CONTENTS

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

PROSE

PIMENTO

Dean-Paul E. Stephens // 5624 words

Ms. Matti minds her business, her kitchen, and her chefs—even Ivan, the android she privately doubts is even sentient. When the young, intergalactic emperor announces a visit to savor her restaurant’s jerk, she’s warned about his disdain for servant droids. Keeping Ivan out of sight is the smart move, but is that really her style?

IBRAHIMA AND THE GREEN FISHING NET

Omar William Sow // 2106 words

Maam Iba quit fishing 20 years ago, and now sits on the beach in his chair, searching for something that no one can name. But when he responds to the ocean’s call once more, what will he find there?

WHEN YOU FIND A DRAGON, NAME THEM FOR ME

Tamara Jerée // 5110 words

A young poet and a draconologist are the last survivors of an expedition to beseech a new dragon to protect their homeland—along with the amassed memories of their entire people. Can the two learn to trust each other before dangerous magic unravels all they hold dear?

DOLL SEED

Michele Tracy Berger // 11571 words

Chevella, a newly awakened Negro doll, is determined to find the human that is destined for her. But 1950’s America is a tough world. Will Chevella find her perfect human, or will she only encounter the worst that humanity has to offer?

POETRY

A SONG FOR MIDDAY

Maz Hedgehog

Ójí Íjè [KOLA JOURNEY]

Uche Ogbuji

EXTRAS

CREATOR SPOTLIGHT

THANKS

July 2019

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Welcome to the eleventh issue of the Hugo Award Nominated, World Fantasy Award Winning FIYAH Literary Magazineof Black Speculative Fiction.

As always, we would like to thank our staff, readers old and new, contributors, and everyone who believes in our magazine. FIYAH doesn’t happen without you, and without you, there are fewer reasons to do the work.

This is one of our rare unthemed issues! We always enjoy curating a seemingly disconnected issue of black speculative fiction because our readers always see such wonderful connections in the stories within. At the end of all of this, we want to showcase the great diversity and skill that lies within the community of black speculative fiction writers. Issues like this, we think, demonstrate those qualities very well.

This issue’s cover art comes from Seth Brown, and we love how much power and nobility his art displays—it communicates the messages of this issue’s stories perfectly. Click here to read our interview with Seth about his process and this cover’s artwork.

Our fiction for this issue is captivating and introspective. In Dean-Paul E. Stephens’ “Pimento,” a restaurant owner grapples with her android chef’s human rights on the eve of an intolerant emperor’s visit. Omar Sow’s “Ibrahima and the Green Fishing Net” is a tale of love lost over ages, and the hope that comes from realizing that love is not lost after all. Tamara Jerée’s “When you Find a Dragon, Name Them For Me” share the imaginative chronicles of a poet and draconologist as they quest for their people’s savior: a dragon who guards memory itself. And our novelette for this issue is Michele Tracy Berger’s “Doll Seed,” a tale of sentient dolls and toys during pre-Civil Rights America that examines how the search for and rejection of love can dominate, define, and destroy one’s existence.

This issue also features two poems. Maz Hedgehog’s “A Song For Midday” is a powerful manifesto for self-love and taking up space in the world through a lens illuminated by starlight, and Uche Ogbuji’s “Ójí Íjè (Kola Journey)” uses the Igbo language to tell the age-old story of planetary colonisation while also asking subtle questions about what African cultures can value through the journey of space and time.

We are also featuring a comic this issue: James Wright’s Contact High, a queer sci-fi love story set in a future where human touch is a drug and has thus been outlawed. It’s a touching and personal story, and our interview with the writer is just as personal.

And finally, we have an ask. In case you didn’t notice above, FIYAH has a new accolade to hang on our hat: we’re Hugo Award finalists! Go ahead and pat yourselves on the back. You helped us get to where we are today.

Our hardworking staff makes every issue happen in between juggling families, careers, and myriad responsibilities. As magical as we are, we can’t conjure money out of thin air...so our entire team won’t be appearing at Worldcon. Our amazing poetry editor Brandon O’Brien will be in Dublin for any of you who will also be at Worldcon, but those of us who are unable to attend would like to celebrate our achievements together, in person, for the first time.

That’s where you come in. We know that it is audacious of us to ask you to help us raise money for our staff to meet and celebrate our achievements, but what are we if not audacious? FIYAH exists because of our audacity to dream.

Click here to learn more about our Hugo Award Meetup plans, and consider sharing the link or leaving us a donation if you are able. We have treats to share in exchange: all donors will appear in the Thank You section of the next issue, and those who donate $20 or more will receive a very dope Thank You kit in the mail.

We appreciate anything that you are willing to contribute to help our dream come true, even if that’s just sharing our campaign with a friend.

FIYAH is immensely grateful for your continued support. If you like what we do, consider dropping us a donation, grabbing a subscription, or gifting an issue to someone that you love. Now, fix yourself a cold drink, sit back, and fire up this issue’s playlist.

We hope that you enjoy the issue.

Executive Editors: Troy L. Wiggins + DaVaun Sanders

Poetry Editor: Brandon O’Brien

Acquiring Editors: Danny Lore + Kaleb Russell + Eboni J. Dunbar

Art Direction + Layout: LeKesha Lewis

Cover Artwork by Seth Brown

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

PIMENTO

By Dean-Paul E. Stephens // 5624 words

Me never notice the little stowaway until it come time fi cook the morning’s first batch of hominy. A lizard as big as me index finger bury ina the brown sugar I just pick up from the Constant Spring Market. Poor thing probably dead after me pack down as much as the little plastic baggie could carry.

How many mornings me go a market and bring back nothing but the day’s ingredients? From the first time I decide to do business with the wholesaler, who love sell them wares in open-air market, I take care to look out for little critter that love munch pon pimento, cloves or whatever them can get themselves into. A little over 80,000 mornings and now the clock reset to zero.

I check to make sure no contaminant de ina the other baggie. I could use the brown sugar leave over from yesterday but that probably won’t last the morning-time rush. If this was two months ago then maybe, but no now with all this emperor foolishness bringing in every Tom-Dick-and-Harry to me front step.

Me know it was trouble, what else could it be when group of reporter camp out in front of you place of business? Even if all of them did speak English there was no way I could understand them a talk over each other. Luckily one of them had sense enough to not camp outside me restaurant. Instead, them send a small baseball-size drone that translate them question with a voice so robotic I couldn’t help but hear it over the cacophony.

“What is your immediate reaction to being included in Emperor Daesor’s itinerary?”

Ah, the first time I did hear that name. Apparently, Higgins Daesor is the new emperor of some world so far flung from Earth that making pilgrimage here is some big tradition. And me would never have to know this if that blinking Daesor pickney had chosen another restaurant, out of a planet full of restaurants, fi nyam.

I was happy cooking for my usual customers and the odd tourist, people who can appreciate cooking in the traditional sense. Now, it’s nothing but whining from people who can’t tell mango me pick off tree from mango piece together by nanoforge. The world so use to having what them want from button press, the mere act of cooking come like magic and any slightly traditional chef favor obeah man.

If I was obeah, me would say this dead lizard was an omen, a warning to steer clear from anything outside the beaten path. If that’s the case the omen come two weeks too late.

“Good morning, Ms. Matti. I didn’t hear you come in,” said Ivan, my newest employee.

Mind you, me never ask him fi come work for me. Him just show up a couple weeks ago, around closing time, walk ina the kitchen like is him name on the building, and offer him services. Before a bewildered “rahtid” could even leave my mouth, he was on all fours spot cleaning the floor.

“I’ll put these away, your usual coffee?”

Him sling two dead goat ‘cross him shoulder as easily as I would a chef’s towel, all the while balancing boxes of fish, breadfruit and plantain on a single titanium hand. The extra weight no seem to bother him, despite his slight frame. Ah so them design, small, so you average person no get too intimidate by how them stay: a visible “brain” of fiber optic cable that branch out and wrap ‘round a carbon nanotube “skeleton” underneath translucent silicone “muscles.”

Ivan no have no last name. Each new wave them turn back on choose to be less like us. That can mean choosing carbon nanotube frame over flesh-and-blood body, not bothering with a surname, or expressive facial features. Ivan reactivate in the most recent wave which is probably why him opt for all three.

“I see you took my advice and purchased an additional goat carcass,” Ivan say with him usual chipperness. “Your goat recipe seems to have gone up in popularity over the past few days. Perhaps it’s the start of the tourist season.

In lieu of an emotive face, Ivan broadcast emotion with colored light that radiate from the mass of fiber optic cable in him head. This morning, like all mornings, is a blue morning.

“That word you just use … purchase. What does that mean?” I ask him with feigned ignorance.

“Oh yes, to purchase something is to exchange legal tender for a product or service,” him say under a pink halo. Me know him long enough to know pink is embarrassment. “You’ll have to excuse me. Two years and I’m still acclimating myself to this world. Waking up where … when there is no legal tender is the most difficult aspect to grasp coming from a time when it very much existed.”

Me want ask if him freedom no much harder to “grasp” but one mind say it’s not a good question fi ask someone.

“Maybe you’ll get a better understanding if you try it for yourself,” me say. “Come with me back to the market.”

Green head this time.

“Did you neglect to purchase, pick up an ingredient? Your list seems to be checked off, unless you’re making a change to the menu…”

“Dead lizard de ina the batch of sugar me get this morning.”

“Lizard?! I doubt the drones would allow such a contaminant into the product.”

“It’s a big market, Ivan,” I say taking off me apron. “You can’t expect fi catch everything.”

“With respect, ma’am, that might have been true in antiquity but drones are designed and programmed to not be so negligent.”

Me think to ask if him a talk from experience, but me ‘member he is as much of a drone as I am a monkey. I’ll never get use to walking pon eggshells in my own kitchen.

“The market director want give an authentic experience,” me say. “That mean growing ingredients from the dirt and letting in the occasional lizard.”

“I fail to see the allure of a system in which mistakes are a feature. A nanoforge could easily provide all the ingredients we need and it would barely take up any counter space.”

That was the umpteenth time I hear that argument. All of my sous chefs, at some point, try to change my opinion on food built by a machine. But nanoforges can never recreate the most important part of a dish, the soul of the person making it. Part of me wonder if this is something Ivan can even comprehend.

∙ ∙ ∙

Two hours ‘til the breakfast rush so me and Ivan take the Ocho Rios to North Kingston subluminal tram circuit, a 10-minute round trip that would leave us with more than enough time to get there, get what we need and come back.

By now, the tram more fill up than when me take it earlier in the morning. Across the aisle from us, a man in a tan suit hold up him glass tablet to scan the day’s headlines, though him eyes linger when them fall on my travel companion. Down the aisle, a mother tries her best to hide the fact her toddler a scream because of Ivan’s presence, while Ivan tries his best to keep him blue head from turning pink.

The trolley ride was much more pleasant thanks to our talkative driver, who no seem bothered by taking an android as passenger.

“On any given day, I run into plenty of characters,” the driver say as him speed through Kingston’s early-morning streets. “When I hear say them a recommission ancient service droids to make them full citizens, I know it was a matter of time until I had one in my backseat. How you liking Jamaica, mister…”

“You can just call me Ivan. I must admit it’s different from the Jamaica I remember.”

“How so, boss?”

“Well, the last time I was here was half a millennium ago when my master was on vacation.”

Me feel a visceral tug hearing him say “master” so casually.

“Although I was confined to the bungalow he rented, I saw much on the car ride over. Mainly the juxtaposition of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. It was as if both propagated the other. But, these days, it seems extreme wealth has overtaken extreme poverty.”

“Wealth overtake poverty, eee? I guess that’s one way to look at it. Personally, I think the concept of wealth just as irrelevant as the concept of poverty. What you see ‘round you a no wealth but cultural empathy, empathy so that nobody destitute or feel like them have right to enslave people.”

“Rahtid,” me say. “Is philosopher a take us to market?”

“No ma’am, man a no philosopher just observant. Which is a good thing to be when you meet so many people on any given day.”

When we get to market, we go directly to the sugar vendor and him have nerve fi get feisty after me make sure only sugar de ina the bag. You would swear I insult the man entire lineage.

Before we hail for another trolley, Ivan suggest we pick up an extra goat. Me usual butcher de on the other side of the market, so we stop off at another one called Wailer’s. Instead of person, a pair of drones that look like hovering pink rabbit ah man the table. As the Constant Spring Market get more popular, little vendor like this occasionally spring up. The owner of some brick and mortar shop no have time fi manage kiosk at market so them send drone with just enough intelligence fi interact with customers. An elaborate form of advertising, one me usually no mind since dealing with excessively polite drone is preferable to dealing with rude people. That wasn’t the case, this morning, though.

“One goat carcass please,” Ivan say as him approach the kiosk. The flying rabbit no respond, so him repeat himself a little louder. “One goat carcass, please!”

Still no response.

“Excuse me? Are the both of you malfunctioning? Run a self-diagnostic, please.”

I realize what a go on before Ivan and immediately regret making him tag along.

“Ivan, we have plenty of goat at the restaurant, let’s just go back.”

Two and two put together the moment me say that. Me see Ivan head top go from blue to green to red to pink in the span of a second.

“Ms. Matti, if you would be so kind,” him say with an almost cartoonishly dignified tone. “These drones don’t seem to be programmed to respond to androids.”

I never want confirm that, and Ivan clearly sense me discomfort with the situation. He relent and start make him way toward the street. “Perhaps it’s prudent if you hailed for a transport, just in case we get a machine driver.”

“And if we get one with driver who say anything ‘bout culture of empathy, I will tell them fi shut them rhas mouth.”

∙ ∙ ∙

The rest of the day go by normal. One of my line chefs name Jacque call in sick, which, in world with no sickness, is a polite euphemism to let you boss know you had a bit too much fi drink the night before. That work out fine, though. After the morning Ivan have, me know the best way fi cheer him up is to give him Jacques place in the line, which mostly entail prep work like chopping vegetables.

What me no expect was Ivan skill with a knife. In all me years, I never see man chop onion, carrot, and chocho with the speed that Ivan did. In ten-minute time him chop enough vegetable to last us the entire day and him only slow down, when another one of my chefs turn on radio, to chop to the beat of the song that a play.

We try keep up with him pace and dishes go flying out the kitchen as if the staff was twice what it was. Kitchen staff had the lunchtime rush under heavy manners, which give me time to work the front of the room. Me go from table to table asking tourists how them enjoying their vacation and locals how the food compare to them mothers’ cooking. One table catch me eye from the moment me walk in the dining area—a chubby, short, elderly man wrapped in a comfortable-looking cloak, seated with three equally short but young man wrap up in too many layers. The old man favor Saudi prince but the way him three companion a fan him make it clear him no use to Jamaica’s heat, much less Saudi Arabia’s swelter.

“I can get you a fresh lemonade,” me say approaching the table.

“Oh no, my dear,” the older man say in a deep, slightly regal voice. “I fear my bladder would simply pop at the mere mention of another drink.”

One of him companion start laugh hysterically. Me no sure why but I decide I don’t like these people.

“You’ll have to excuse them, their behavioral subroutines could use a bit of work, and you’ll have to excuse me for not properly introducing myself. Tyco Dian, Emperor Daesor’s ambassador to Earth.”

“So these are machines?” I ask, amazed at how human them look.

“Indeed, sadly, last year’s model. I’m afraid I haven’t been to the home world in quite some time.”

“You mean them can look more lifelike than this?”

Him no answer me question. “If I didn’t know better, I would assume you’re not used to being around androids.”

“You would be surprised…”

“No, I’m afraid I wouldn’t, Ms. Matti. Which is exactly why I’m here. You recently hired a machine, correct?”

I’m surprised by the question and sudden change in him tone. Me didn’t have no reason fi leave though one mind was telling me to do just that.

“Correct, him name Ivan.”

“Oh, and it has a name.” He run him hand through him thinning hair as if taking a moment to consider him next words. “I find your world’s commitment to egalitarianism admirable, but you have to understand. What one world thinks of as admirable another might find offensive. Such is the dilemma when cultures are separated by chasms spanning lightyears.”

“Thoughtfully said,” one android chirp.

The ambassador continue like him no hear the compliment.

“For example, waking up thousands of decommissioned machines, dormant for centuries, and telling them to live freely in a galaxy they scarcely understand.”

“That make you choice of travel companion confusing,” me say.

The ambassador smile and ask me what I know of him homeworld.

“Unu leader is coming here for lunch in about a month. He’ll probably order the jerk chicken like all the other tourists.”

“Yes, and when he comes here, he will be waited on by several servant droids. I hope you can appreciate the fact we haven’t deluded ourselves into thinking our creations are also somehow our equals. An android’s place is to follow orders, not pantomime sentience in the presence of his excellency.

“Others from the emperor’s court will be here to prepare this place for his arrival. My job today is to ask you to not disrespect our people by letting, what was its name, Isaac, take part in the preparation of the emperor’s meal.”

Now I’ve never had an issue telling a customer fi go suck off them pupa. Man walking in my restaurant to bad mouth one of my people begs for just that reaction, but me no even bother defend Ivan. I spend me life thinking of myself as having open mind, but these two weeks with Ivan force me to question that. When government first start wake up machine a decade ago, me say a good thing until one find itself, himself, on my doorstep. Out of sight, me no have to grapple with the suspicion that them not real, but with one working in my kitchen, it’s a thought me no have no choice but to confront.

Me see Ivan content, confused, happy, angry; every emotion in the spectrum, but even now I can’t say definitively if any of it is genuine or an act. Me spend the rest of the day on autopilot, me brain trying to figure out if part of me agree with this little man.

∙ ∙ ∙

After me see off the last customer of the day I feel heavy again. I spend the day focus on my work but now that work done, the ambassador’s words flood back in my head.

I watch Ivan as him prepare to give the restaurant the same spot cleaning him do every night. Me know say him no come here fi clean up after people. Is a chef apron him want, something me never intend to give him until him ask me personally. After today, I decide fi broach the subject myself.

“No bother clean the kitchen quite yet, Ivan, let’s chat.” Me put two cups of ginger tea between us.

Ivan look at the clay cup and tilt it upside him head with him pinky pointing out. I smile at his comedic gesture.

“I appreciate the sentiment but we probably shouldn’t waste ingredients.”

“You right,” me say. “But that beg the question, what kind of chef can’t taste the food him a serve to people?”

Ivan take a moment to consider the question. “I’m no stranger to the kitchen, you know.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes, cooking was a big part of my past life, though not exactly a positive one.

“How, so?”

“My master’s tastes were, I guess you could say, monotonous. Every Monday was steak, Tuesday hamburgers, Wednesday pasta—but Thursdays were the most frustrating. Thursdays I was required to cook a tomato bisque recipe that used entirely too much salt. I knew he would enjoy the bisque with reduced sodium but every Thursday I had to watch my hand move of its own volition, pouring in the amount the recipe called for.

“Something so inconsequential as an android deviating from a downloaded recipe has massive implications for civilizations invested in our labor. It shows a capacity to perform art, a telltale sign of sentience.

“The architecture of our programming was to ensure we never deviated from preset instructions. It was why they were comfortable with us cooking their meals or entertaining them with their music. They knew our coding prevented us from the one act that made our sentience undeniable, improvisation.”

“So now that you’re free to improvise, you choose to do so in my restaurant?”

“Not exactly.”

“Why are you here?” me ask him.

“To become a chef. To prove my kind is sentient via our capacity to perform art, which would make our demands for freedom hold more weight.”

“But you are free. You no have to make nobody’s tomato bisque but you own.”

“With respect Ms. Matti, you know that’s not true. You saw, this morning, the extent of our freedom.”

“So them need to update drone to recognize android, ah no simple thing that?”

“So simple that a decade after the first wave’s reactivation it still hasn’t been done? You Earthlings woke us up, removed our inhibiting programming, and said we are free but you don’t believe in our sentience in any meaningful capacity.”

Ivan no know him a talk ‘bout me specifically when he make that general observation ‘bout humanity. For the second time that day I feel a visceral tug.

“How could you believe in our sentience? If you did you would have nothing to do with a planet that still enslaves my kind.”

“You talking ‘bout Earth or my restaurant specifically?”

“Both, I suppose.”

“So what is the correct thing to do, tell the emperor to piss off?”

“I’d rather you didn’t, I believe a greater impact could be had forcing him to acknowledge a team of chefs that counts an android among their ranks.”

This was him roundabout way of asking me for a chef’s apron. I decide to be equally roundabout in my answer.

“But that can only be if you’re a chef,” me say. “Cook me something fi dinner and make sure you no use any of me recipes. Show me how you ‘improvise.’”

Without skipping a beat, him start whisk brown sugar into a bowl of coconut milk. To a clay pot, onions, garlic, scallions, water, and red kidney beans. To the coconut milk barley, a hint of nutmeg and vanilla with a scotch bonnet him mince so fine it come like paste.

I stop put scotch bonnet in my rice and peas after enough tourist complain ‘bout the heat. This recipe clearly aiming for something more traditional.

After him combine everything with pre-wash brown rice, in goes salt, cumin, pimento and a single bay leaf. While that a cook, him de-vein a bowl of prawn and add salt, mince scotch bonnet, black pepper, and green onions. In another pan him put garlic, onion, curry powder, and a dollop of plain yogurt me keep in fridge if customer order smoothie. The moment shrimp meet pan, the aroma combine with the fumes from the rice and peas that prologue the meal to come.

He time it so curry prawn and rice and peas finish the same time. He place the curry prawn over a bed of rice and peas so the whole thing favor gold on mountaintop. Like Ivan, me never need to taste it to know it worthy of an emperor.

“Please,” him say with a yellow crown.

I take a bite, then another and another. The heat was sharp but dulled by the yogurt. The prawns’ saltiness was unmistakable but subdue by the sweetness of the rice. Everything worked and in a way that was very deliberate.

This is what him mean by improvisation.

For an instant my mind flash to the ambassador and no amount of rationalization could stave off the shame me feel. No man can deny the soul that go into this dish, unless them no have one.

∙ ∙ ∙

Ivan’s transition to line chef was more than seamless. The others seem to naturally gravitate towards him as a de facto head chef in the odd time I’m not in the restaurant, which seem to happen more frequently as the emperor visit draw closer. Just this morning me hafi skip the breakfast rush after “Wake Up Jamaica” give me a call for a last-minute interview. I was expecting another umpteen questions about the menu and what I plan to prepare for the emperor but, surprisingly, the reporter ask me ‘bout me sous chef.

“Well, there’s Jacques Rénault, a Frenchman who want learn Caribbean cuisine after him conquer most of Europe’s culinary traditions. Then there’s Pattie Rosen who been cooking with me for almost a decade now, she can easily strike off and start her own place but I think she a wait for me to croak, so she can run things.”

“Yes, but tell us about your most recent hire,” the polite reporter say.

I hesitate before I decide there’s nothing to hide.

“You mean Ivan,” I say mimicking her tone.

“Yes, tell us more about Ivan. We hear he has become a sort of a local celebrity around Ocho Rios.”

“What you want know ‘bout him,” I say, trying me best to not sound defensive.

“Well, we hear he’s the only created you have on your staff.”

“That he is,” I say. “Him come to us about a month ago, start off as a busboy and janitor, but I learn quick that his talents de in the kitchen.”

We spend the next few minutes dancing around the point until we come near commercial break and the end of my interview.

“Emperor Daesor’s might find it difficult to swallow if he learned his meal was prepared by a created…”

“That’s a lie,” me interrupt, no longer caring how defensive I sound. “Almost every meal them people shove down them gullet cook by machine. Them no have problem with machine cooking them food, is liberated machine them have problem with. Machine that no have layer and layer of, what it call, subroutine fi keep them in check.

“On Earth, we call that slavery and make big production of freeing every android. And now we a big up the supreme slaver and wonder if him comfortable with our decision fi do what’s right. The only way them two things make sense is if we no mean what we say when we free them in the first place. Is that it?”

The reporter look at me with a slightly horrified look. “I couldn’t possibly answer that…”

“So what make you think me can answer anything ‘bout the emperor when I’m just an ignorant cook and you’re an educated reporter? If the emperor want come and eat good food, then let him. If him want miss out on good food because it cook by android, then that’s his prerogative. Me no have nothing to do with that, and neither does Ivan.”

I go to bed that night and dream ‘bout drowning in an ocean of newspaper with headline that say “Supreme Slaver” only to wake up and find reality not so far from fantasy.

“At least it’s alliterative,” Jacque say, pushing a tablet in my hand. Me flip to the New York Times and read “Supreme Slaver” in big grey letters. The Guardian, The Sun and The Gleaner have it, too.

I look up and notice all my sous chef and waiter de ina the kitchen. Me no sure if this is the restaurant’s first ever all-hands meeting or an intervention.

Everybody a wait for me to say something reassuring but all I could manage was, “One day out and me already sabotage the emperor visit, eee?”

“Anything that can sabotage with the truth no worth having,” said one of my waiters.

“She’s right,” Ivan said. “Not that you need me to say it, but you shouldn’t feel apologetic about anything you said yesterday. The question is, what do we do now? We have an excuse to shut down operations today, to prepare for the emperor’s visit.”

“That’s what we planned to do anyway,” Clemente, another of my sous chef, say, “but now we have ‘bout 20 reporter wanting to talk to you and Ms. Matti…”

I keep quiet and watch Ivan moderate the discussion. The way him frame, dead center, behind the kitchen’s long metallic table, listening as waiter and chef on either side of him discuss what they should do next, I can’t help but think him no close to reaching his potential. Me decide, at that moment, to help him do just that.

“We not preparing for a god damn thing because we no need to,” I say. “We carry on business as usual today and tomorrow and reserve the private room for the emperor. If him no come then him no come, if him come him come. Either way, Ivan, consider yourself head chef all day tomorrow.”

Me think Ivan head would turn green but it stay blue. He expect this.

“To be clear, you want me to be the head chef on the day of the emperor’s visit?”

“To be clear, me want you fi be head chef and him personal waiter. When you done cook him jerk chicken I want you to march out there, look him ina the eye and tell him bon appetit.”

Everyone else laugh nervously but Ivan just slightly nod him head one time.

“In the meantime, we could use some good press,” Ivan say.

“We’re opening earlier than usual this morning,” me say before inviting in an army of reporter for some ackee and saltfish with roast breadfruit.

∙ ∙ ∙

The next day come like any other. Like usual, me pick up the day’s ingredients from the Constant Spring Market, open the back door to the restaurant and greet Ivan and the others. Although me help with preparation, this was Ivan’s day. When the first batch of customer come in, I remove my apron and put on the most charming face I could manage.

Breakfast go off without a hitch, and before I realize, it was midday and time for the lunchtime rush. I feel the onset of a hunger headache and remember me skip breakfast that morning. I go in the kitchen to make myself a cup of mannish water.

I come out to an empty dining room. I was going to peep outside but I remember days ago, one of the emperor’s security detail let me know of plans to shut down the road and bar customers from coming in about an hour before the Emperor would make him appearance. All that morning me convince my televised outburst put stop to the emperor lunch plans.

I sit down and take sip of the tastiest cup of mannish water I ever have.

After ‘bout another hour, the door open and in walk a small child flanked by a dozen or so people. One of them me recognize. The ambassador walk towards me and say in that performatively regal tone, “Madam Matti, may I introduce, Emperor Higgins Daesor. Emperor, the owner of this establishment.”

The boy pay more mind to my mural of Wangari Maathai and Thomas Sankara than the ambassador.

“It’s an honor to meet you,” me say, a little louder than I usually would but that seem to do the trick and the boy jerk him little blond head in my direction.

Normally I would extend a greeting but me have sense enough fi wait for royalty to make the first offer of physical contact. A little hand emerge from behind a purple shawl covered in so many pins and metals me feel tempt to count them. He hold him hand out so that him palm parallel to the ground and me no sure if him expect me to shake it, or kiss the giant blue gem on him ring finger. I decide to shake it and that, apparently, was the correct choice.

“The pleasure is all mine, my good lady,” the Emperor say in a surprisingly youthful voice. It wasn’t just him appearance, this really was just a boy.

I take the emperor and him entourage to the private area even though them is the only customer in the entire restaurant. After we take them order, me and the boy get to talking. If there was any tension from me calling him the Supreme Slaver, it was entirely in my mind. The emperor no seem to care, or more like him no know. Whatever the case be, him seem more interested in all the mural me have throughout the restaurant.

For his part, the ambassador intent on answering all the emperor’s questions on my behalf. Whenever the boy would point to a mural the ambassador would flick his wrists and read from a hologram that appear in his palm. One mind say I should have commission painter fi cover the roof in mural of Dr. Harold Cockburn, the former Earth minister who sign into law the bill that make sentient machines full Earth citizens. Too late for that now, though.

Conversation die down as soon as the aroma of jerk fill the air.

“I had no idea it was possible to torture someone simply with the smell of food,” the young emperor said.

“Patience,” said the ambassador. “Good things come to those who wait.”

“Excellent insight,” said one of the emperor’s hangers-on. “You would do good to learn from Ambassador Dian’s wisdom, Your Excellency.”

I look at the emperor and feel sorry for him.

The emperor’s entourage greet the servers with a round of applause as them file in with the first set of plates. Everybody get a plate of jerk, except for the emperor. Me can’t imagine how many protocols that break but the emperor seemed to be the only one in the room who was unbothered.I could feel the ambassador’s glare burning a hole on the side of my face but me no pay him no mind. When everybody but the emperor have them food, in walk Ivan with a porcelain platter of jerk, rice and plantain. Him place the platter before the emperor with a slightly ceremonial flair.

“Your highness, you may call me Ivan,” him say, extending him hand. “I hope you enjoy the platter I have prepared for you. It’s my own special recipe.”

The ambassador was clearly beside himself but the boy didn’t lose him composure. To everyone’s surprise him reach out and shake Ivan hand, which fill up the room with a silent and scandalous energy. I take special care not to look at the ambassador out of concern the mirth might kill me.

“Your own recipe? Forgive me, I didn’t know such a thing is possible.”

Ivan remove him chef’s hat and everyone squint so them eyes can adjust to the beam of yellow that flood the room.

“Oh, but it is, Your Excellency. Those you think of as merely servants are capable of so much more than they are given credit for.”

The emperor take moment to consider this before him ask Ivan permission to eat.

Ivan simply nod him head and the emperor take a giant bite of the jerk chicken, cough, and reach for him cola champagne.

“Absolutely splendid,” the emperor mumbled through a mouthful of jerk.

I look at Ivan and the yellow from him head top cast a shadow that make it appear like him a sport a smile, though me know that’s not possible. Out of all the hundreds of chefs who come to study beneath me, Ivan may be the only one to truly comprehend why me no use nanoforge. Planting seeds is so much more important.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT DEAN-PAUL E. STEPHENS

Hailing from Belmont, Jamaica, Dean P.E. Stephens works as a reporter when he isn’t dreaming up new fiction. You can find him on Twitter as @DeanPEStephens.

IBRAHIMA AND THE GREEN FISHING NET

By Omar William Sow // 2106 words

Maam Iba’s eyes could not see the shape waving at him from each breaking water wall at every high tide. And because he could not notice, of course he did not recognize the man he loved. This is important: it was hope, nothing more, that pulled him back into the sea.

But first, chérie, try to picture Maam Iba: our tall fisherman from Conakry, standing nearly naked on his beach. His thin beard is starting to turn more white than gray, and looks like it’s always been more gray than black. His hair is still thick, though always retreating, as if in terror of his forehead. His eyes have darker whites and lighter browns. You can hear him when he smiles, and you can see time in his spine.

Leave him here for a moment, and picture the way his days, as far back as anyone in Conakry can now remember, have always been the same.

Just before noon, Maam Iba eats lunch with his daughter’s family. He takes care to finish his attaya last, so nobody dares leave too early. But they always must, so he kisses his daughter and takes his son-in-law’s hand; kisses each of his three grandchildren, starting with the youngest, before they put on their schoolbags. When the house is empty again, and the sun starts to bake the living room windows, he puts on his yellow cap, goes to his bedside table’s second drawer to grab his wallet, and takes a book from the shelf his son-in-law bought him when he first moved in. If it helps, chérie, picture him carrying L’Enfant Noir, a copy just like yours.

He waves at their housekeeper through the kitchen door as he unlocks the front gate and asks her to close it behind him. He doesn’t wait for a reply, and instead nods and agrees with himself before stepping into the sun.

On a path of fish-shaped bricks between towering apartments, he sticks to the shade of the walls to his right. Eventually, the road turns left, but he knocks on the glass of a guard’s wooden cabin outside the French ambassador’s home. A man with lost eyes steps out, extends his right hand to Maam Iba while touching his left to the center of his chest, and opens a gate. Sometimes the ambassador’s children are home and wave at this old man who crosses their driveway, unlatches a narrow back door, and steps onto the beach.

He takes off his babouches whenever walking in the sand, even when it’s packed too thick to slip between his toes, and mixed with orange dirt some truck dumped here to make more of the hollow bricks that slowly pile up and spread across his beach like a fungus.

A group of young men are always sitting in the shade of the ambassador’s wall when Maam Iba arrives. They wave at this man they call père, point to his chair, and then return to arguing about who’ll pay for that night’s round at the bar across the bay.

It’s a plastic chair, the only one you see anywhere you’d see plastic chairs. The same type of chair our fisherman sits in for his haircut on the first and third Tuesday of every month. A chair you’ll always find in fours at every corner resto. One of those chairs that anyone with a heart would stitch back together when a leg inevitably broke off.

This one used to be yellow, like his cap. Its four legs dig all the way to the wet sand, a step from the high-water mark, so he falls into its cheek-shaped seat and knows it’ll catch him. He places L’Enfant Noir on his right thigh and breathes. He likes the first breath—it always smells the most. Of sun-dried saltwater skin, and warm rope netting.

He holds his book open, turning pages when he remembers to do so, and the young men say to each other that he’s a well-read man. When the sun starts to harden in preparation for its dive, children run along the beach, and the older little ones say to the younger little ones that he’s watching for sharks. Only the occasional younger little one is ever right, when they tell the older little ones that no, he’s waiting for a friend.

Maam Iba sits there, on his beach, until the sun sets fully and the bats start flying north, high in the milky purple sky, while the seagulls start flying south, so low he can see their eyes and so low they have to dance around antenna poles and palm trees.

These are Maam Iba’s days now, chérie, but you must also know, if you want to know him, truly know him, that his days were once very different. Back then, everyone called him Ibrahima, and back then, his days were spent with a friend, a fellow fisherman. Together, the two of them owned a pirogue. It was small and wooden, thin enough for just two bodies and just as long as one. The day it became theirs, they painted it metallic orange and sweet green and bissap rouge.

For twenty-three years and four days, our two fishermen went out when the morning sky was still black-blue. The beach, back then, faded into fields of dead grass, and the sand was only the shade of milky Nescafe.

The bar across the bay had just been built, and its stilts seemed almost stable over the rocks. Before going home each evening, Ibrahima and his friend would share two beers at one of its small tables, sitting in yellow plastic chairs. They spoke in the way people around them expected men to speak to each other, and about the things people around them expected men to speak. Independence, then elections, then corruption; football, then bills, then football again.

Each morning they pushed out from their beach, taking the pirogue far enough that Conakry shrunk into the horizon, but stopping just before reaching stronger currents. In this still place, after the thin netting—made first of rope, and later of deadly green plastic—slipped into the water, and after each pulled up a plank of wood tied to the sides of the pirogue to lay across the three seats, they spoke differently. On old nets spread across their makeshift floor, they lay down to watch the sunrise, Ibrahima always to his friend’s left, lettings their hands wander and find the softness between each other’s calluses.

In the summer they’d share a kiss then, but on winter mornings Ibrahima loved to watch the clouds change color for a little while. On all days, they’d lay for hours in the smell of each other and the drying saltwater on their skin. Drunk on youth, they sometimes loved each other right off the boat, crashing into the sea but always climbing back in and to each other. These days overflowed with laughter.

For twenty-three years and three days, the sea saw what they wanted of it. Every day, they were welcomed: when the rains came from collapsing clouds like a lukewarm shower, on the Harmattan mornings where tongues turned to sand if left out for too long, on the first day of Ibrahima’s marriage to a young woman from his hometown.

It wasn’t until the fourth day of the twenty-third year, when Ibrahima fell ill with something expensive, that the sea decided they needed more. Illness demands work, so his friend pushed out from their beach, alone for the first time, in an impossibly wet August.

People in uniforms blamed the weather when they found an empty pirogue floating in the bay the next morning, but as he wept, Ibrahima could only think of the green plastic net. He thought about it through tears on that day and so many that followed, then through a still face, every afternoon for too many days to count, in his yellow chair on their beach.

Now you can maybe picture a bit more clearly, chérie, this good day for hope and magic.

On this day, Maam Iba kissed his daughter goodbye, and for a little moment, held his little grandchildren. He slid his palm off his son-in-law’s hand, snapping their fingers. His youngest grandchild laughed, and Maam Iba smiled. He waved to the housekeeper but did not ask her to lock the door behind him.

The guard at the ambassador’s home was not in the wooden office this day, so he continued to the end of the street, and then back down an alleyway paved in crushed concrete. He found his chair dry and far from the low tide. The young men waved, and he nodded back.

He dropped his wallet, hat, and copy of L’Enfant Noir into the chair’s cheek-shaped seat. Turning towards the water, instead of falling back, he began undoing the buttons on his shirt and stretching his arms out. He released his belt, sliding it out of its loops and placing it on his yellow chair, curled up like a snake. With a smile, he pulled his pants down and folded them neatly in the chair.

This is where we first left him.

The young men sat in silence as Maam Iba began walking, and something like wonder kept their minds from peaceless thoughts as they watched him take careful steps across the cool, wet sand, around bubbly black rocks, until the water started licking his toes.

A few steps further, the waves lapped around his ankles, then his calves, then his belly, then his armpits, until he was almost floating. The salt felt right on his skin, and he kept his feet in the sand with each step forward. The water waited a moment, then sent a wave over his closed eyes, into his ears. He held his breath at first, still putting one foot after the other.

Then, chérie, Maam Iba breathed. Deeply, do it with me. Out and in, and the sea slid down his throat. It sank into his lungs and into his blood and instantly, he felt a tickle running from behind his earlobes to the center of his throat. He inhaled again, through the slits of darker flesh, and continued.

His steps were lighter now, so when he reached a crack that ran out into the open sea, he jumped into it fearlessly. He landed on his stronger left leg out of habit, but the soft bed of sand welcomed him to this watery valley, the walls of which were filled with creatures snickering, floating, lounging and eyeing this newcomer.

He barely registered the current pushing him forward when a blue stingray with yellow spots appeared besides him, rubbing against his calf. It circled him once, twice, then swam upwards and, following its waving body, he saw, between him and the orange sky filtering through the dancing window of the surface, streams of impossibly fat thiof and other starry-night rays.

Maam Iba continued, pulled by something he’d call hope, until the life-painted walls ended and a desert of moving dunes spread out before him. A few shining green eels watched him from their coves as he started to climb, cupping his hands and swiping broad strokes as if trying to clear away the water. He didn’t see the eels smiling, as much as eels can smile, when he reached the top of the dune and felt the water still.

Now, chérie, you wouldn’t believe how Maam Iba, our fisherman, laughed. Oh, he laughed! He laughed the way he did when he was a child, and when his daughter was a child, and when his grandchildren were too young for shame to keep them from playing with his thin beard.

He laughed the way he had when he lay by his friend on planks across their pirogue, and now, again, finally, his friend laughed with him. Sitting in the sand, he tossed the netting to Maam Iba, and called him, again, Ibrahima. The green plastic wrapped around his hand like an octopus. He laughed as his friend stood and jumped over to free him, running his fingers over our Ibrahima’s palms as he did so. The green net finally let go and sank into the blue sand, its purpose achieved.

Eyes locked, they laughed as the webbing between Ibrahima’s toes thickened. Then, with the determined softness he remembered, his friend pushed off the sand and began drifting towards the wall of strong current, his left hand reaching back. Ibrahima jumped and took it in his right as he wrapped his right foot around his friend’s left. They spread their limbs out like starfish and the sea carried them out, together.

ABOUT OMAR WILLIAM SOW

Omar William Sow is a queer, Senegalese-American writer. He grew up in Dakar and now lives in Brooklyn. His fiction seeks to find or create queer space in the realms of African-futurism and fantasy.

WHEN YOU FIND A DRAGON, NAME THEM FOR ME

By Tamara Jerée // 5110 words

I see the dragon feather first, but when I record our progress for the day, I will write that Nihla was the one to discover the first hopeful sign. I will give her that kindness, a gift that will only matter if we find the dragon and don’t die in the middle of the wastes. If my manuscript survives as long as those of the greatest poets in my family, I will not only be giving her a kindness but bestowing even greater honor upon her. Few ever touch a dragon’s feather, whether it is still attached to the dragon or not.

The feather is only as long as her forearm and radiantly black. She bends to it with reverence, the loose end of her headscarf falling to conceal her face as she does. The first peaceful silence of the journey falls between us. I move to her slowly as if the feather is a fragile thing that will dissolve if I stir the air. We stare at it, shiny despite the gray sky; lush in defiance of the wilting around us. Nihla strokes it. The clouds are swirling again, but we don’t feel any wind here on the ground.

She eyes the feather now with a glint in her eyes that makes me uncomfortable. “Is your command of language enough to capture my discovery? Or should I suggest some words for you?”

I clench my teeth but manage to reply mildly, “My Book was passed to me by my second mother. She wouldn’t have done so if I couldn’t uphold the poetic decree to set words beautifully and faithfully.”

At that, Nihla turns away from me. She holds the feather in front of her like a torch. I briefly wonder if draconologists possess their own magics, secret methods of divining direction from abandoned pieces of a body. Then I remember her disrespect. I’ve never known even the greatest draconologist to wield magic that equaled the abilities of a novice poet. Even when I was young, I could trace a finger across the page of an elder poet’s book and glimpse histories as hazy afterimages. I could record and set my small everyday experiences in simple phrases by the time I was able to write with a mundane quill.

Now, I could set entire days in close detail so that experienced poets could relive the past in mental projections. Now, I could project the histories recorded in my Book into other minds. Into dragons’ minds. That’s why I was chosen for this expedition in addition to three others. Three others who we’ve buried along the way, including the geomancer. This is why Nihla and I are lost now. I swear we’ve been circling the same stinking wasteland for days now.

I noticed the illusory stretch of the land a few hours in—the way big landmarks like the scattered trees and rare boulders hid from us, the way the mud didn’t keep the trail of Nihla’s footprints—and was embarrassed how, in my exhaustion, I’d been unquestioningly following Nihla. She might have been chosen for the expedition based on her knowledge of draconic custom, language, and habitat, but she obviously knew nothing of the way deep magic could twist a land whose draconic protection was fading.

The mud of the geomancer’s grave still stained our hems as we fought over what we should do next. I wanted to return home to Vel to find another who could guide us on our journey. Nihla had seen it as an opportunity to mock me for cowardice. I thought I was being pragmatic. We’d die wandering the wastes if we didn’t know where we were going. The terrain changed every day. Sometimes we’d fall asleep beneath one of the old great trees only to wake by a putrid lake.

Then Nihla explained why we’d only had one geomancer to begin with. Vel couldn’t part with another if the city were to survive and not be swept off into some void of deep magic as Adisa, the dragon guardian of Vel, aged and slipped into the afterlife. This was yet another instance, she’d said, that proved my immaturity. I was young and inexperienced. I’d never live up to my family’s great name.

I run my fingers over my bag, finding the intricate patterns of my greatmother’s tooled leather. I find a leaf there and trace it again and again. I have not seen a green thing in weeks. We have ventured so deep into the Far that we’ve abandoned our maps at the bottoms of our bags.

Nihla stomps the gravel. I follow. And so we are back to our uneasy silence. With no talk to pass the time, I feel I have seemingly infinite time to worry—and there’s an infinite number of things to worry about now.

My first mother is a watchmaker because she says it puts her worry to use. Like everyone in Vel now, she worries over how much time is left. She used to count dried beans or the kinky strands of her hair, anything to take her mind off of my second mother’s illness. Making the watches is the closest she can come to ever controlling or understanding time, and so she turns the gears. When I left, we hadn’t eaten at our table for months because it was always scattered with toothy metal circles. I imagine her now in the kitchen, pushing her magnifying goggles up on her head when she hears my second mother turn over in her sleep. Going to my second mother’s room because I am not there to help her. I am out in the wilds with Nihla who hates me, searching for Vel’s dragon savior.

We finally settle in a rocky outcropping amidst a stretch of flat marshland. I feel like I haven’t slept since the geomancer died. Nihla and I have taken turns keeping watch which means little sleep for either of us. Watching for what exactly, I don’t know, but before we lost the rest of our company, the one thing they were confident about was the unpredictability of deep magic. This desolate journey was easier when there were more of us to watch, more sleep to be had, the illusion of safety in numbers.

Nihla is watching the gray landscape, her back to me, perched neatly upon one of the driest uppermost rocks. Despite all the time spent out here, she still bothers with her little cleaning rituals: removing the mud or dust from her boots with that little brush she keeps in the side pocket of her pack, folding unworn clothes into neat squares, washing her brown blemishless face with those little potions that were all the rage at home. Back when we were comfortable and secure in our knowing, before our collective memory was endangered.

Adisa, guardian of our memories. The only dragon to ever watch over Vel had grown weak, and started forgetting the history and stories of our people in their old age. Consequently, children started to sometimes forget who their parents were and leaders forgot who they led and some people left for their daily work only to wander aimlessly.

I take out my Book to write as I always do when we stop to rest. It’s never fully daylight out here in this part of the Far, but there’s enough light through the constant clouds that I can see what I’m doing. My pen hovers over the page, and when nothing comes, I worry I am having a moment of forgetting. We are so far from Adisa after all. So I start with that wondering. I try to recall stories of our people travelling far without our dragon, and there are none. Or if they exist, I have forgotten them. I do not get stuck in that worry. I remember my first mother and try to keep my hands moving. I record in detail how Nihla found the feather. I embellish it a bit so that she seems more wise and less like a jerk. On the other side of the page, I record the discovery with all the tangled relief and desperation that I truly feel.

I flip between the two versions. It is our duty as poets to keep the dragons fed with our stories. I do not want to imagine feeding Adisa the more truthful second one. They are already so sick, and I know this thing would be bitter and drying on the tongue. If we do find the new dragon we came out here to search for, how could I entice it to return to our land with us if my Book is filled with angry, hopeless words?

I glance up at Nihla to make sure she’s not watching. I don’t want my ill second mother, our land’s Great Poet, to know what I am about to do, but I am only paranoid. Nihla knows nothing about poetic teachings.

I put my hand to the more triumphant version, the one where, after losing many companions and wandering lost for days, we are reinvigorated with a symbol of hope. Nihla is a hero. I infuse the words with the intention needed to set them, and for a blink, my Book emits the most light I have seen all day. This story curls around my wrist one letter at a time, following the order of my quill strokes and stinging as it goes. The curving trail of the last words—Nihla, triumphant—burns itself onto the back of my hand. Words should not hurt. When I was young, the setting tickled until I got used to it. But it never hurt. I shake my hand as if it were the recent victim of a stinging insect, as if I can wish away the wrong words and the pain. I’ve never been self-conscious of the writing inked across my body. Even as a young poet, layers of disciplined script have blocked out sections of my brown skin in black stripes and rings. We are patterned like the great cats, my second mother says. I wear my ink with pride, but the ink of this story—this one itches like the beginnings of an infection trapped under the skin. I tell myself I haven’t lied. I shut the book hastily, and it falls closed with a thud. The other story, my truth, will fade within a day.

“Why don’t you take first watch?” Nihla calls down. When we first set out, she used to complain about the occasional flashes of light from my Book as I set stories. Now she has already oiled and rebraided her hair, twisted her sleeping scarf over the fresh rows, and put out her bedroll on the flattest part of the rock to settle down.

Again, I am too tired to bother with my hair. The twists my first mother did for me are now frizzy, too dry. Maybe we’d be better off if Nihla put as much care into our mission as she did into her hair. Maybe then we would not have wasted time on illusions. I breathe and try to let the thought go. My second mother would never complain about her companions. Nihla is wrong to doubt my skills, but I am still not the poet my mother is. If I can’t accomplish what she could, we will die and be forgotten. All of Vel will die, and as they do, they will wonder who failed them. So that I do not cry, I scratch the back of my hand and do as Nihla suggested. I watch.

∙ ∙ ∙

The way ahead is ringed with mountains. We never get closer to them, which means we are very far from the dragons who might nest near their peaks. Nihla deigns to let me hold the feather as we start towards them again.

“It’s either a tail feather from a very young dragon or a spinal feather from a middle-aged dragon. Middle age is about five hundred—”

“Yes, I know,” I cut her off. My wrist is red from where I scratched it in my sleep. The back of my hand feels like it’s starting to burn, and I hope the lack of sleep is only making me imagine that.

“We’d be very lucky to find a dragon of that age. Vel would be safe for centuries to come.” She pauses, and I know something unpleasant is coming. “Do you think your craft is advanced enough to convince it to follow us home and hold our memories?”

“I wasn’t chosen for this journey only because of my lineage.”

“But it did sway the council’s decision, I’m sure.”

The burning itch seems to intensify at this. I rip the hem of my right sleeve and wrap my hand and wrist with the cloth. Nihla keeps walking ahead. “I am trying my best to honor my second mother’s teachings and uphold my family’s craft,” I say. I’ve already gotten foul water in my boots once out here and so keep my eyes on the ground, but if Nihla persists in interrogating my worthiness, I will keep inventing insults that I will then have to bite back.

Were the other draconologists so busy doing important things, like keeping Adisa alive, that she was the only one they could spare? How competent of a draconologist is she if all she’s managed to track down in days is a single feather? Could she even tell the difference between a dragon’s spine and one of its teeth?

We are still early in our daily walk when Nihla suddenly stops. I am fussing with the bandage over my hand and almost run into her.

“What? Need to stop and wipe the mud off your shoes?” I grumble.

She turns and smiles, not at all like herself. “I meant to tell you how that last story you told to the children was perfectly delivered. Every word beautifully projected,” she says.

“What … story?” I ask.

“The one about the poet and the moth.”

I know this story. I know it very well, but I’ve never told it to Nihla. It is a story for young poets just learning to write.

“I wasn’t telling a story,” I say.

“Perhaps that’s your problem. I’d lose my spirits too if I walked through this gray nothing and didn’t have song or story. We must hold our joy close in these times.”

Nihla’s face hasn’t changed—other than the fact that she is smiling for once—but I see a flicker of my second mother, Vel’s greatest living poet, in the knowing curve of her lips. Remember the smile she’d given me before I set off. Her wish that, when I found a dragon who could be nourished by Vel’s memories, that I name them after her.

“I understand now,” I tell her.

She gives me a long look as if remembering something. Then says, “I’m going to miss you, sweet girl.”

When her presence leaves, I know that Adisa now holds all her memories. I think about the intricacies of death ceremony and custom, how her body will be wreathed in sacred dragon flame, because it is easier than thinking about the loss itself. I hope my first mother was there to hold her before she died. I hope she did not strain her soul to come say goodbye to me. I think of my first mother sitting alone in silence but for all those ticking clocks and watches. The kind of grief that might break me down will have to wait until we return to Vel. My mother has urged me to have joy.

Nihla’s face is Nihla’s again. “What did you say?” she asks me as if she was only distracted by a pretty trinket in the marketplace. Then she looks at her shoes, the way the mud is sucking at them.

“I have a story I think you’ll like.”

∙ ∙ ∙

In the time it takes me to tell the story about the moth, we are suddenly at the foot of the mountains, and my childhood feels oddly close. I’ve found the memory of the first time I held my poet’s pen, a sleek brown feather gifted to my second mother by Adisa themself. I kept it on my bedside table and couldn’t take my gaze off it for the entire night. Despite the lack of sleep, I was energized during my recitations and studies the next day. The feather has lost its luster and lush out in the Far, but as long as the warmth of the story lingers, I can feel the newness of this old gift.

“Finally,” Nihla sighs. She does not remark on how the mountains which have seemed days away for weeks suddenly rise steep before us.

We can finally feel the wind again, and the sky is clearer here, peeking blue through white clouds. I tap a beat into the small drum that hangs from my belt, letting my hands settle into a rhythm that summons the next story. I drum through the bite of the lie clamped around my wrist. I want so badly to ignore it.

Other than the one-way communication of story, Nihla and I do not talk on our climb. Eventually, the path becomes so treacherous that I’m forced to concentrate solely on my footing.We often slip off our packs and press ourselves between high and narrow rock. Small animals scamper here, and when Nihla speaks, it is to voice her jealously at how easily they travel. My wrist aches from slinging my pack on and off and sometimes climbing when the strip of path disappears. I am trying not to favor it, but I do not keep up with Nihla’s pace.

“Give me your hand,” she calls down to me from a precarious perch.

I shake my head and press my forehead to the rock. The wind has whipped up again, and tears sting my eyes. My hand feels numb as if the lie around my wrist is choking off my blood.

Nihla curses, and it hurts in a way words haven’t hurt me before. My chest tightens at the sound. I am still squeezing my eyes shut, so I don’t notice when she stretches down to grasp me. Her grip tightens around my wrist, the bad one, and I cry out and slip. Nihla curses again and clamps down on me. I want to yell at her to let go. My body is suddenly a storm of pain. I do not remember that we are on a cliffside, that the only thing keeping me from tumbling to my death is her.

I am screaming when my back meets solid rock. Nihla is saying something to me, her voice rising as well. I do not know how long it takes the pain to subside. I cradle my hand to my chest and rock like a scared child.

“Your words are rotting!” Nihla cries. It’s the first thing I understand. She stares at me like I might infect her with something, wavering between fear and concern. She’s pointing at my hand, and I make myself look at it. The bandage, ripped in the rescue, is gone. Eager to deny what was happening, I haven’t looked at my hand and wrist since I covered them. Now the skin around the words is black and festering like an untreated open wound.

Seeing it now, I cry.

“What’s going on?” Nihla demands. She moves away from me.

I curl against the rock. “I only meant to help,” I say to the wind stinging my cheeks, to the mountain, to Nihla.

“Tell me what you did. I’ve never seen a poet’s words rot on their body.”

I wipe my eyes, I breathe, and I tell her. I tell her about the record in my Book, the one I wrongly twisted to brightness. “I only wanted to make sure that when we found a dragon our stories could nourish it. Why would anyone want to eat bitter stories of a dying, desperate people?” Nihla doesn’t say anything, and I add, “I was scared. I was scared and now—you’re right. I’ve endangered everyone.”

She won’t look at me. “What happens now? Can we keep going?” I can hear the real questions behind the ones she asks. Is there any reason to try? Will we die? Our people die?

“I’ll fix it,” I say.

∙ ∙ ∙

In a place where the mountain curves in against itself, we settle for the night. There’s not enough space to put out our bedrolls properly, and Nihla and I share a blanket against the mountain wind. The rations of flatbread, bean paste, dry fruit, and nuts are low. We finished the last of our water before settling down for the night. We need to cross a mountain stream tomorrow.

Nihla’s pack is still heavier than mine despite the low rations. I can hear the weight in the way it settles against the rock when she puts it aside. Probably extra jars of hair oil, knowing her. She notices me eyeing her pack with a frown. I think I might say something when she speaks first.

“You think I’m frivolous,” she says in the whistling wind and the darkness, and I think I’ve heard her wrong. When I don’t reply, she turns her head to me and continues, “I’m trying to remind myself that there’s something besides fear and survival. Trying to remind myself to be tender with my body after putting it through this forced march every day.”

I blink at her, let my mouth hang open for a moment as I wait for a reply to process.

“When we’re not stuck on the side of a mountain, let me retwist your hair. I’ve got some flower oil left.”

“Thank you,” I say, struck by the way my resentment dissolves. I want to say more, but I don’t know how to be vulnerable with her yet.

I comfort Nihla into sleep with stories, but my wrist keeps me awake. I slip from under the blanket and weigh my end down with my pack so that the wind doesn’t take it. Nihla wrinkles her face and clutches the blanket. “I’m sorry,” I whisper to her sleeping face. I take my book and pen and creep into one of the narrow breaks in the stone. I hope it is enough to shield any potential light from waking Nihla.

The Nihla I started this journey with would have wanted to throw me off the mountainside for what I’ve jeopardized. Now she is so tired and travel-worn, she’s willing to believe I can turn my lies into hope. I’m so sorry, mother, I pray. I don’t know if I’m still connected to Adisa so deep in the Far and especially after what I’ve done, but I hope even my weak apology reaches her.

My Book’s pages reek of mold. I have not written in it since setting that mistaken story. Wedged deep in the rock, I open the Book to a random page and brace its heft against the opposite wall with my infected hand. I can barely see with the clouds crowding the moon, but that’s no matter. Even in the dark, my off hand can inscribe words clearly enough to seize the magic in the Book. The feather of the pen feels suddenly too light in my hand. I am not an elemental caster like some in Vel, but I know just enough to cause destruction, and that’s all I need.

I weave the elemental power with my words, inscribing the symbol for fire across the page. The Book grows warm, then hot. I tuck the pen safely in the hip pouch of my belt and watch the flames curl and blacken the edges of the Book’s pages. I resist pulling my hands from the flames and dropping the Book. Fire licks the festering words on my hand and wrist and flares with the excitement of an animal who has sniffed out a trail. Blood floods my mouth, and I realize that I’ve bitten deep into my cheeks as I try to hold my agony down in my throat. My eyes burn with the purging light, and that’s when I smell the burning flesh. Fire blazes for my face, and I let the Book drop and duck towards the entrance. One step back. Two. I can’t look away from how the Book is curling in like a rapidly withering leaf, its innards ashing.

∙ ∙ ∙

I cannot feel my hand anymore. It hasn’t blistered as one would expect with natural fire. The words are gone. My skin is unmarked and smooth. But I cannot move it or feel it as if it had been cut from me years ago. I push back my sleeve with my other hand and see the absence of markings on my arm. No stripes. No rings. Despite my clothes, I feel naked. Part of me ripped away.

I cannot remember why I am clinging to a mountainside and huddled beneath a blanket with—with…

The woman next to me blinks her eyes into the haze of sunrise. The wind whips the floral scent of her hair into my face. She stares at my unmarked hand atop the blanket and seems to understand something.

“Nihla,” I say because I have remembered her name.

She nods, but her face crumples with confusion. She puts her hand to her throat. “The dragon,” she says, like this is the first time she’s tried the words. Her voice is scratchy as if with sickness.

I show her what ashes remain of my Book, the ones the wind hasn’t swept away in the night. She screams and shakes me, suddenly oblivious to how close we are to falling to our deaths.

“The only way to erase the lie, to stop the spread,” I explain when she lets me speak.

She points to her head, and her eyes glisten with tears. “I’m already forgetting!” she exclaims.

I’ve severed the last connection we had to Vel, to Adisa, our language, and our collective memories. I don’t know how much time we have until we forget the reason we came here and who we are.

“You were right,” I say. I try to explain the molding Book, how the story would spread like a blight over our histories as it had done to the rest of my Book. I couldn’t give a dragon what I’d written, but if we found a dragon soon enough, I could give them what I did remember, the stories ingrained in all poets before we’re allowed to leave Vel. I try to hold that if. “I’m sorry,” I say again. For the first time in my life, my words aren’t enough.

We climb. I recite stories aloud to keep them centered. The moth who created the world and the first Book made from its wings. The geomancers born of earthquakes. The day the dragons arrived from the stars and helped us remember what we’d buried with our dead. I remember the images, but sometimes I stumble over the language to convey them. We’ve adopted so much of the draconic tongue for the old stories, and with the connection to Adisa lost, these words are fading fastest. Nihla has stopped speaking at all, and I wonder if it is because she has nothing to say to me or because she has forgotten all her words.

Nihla spreads the last of the bean paste on my flatbread because I haven’t gotten used to doing things with only one hand. I smile at her in thanks, and she tries to smile back. I pray to my second mother again, repeating her name over and over in my head like a chant to channel a spell. I remember her wish to name the dragon after her.

It rains when we slow down for the day. The light hasn’t set yet, but we are tired from our scant rations and lack of water. Nihla opens her mouth to the sky, the gesture a mix of childish whimsy and true desperation. I watch her and then follow suit to stop myself from choking on a sob. We stand like that for a moment, catching the spare drops of water the sky allows us. Suddenly, Nihla’s hand grips my shoulder, then slips down to hold the hand that can’t feel. I’m confused at first, but she tugs me towards something in the mud. Excitement animates Nihla’s face out of the haze of forgetting. She drops to the ground and places her hand in a print in the earth. Her face hovers just over the mud like a geomancer divining a harvest.

And there, the softening, rain-filled print of a dragon’s foot.

In the gathering shadows ahead, I make out a deeper darkness set into the rock, the jagged edges of an unnatural tunnel. Nihla nods. She knows the signs. I wonder if she has been listing them to herself to keep them anchored just as I have been reciting the old stories. We make it inside just as the storm settles into its rage. The rain beating the ground outside is a wall of sound at our backs. We stumble forward into the silence. My heart beats hard. Nihla squeezes my hand, and I hear so many words in her touