but not much to look at with its peeling paint and flaking wood. Barn didn’t look much better. Splintered wheels and broken buggies dotted the backyard. All was quiet, save for the chorus of frog song, making me think this was just gonna be like any other cemetery visit.

Sorry to say it wasn’t.

I managed to find the poplar tree, with its white chalk mark slash pretty easy. It was sick, likely from the rot in the soul of the person who buried the dead here. I loosened my shovel from inside my cape and said a swift prayer that this was gonna be a cakewalk.

A patch of grass lifted away in one straight piece. Underneath, a layer of earth was loose, releasing the smell of rich soil. I scraped it away. Against the black dirt, white bone shined. The boy must have stopped here and run to his mama because the rest of the dig was into harder dirt, like the earth had to make up for the soft dank pluff mud of the marsh just feet away. Glad I didn’t have to come through that way. Charleston was famous for its pluff mud and even binyahs like me lost a shoe once or twice to its sucking hold.

I grunted as the shovel only broke through fingernail-sized bits of dirt at a time, making me use elbow grease I didn’t have. Hot and sweaty, I stopped for a moment, easing my back upright, taking big glugs of the cool air off the marsh. It held the sweetness of life and death, swampy and ocean cool. I lost myself in it and didn’t hear the footsteps approaching.

He tackled me from behind, holding my legs together, and sent me head first toward the base of the tree where it poked through the hard pack dirt. I kept from slamming my face into the gnarled roots of the poplar by twisting my body and taking the knock on my shoulder. The wind flew out of me and I rolled to my back, the shovel thudding to the ground. I heard Jack grab for it and toss it away. His weight felt like a stone where he had me pinned to the ground, pressing his man parts against me like we played night games. His face was weathered, pale skin drawn tight against his skull. Salt and pepper whiskers and a beat-up fishing hat covered most of what else I tried to see. But those rabbit gray eyes held me sure as his body.

“What’re you doing on my land?” He growled the question out and its scent reached me, swimming in tobacco and fish grease. His fumbled for something in his pants and my breath caught, but he just pulled out a revolving gun, the kind Army men tended to have. Satisfied I had seen it, he lay it against my belly.

There was something in his face that I knew. I couldn’t place it, but it was there. The shape of his brow, the line of grizzled hair running along his cheek? I saw it, felt it in my spirit. Knew it as sure as I could breathe. Breeze blew up off the marsh, shifting the clouds and letting more of the moon’s smile through to touch his pale face so close to mine. The answer called to me in a memory of blood.

“You a Negro,” I whispered.

“And you’re a witch. Facts neither one of us wants told.” He cocked the gun. “Now where’s that leave us, Miss Prosper?”

I eyed the oiled metal barrel, then frowned. “With you lettin’ me sit up off this cold ground.”

He thought about it, then sat back, freeing my legs. I shuffled to sit up, smoothing my long skirt down. He didn’t help, just watched me with them rabbit fur gray eyes and tapped the gun on his knee.

“Why’re you here?” he asked again.

“To do a job. You got a child buried out here, Mr. Jack and I—”

“You ain’t taking nothing from my property.”

“What? I’m talking about a child. His mama just want to bury him. That’s all.”

He shook his head.

“A boy someone lynched for looking sideways at a girl, that’s all. A Negro boy. Or don’t you care about your own people?”

His eyes stayed on mine and I shivered like ghosts was looking in my face. “I said you are not to take a thing off my property.”

Frustrated, I thumped the ground with my fists. I had nothing, no weapon, and I felt foolish for never thinking to bring one. Never needed to before. “It’s a dead, Jack, a dead! Why you wanna keep a dead here?”

He thought about my question, then he spat out a thick wad of wet tobacco. “Leave ’em be. No good comes of draggin’ up the past.”

As he sat on the cold ground looking down at me, I realized. Whispers said it was white men who had taken them children off over the years to God only knew what kinda fate. And it never occurred to me that someone might use that fact to hide his own sins.

Real fear took me then and I shook with it. “It was you. All this time.” When he didn’t say anything, I yelled. “Wasn’t it?”

“Whites kill coloreds all the time.” Jack worked a finger into his ear, digging. Wiped it clean on his dungarees. “Everybody knows that. I just had to make sure I picked the right ones; ones they woulda gotten to eventually. All I had to do was keep to myself and dig fast.”

I felt tears burn my eyes, run down my face in hot trails. “Why?” I choked on the word. The marsh grass shooshed in the still air.

He shrugged. “I can’t help killin’. I need it…like breathing.”

My heart flipped in my chest. I searched the ground for something, anything, to use to save my life. The tea running through my system would buy some time, but it wouldn’t heal me from gunshot. A flicker caught my eye and I saw the cutting edge of the shovel for a moment as the clouds passed over. Nestled against the marsh reeds, out of reach.

Jack got to his feet, towering over where I sat on the ground next to the half dug hole. He’d probably finish digging it and slide me in next to the dead.

“It keeps me calm. Helps me sleep.” Training the gun on me, he turned up first one shirt sleeve, then the other. “I plan to sleep well tonight.”

“You sho is, Mister Jack.” The voice came from behind him and as he spun around, the crack of a rifle followed.

His head flung back like he was about to offer up a prayer, but I knew that couldn’t be as I could see the sky through his skull. He swayed, crashed to the ground. Slow-like, his body fell back, meeting up with the trunk of the poplar.

I swung my head to see Francis Station lowering her husband’s rifle and my breath eased out of me. Her young boy, the one who had come to me earlier, stood behind her. They were both barefoot, feet covered in shiny brown pluff mud from the marsh up to the ankles.

“My boy told me you was coming tonight. I just…wanted to see.”

I didn’t ask why she thought she had to bring a gun, but I was grateful and I told her so. “Glad you came, honey. I ’preciate you.”

We both dug, me with the shovel and her with the hoe that the boy had brought along. Soon, we uncovered what was left of a reed-thin young man, once handsome from the way his bones and what was left of his dark skin came together. I tried to cover most of the rot with my cape, but she stopped me.

“No, I wanna see him. His pa…ain’t gone want to.”

“Alrighty.” No need to pull away the lips; they were mostly gone. I poured the tea through the exposed teeth, where it ran across and down into the space just before the jawbone hinged to the rest of the skull.

While we waited, she asked, “Can you make him whole? Just for a little while? It’s been…”—she cleared her throat—“a long time.”

“No, I can’t,” I said, grateful that tea can’t fix everything. I didn’t want that magic. “Spend this little time you have with him, then let him rest. That’s always my advice.”

She pressed her lips together, but nodded and I was sure she’d heed me. I turned to the rustling now coming from the makeshift grave. “Come on now. Time for you to get on home.”

I parted with the Station family at the top of their road, promising to show up at the services if I was able. I guzzled the rest of the Life Everlasting I’d made on my way home, hoping it would ease my aches and bruises. As I shuffled along, I was starting to wonder if I was up to whatever the job for the blacksmith was. How was I supposed to remove any more fragile items when I felt like one myself?

I chafed my fingers, the brief warmth fighting off the creeping chill of the hushed night. And how many was a “large number,” anyways? Ten? Twenty? Sure, I could brew up enough tea, but what about the cost to myself? Seeing my people broken up and beat down, tore and tattered made me weary. Forever after, I’d be wondering how many of ’em Jack killed, after giving in to that mad fever in his head. A few more empty streets brought me shuffling up to my doorstep. Never have I been so happy to see my little house, but it made my mind run on how many others was out there waiting to be found so they could catch they final little piece a home.

Once inside, I made myself a cup of Forty Winks tea to help me sleep. Something to calm my mind, help me stop thinking about this last job, what it meant to my peace and my future in this town. I breathed in the scent of magnolia bark and mulungu, and took a small sip. I shook myself at the taste—like perfume on dry roots—and said a silent prayer for God to guide my mind. All the while knowing I was gonna take that job, no matter how dangerous it was. I stayed up all night drinking that brew and staring out into the dark, because tea don’t fix everything.

ABOUT EDEN ROYCE

Eden Royce is descended from women who practiced root, a type of conjure magic in her native Charleston, South Carolina. She’s been a bridal consultant, reptile handler, and stockbroker, but now writes dark fiction about the American South from her home in the English countryside. She is the recipient of the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Diverse Worlds grant for 2016. She is one of the founders of Colors in Darkness, a place for dark fiction authors of color to get support for their projects, and a regular contributor to Graveyard Shift Sisters, a site dedicated to purging the black female horror fan from the margins. She occasionally updates her website edenroyce.com and is on Twitter @edenroyce.

INDIE SPOTLIGHT

The road to publication is not easy for anyone and comes with a number of hurdles. For Black writers, these challenges are multiplied and because of institutional issues, the path seems almost impossible. But the resiliency of Black folks always finds a way and for many Black SFF writers that way was in the form of self-publishing. At FIYAH, we do not snub our noses at those writers who chose this path. We salute them because they have decided to embark on a journey by themselves that in traditional circumstances would involve a team. So we wish to acknowledge those Black indie SFF writers out there working hard and dropping a good product, by featuring them in this special section of some of our issues.

This issue’s feature is Constance Burris’s COAL: ELVES, DRAGONS, AND DWARVES.

The first chapter lies in the pages that follow. Visit our website to read an interview with the author and support the work by purchasing it at the link below.

AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | GOOGLE PLAY | ITUNES

INTERVIEW

INDIE SPOTLIGHT

COAL // Constance Burris

J.R.R. Tolkien and Percy Jackson Fans will love this exciting coming of age fantasy by New York Times Best-Selling author Constance Burris.

It hasn’t been easy living in the fey realm where humans are considered lesser beings. But things are about to get much worse for Coal because he’s in love with his best friend, Princess Chalcedony, soon to be a Queen. Even if he wasn’t human, she’s way out of his league and he knows it.

Except, thankfully, she doesn’t. She actually likes him back, kisses him even, and for a brief moment Coal believes there is hope for the two of them.

But when a human child breaks a law in front of the elite fey, Coal must choose between the girl he loves or saving the child’s life. And more hangs on the crux of that decision than Coal or anyone else in either realm has ever imagined.

COAL

By Constance Burris

Coal held the newly forged sword at arm’s length. The sentient weapon vibrated in his grasp, urging him to attack, but he tightened his sweaty hands around the leather hilt and ignored the foreign impulses. He had been forging swords and practicing with the completed weapons long enough to know when to attack and when to bide his time and let the fight come to him.

Grigory, the master swordsmith, advanced. Coal parried, stepping aside and swinging his sword with all of the skill he’d gained from the two years of working the forge. Grigory fell to the ground, effortlessly rolling beneath the sword before bouncing back to his feet.

“Is she overwhelming you?” Grigory asked as they faced each other. They had been dueling for the past hour. Sweat dripped from Coal’s forehead, back, and arms, but just like every other time they’d dueled, the master swordsmith showed no sign of exertion.

“She’s restless.” Coal wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “But I’m in contr—”

Grigory rushed forward with an arcing swipe. Coal raised his sword to meet the strike. For a moment, their strengths were equal. His sword vibrated with glee as Coal threatened to overcome Grigory.

Forcing the sword’s excitement to the back of his mind, Coal focused all of his strength into his upper body and pushed outward.

Overwhelmed, Grigory leaped back.

During the two years of forging swords and sparring with the master swordsmith, Coal had never had the strength or skill to complete such a move. For an instant, he let himself—and the sword—enjoy their accomplishment.

He was so distracted by his small victory that he almost didn’t notice when Grigory spun around, his left leg heading towards Coal’s knees. Coal dove away, Grigory’s boots just skimming his leg. He rolled over to find a sword pointed at his neck.

Grigory lowered his blade. “You were distracted.”

“I almost had you,” Coal said with an intense rush of pride and confidence.

“You did not,” Grigory said, scratching the eye patch over his left eye. “You’ve been slow and lazy all morning.”

“But I finally completed the block.”

“Not with any speed. You’re gaining strength and height, but that’s nothing to be proud of. What is the point of winning the bind if you are beheaded a moment later?”

Coal let Grigory’s words sink in while he caught his breath. “You’re right. I’ve been a little distracted. I’m supposed to meet Princess Chalcedony soon.” He glanced at the sun, trying to gauge the time. It hung low in the morning sky, but the springtime rays were much stronger than they were when he’d arrived.

Time for him to go.

Grigory lifted the eyebrow above his remaining eye. The other had been gouged out 200 years ago when he served as a soldier instead of a swordsmith. “How long has it been since you’ve seen her?”

Coal bit his lip while he pretended to think about the answer he already knew. “Two months.”

Grigory took the sword from Coal’s hands. It would be presented to Chalcedony on her coronation as queen. Magic reinforced the silver shaft, and its black leather hilt emanated heat and welcomed touch. By far, it was the best sword they’d forged.

“Before you go, I have something to ask you.” Grigory kept his shoulder-length black hair tied in a low ponytail and his beard trimmed. Both elven and dwarf blood coursed through his veins. As the only known half-breed of his kind, he had the height of an elf and the thick, muscular build of a dwarf.

“What is it?” Coal asked. The way Grigory spoke made Coal wonder if he’d done something wrong, besides being too distracted during the fight.

“I’m getting older,” Grigory said. “I need to choose a full-time apprentice, and it needs to be soon. Do you want the position?”

Coal’s breath caught in his throat. Had he heard right? “I thought I was just helping out until you found a full-time apprentice?”

“Well, you’ve passed the two-year audition, and now I’m offering you the job.”

“But humans can’t do magic.” It was one of the first things Coal had learned when he’d arrived in the fey realm eleven years ago. Powerful swords were impossible to make without magic. It made the swords stronger, lighter, and prevented someone else from using it.

“I’m half dwarf and half elf,” Grigory said. “For years, my master refused to teach me because he didn’t think a half-breed could make a great sword. Now, I am the best swordsmith in Everleaf. It’s what’s inside that makes a good swordsmith. I believe you could be one of the greats.”

Coal had been coming to the forge almost every day for two years, but he was allowed to come and go as he pleased. With a full apprenticeship, he’d eat, breathe, and sleep smithing. He’d have to move out of his home.

“I don’t know, Grigory. I need time to think about it.” Coal enjoyed forging swords. He especially loved practicing with them, ensuring they would endure battle, but he didn’t know if he wanted to make it his life’s work.

“Your childhood friend is soon to be queen. She will not have time, or tolerance, for a lovesick human.”

Coal was hurt, but not surprised by Grigory’s words. No one said anything to his face, but he heard the servants and soldiers gossiping about him and Princess Chalcedony when they thought he wasn’t listening. “You’re right, but give me time. It’s not easy choosing one life over another.”

Grigory’s eye softened. “You and the future queen still have much growing to do. Decide soon. I won’t wait long.”

Coal glanced back towards the rising sun. “It’s time for me to go.”

Grigory waved his hand as if to swat a fly before he turned back to the forge.

Bees and butterflies as big as his hands buzzed around Coal’s ankles while he walked through a meadow of red, yellow, and blue wildflowers that separated the forge from his home. He felt guilty for not accepting Grigory’s offer, but as he approached his home, the guilt faded, and a smile grew across his face. He lived in Legacy, the biggest tree in the fey realm, with his best friend Princess Chalcedony, her staff, and a handful of ambassadors from every part of the realm.

At 850-feet tall and ten times as wide as Grigory’s modest home, Legacy seemed to be larger than life. Residing inside of a living, sentient thing, made him feel like he was a part of something remarkable. The moment he saw it years ago, Coal knew he’d made it home.

“Legacy.” Coal touched the coarse bark of the oak tree and instantly felt the life thrumming inside it. “Is Chalcedony back?”

There are so many here today. How am I supposed to keep track of any one person? Legacy said, its voice full of annoyance. Legacy was neither male nor female, but its voice sounded female nonetheless.

“Come on, Legacy. Is she in her room?”

The tree gave an exaggerated sigh as the breeze rustled its leaves. When last I bothered to listen, she was in her office, and she was asking for you.

“Thanks,” Coal said, relieved to hear that Princess Chalcedony had returned. He removed his hand and approached the two female sentries guarding Legacy’s main entrance. Like all of Everleaf’s elven soldiers, they wore a dark green shirt with black sleeves and black pants.

“Where are you going?” asked the taller of the two, who had light green eyes. She stepped in his way, blocking the door. “The servant’s entrance is around the back.”

“I’m not a servant.” Coal held the sentry’s gaze. He’d never seen these two before, but he’d done this dance countless times over the years. He was a human in a world where humans were mostly banned and thought of as violent, ignorant, and greedy. His stomach churned as he faced the sentry, but he stood his ground. If he showed fear, it only made the taunting worse.

“No.” The other sentry stood a head shorter than her partner, but where the other was slender, she was more muscular. “He’s not a servant. He’s just human trash.”

He swallowed. “Let me through.”

“Or what?” The taller sentry placed a hand on her sword. “You’ll tell the princess I was picking on you?”

“I don’t need the princess to protect me,” he snapped. “I can take care of myself.”

“Calm down, Sophia,” the shorter sentry said. “Let him through. Today will be his last day here anyway.”

“What are you talking about?” Coal narrowed his eyes, his pulse quickened. This was not part of the usual bullying.

“Don’t worry about it,” the sentry said, pulling the green-eyed sentry away from Coal. “I apologize for my partner. Her great-great something or other died in the human and fey wars.”

“Well ...” Coal deepened his voice, his attitude bolstered by the change in her tone. “Don’t let it happen again.”

“Of course not.” The shorter sentry bowed. “Again, I apologize.”

Coal walked past the sentries and through the entrance, deciding they had only been trying to scare him. But why would she say it was his last day here?

Once he entered the grand hall separating the entranceway from Chalcedony’s offices, he understood why Legacy sounded upset. Staff bringing food from the kitchen and filling mugs with milk, juices, and mead crowded the hall with bustling energy. Almost every race of fey had gathered here—or at least every race of fey that ventured out in the daytime—elves, giants, dwarves, satyrs, nymphs, and even a few trolls.

Coal touched the wall and said to Legacy, “The ambassadors aren’t supposed to be here until tomorrow.” It had been quiet for the past three weeks. However, now that Chalcedony had returned from the human realm, fey from every corner of Everleaf came to meet with her.

Obviously, they decided to come early, Legacy said.

Disappointed, Coal broke the connection with the tree. Before she’d left on her last training trip, Chalcedony had said she had something special planned for the two of them. Her duties came first, though. If she had to work, she wouldn’t have time for him.

He peered into the crowd, searching for the path of least resistance. Finding it, he lowered his head, stepped out of the safety of the entranceway, and walked into the congested gathering. The smell of goat sausage and fried eggs wafted towards him, making his stomach rumble with hunger. He’d awakened before the kitchen staff, and only had time to eat an apple before he’d left for Grigory’s.

“Did you really think you were going to walk by me without speaking?” A deep voice said from behind. Coal twisted around and looked up into the gray eyes of the eight-foot tall, tawny-skinned giant named Octavius.

“Soon...” Octavius winked one of his gray eyes at Coal, “I hear you’ll be reigning next to Chalcedony.”

“Princess Chalcedony and I are only friends,” Coal answered, suddenly losing his appetite. Humans were considered weak. If Chalcedony took on a human mate, she would be considered weak also.

The day had started full of promise. He’d looked forward to spending time with Chalcedony, but his plans were quickly unraveling. With the giants and dwarves here, it would be impossible for her to slip away. And, for the second time today, someone had reminded him he didn’t belong.

“Don’t look so insulted.” Octavius grabbed Coal’s shoulder. “My great-great-grandmother was human. I’d consider it an honor to have a human reigning beside the queenling.”

“Hmph, that would never happen,” said Ambassador Eli. The dwarf seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, his head a mass of dark curls. “Humans are exiled for a reason. They are violent, greedy, and, above all, parasitic.” He stared at Coal with light blue eyes and sneered.

Octavius shook his head and clicked his tongue. “No, giants are humans, only taller. That’s why we can’t wield magic. And there is nothing extraordinarily violent or parasitic about us.”

“Stop it with the myths. That’s like saying dwarves are human, only shorter,” Ambassador Eli said. “If your brother heard you speak like that, he’d have you whipped.”

The temptation to stay and listen to Octavius and Ambassador Eli argue nearly overpowered him, but the idea of seeing Chalcedony pulled much stronger. They were too busy debating the differences between humans and giants to notice Coal slip away.

Coal stood outside of Chalcedony’s thick wooden door and straightened his brown pants and the white shirt he wore underneath his green jerkin. He ran a hand over his braids and noticed one of them had unraveled. Cursing under his breath, he quickly re-braided the stray kinky hair. Satisfied he was presentable, he knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” asked a gruff voice from inside the room. It was Chalcedony’s royal advisor, Madoc. Coal was convinced that Madoc’s primary goal in life involved making Coal miserable.

“It’s me,” Coal said in his most formal voice. “Legacy told me that Chalcedony is looking for me.”

The door opened, and Princess Chalcedony stood on the other side. “Legacy’s right. I am looking for you.” She wore a black sleeveless shirt and matching pants that were only a few shades darker than her brown skin.

Coal bowed, bending low at the waist while happiness surged in his chest at the sight of his oldest friend.

“How can I help you, Princess?” he asked.

“Come in.” She stepped back from the door, her muscular arms flexing as she motioned for him to step into the room. “Since when do you bow or call me princess?”

Since last week, when Madoc lectured me for ten minutes about properly addressing a future queen, Coal wanted to say, but instead, he kept quiet. The less he said, the less Madoc could use against him when Chalcedony left.

Once he stepped into the room, he saw there were three other fey sitting around the table in Chalcedony’s office. Madoc sat closest to the door, scribbling on a sheet of paper. He scoffed at Coal before he turned back towards the table.

“If I am no longer needed, I’ll be retiring to my room,” said Binti, the female waif who had been sitting at the end of the table. She had a jumbled network of tiny blue veins that showed underneath her pale translucent skin. As she stood from the table, the loose pink dress she wore buckled around knobby knees before she pulled it down.

Binti and her twin brother acted as a tether between the two realms. If a rogue fey used magic in the human realm, her brother felt it. Through the link the siblings shared, her brother would let Binti know. Then, Binti would alert Chalcedony in the fey realm.

“Go ahead,” Princess Chalcedony said. “Thanks for your help.”

Binti nodded briefly at Chalcedony as she walked away from the table and towards the door. Coal shivered as she passed. The waif lowered the temperature of any room by five degrees just by her presence. They were rumored to be children of reapers sent into the physical world to live until they replaced their parents as harvesters of souls.

Motion next to Chalcedony caught his attention. His eyes were drawn to the blonde, blue-eyed elf standing next to Chalcedony.

Tetrick.

Chalcedony had spent the past two years with the high-born elf. He was appointed by his mother, Queen Tasla, to teach Chalcedony how to patrol her part of the human realm for fey who were there illegally. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to escort you, Princess?” Tetrick asked.

As usual, the royal elf paid Coal no attention. Coal didn’t know if it was better to be ignored and made to feel like he wasn’t worth a second thought, or to be constantly ridiculed and belittled like Madoc treated him.

“No, thank you, Tetrick,” Chalcedony answered.

“You should let him escort you,” Madoc said with a tone that suggested it was more of an order than a choice.

“No,” Chalcedony said with such intensity that her long, sharp incisors were visible. “But thank you anyway,” she said to Tetrick, her temper back under control.

“Very well, Princess.” Tetrick bowed, and then the elf disappeared as if he’d never been there.

“You should have let him take you,” Madoc said.

“Take you where?” Coal asked. “I thought we had plans for today.”

“We do.” Chalcedony’s red eyes were wide with joy. “It’s a surprise. But first, go get your clothes. Then, I’ll meet you upstairs in my room.”

“What clothes?” Coal asked, confused. She’d changed from all business to playful so quickly it took Coal a moment to adjust.

“The ones you brought back from the human realm.”

Coal hesitated. He was five the last time he’d worn those clothes. “Why?”

“You should not question a princess’s orders,” Madoc said.

Chalcedony huffed and turned to Madoc.

“You’re dismissed, Madoc,” Chalcedony ordered.

Madoc shot Coal a hateful look before he bowed towards Princess Chalcedony and left the room.

“Don’t worry about him. He’s in a bad mood.”

“He’s been in a bad mood for eleven years,” Coal said. “I think it’s safe to say he just really hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you. He treats you just like he treats everybody else.”

“Really?” Coal asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Okay, he may dislike you a little bit. Go, and meet me upstairs.”

“But—” he began.

“No more questions or you’ll spoil the surprise. Just go get them.” Her voice was full of joy and mischief. He’d missed it. He’d missed her.

Coal bit his lip, stifling his next question before he left the room.

What could she possibly want with his human clothes? They were all he had that proved where he’d come from, but he hadn’t touched or thought about them in years.

Coal stood at Chalcedony’s bedroom door a few minutes later, holding a ragged shirt and a pair of pants.

The door stood open, but the room seemed empty until Chalcedony stepped from behind her dressing screen. He almost dropped his bundle when he saw her wearing a pair of blue pants and a yellow shirt. Human clothes.

“What are you wearing? How did you get those?” he asked.

“Jeans and a T-shirt, the items you have in your hands, are very common clothes in the human realm.”

“But why are you wearing them?” he asked.

“It’s a surprise. Give me yours, and I’ll fix them for you.”

She took his clothes, placed them on her bed and whispered over them. As she spoke, the holes in the shirt became smaller until they disappeared. The material stretched, becoming longer and wider. She worked the same magic with his pants.

“Wow, you could be a tailor. That’ll come in handy if the giants decide to attack the dwarves.”

“Ha ha.” Chalcedony smiled in triumph. “Tetrick taught me this two days ago. I’m discovering more abilities the closer I get to my coronation.”

He’d always been jealous of Chalcedony’s ability to wield magic. Over the years, he’d gotten much better at hiding his envy, but still, every time he saw Tetrick and Chalcedony together, the jealousy and longing returned. Tetrick was strong, powerful, and able to phase in and out of most places anytime he wanted. He was everything Coal wasn’t.

“Fine, you can lengthen clothes, but why do we need to wear them?” Coal asked.

“Stop asking questions and relax. I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

She waved her hand, and an invisible force pushed him backward. She’d learned to move things years ago, but it wasn’t until recently, that she could move anything heavier than a sheet of paper.

“Okay, okay. I won’t ask any more questions. I can walk the rest of the way myself.”

“Thank you.” She lowered her hand, and the force disappeared from his chest. “Be careful back there. I don’t want you ending up somewhere you shouldn’t.”

Reluctantly, but of his own free will, he walked behind the screen with his clothes.

A wave of nostalgia washed over Coal as he remembered the last time he’d ducked behind the screen. It served as Chalcedony’s secret portal and her escape route if Legacy was ever invaded, which hadn’t happened in over one hundred years. It was one of the best kept secrets in Everleaf. As children, they would travel through the screen pretending to hunt for treasure in the forest while everyone slept.

“So, what do you think?” Coal walked out from behind the screen. He didn’t like the feel of the stiff fabric against his skin, but the clothes fit.

She stared, eyes narrowed.

“Did I put them on right?” he asked, feeling self-conscious under her intense gaze.

“You look fine.” She smiled. “You look really good, actually.”

“Um, thanks.” If she liked them, he decided, they couldn’t be all bad. “So are you going to tell me why we’re dressed like this?”

“Nope.” She wrapped a black cloak around her lean shoulders and then handed him an extra one lying on her bed. “Wrap up. I don’t want anyone asking too many questions.”

Coal followed her out of the room while he tried to hide his excitement and curiosity. His joy disappeared when he saw Madoc at the bottom of the stairs talking to Ambassador Eli. Madoc turned when he saw Chalcedony and Coal.

“You’re not taking your shadows?” Madoc asked, cocking a bushy black and gray eyebrow.

“I know how to protect myself.”

“Your pride will get you killed. Take your shadows. I’m sure they would appreciate the exercise.”

She rolled her eyes. “No. You have to start trusting me.”

“Traipsing through the human realm without your shadows is not something a queen would do.”

“We’re going to the human realm?” Coal blurted.

“Damn it, Madoc!” Chalcedony exclaimed. “I told you it was a surprise.”

Madoc shrugged. “Take your shadows.”

Chalcedony answered with a sneer before she stormed out of Legacy.

Coal followed behind Chalcedony while his mind raced. She chattered away, but he couldn’t focus. Several moments passed before he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me we were going to the human realm?”

“It was a surprise. Surprise!” She wore a mischievous grin that made her red eyes sparkle.

In any other situation, Chalcedony’s good mood would have been contagious, but he’d been in the fey realm since he was five, and he’d never left Everleaf. He didn’t know whether to be scared or excited.

“Why are we going? I’ve never asked to go there.” Madoc not arguing with Chalcedony about taking Coal was troubling. If he knew anything about the elf, it was that he hated Coal. Most especially, Madoc hated Chalcedony to be seen with Coal outside of Legacy. His disapproval had grown more venomous over the past year.

“Are you going to leave me there?” he asked, recalling what the sentries had said.

Chalcedony stopped and faced Coal. “Why would you say that?”

“You didn’t answer my question.” His heart raced while he waited for a response.

“More and more of my work is there. It’s so different. Human tech can be destructive, but it’s amazing. Every time I go there, I think of you, and I wish you could see it. That’s why we’re going.”

“What about Madoc?”

“Don’t worry about him. Do you really think I’d just leave you in the human realm without telling you?”

“No, I don’t. It’s just—”

“Coal, I’ve been tracking rogue fey in the human realm and dealing with serious situations for weeks,” she said with desperation in her voice. “I want to have fun. I swear on my mother’s sword that is the only reason why we’re going.”

He decided to believe her. But the twitching in the corner of her lips told Coal she was hiding something. “How are we going to the human realm without Tetrick? Don’t you need him to phase us there?”

Chalcedony shrugged and continued walking. “No, we don’t need Tetrick.”

“Are we taking the dragons?” Coal asked, his curiosity piquing.

“No, we’re not flying. We’re taking the horses most of the way.”

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” Coal asked as they entered the stable.

“Nope.”

He smirked. “I didn’t think so.”

“Just relax,” Chalcedony said. “You’ll have fun. I promise.”

ABOUT CONSTANCE BURRIS

Constance Burris is on a journey to take over the world through fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Her mission is to spread the love of speculative fiction to the masses. She is a proud card carrying blerd (black nerd), mother, and wife. When she is not writing and spending time with her family, she is working hard as an environmental engineer in Oklahoma City. Website:constanceburris.com | Twitter: @constanceburris

SPECIAL THANKS TO THIS QUARTER’S DONORS

Daniel Bergey, Laura Weymouth, Lois Kwa, Kai Ashanti Wilson, Mari, Laurence Kornfield, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Chris Worth, Anne Holland, and Eleanor Blue.

You, too, can make a donation like one of these cool kids and appear in the next issue of FIYAH.

FOLLOW US: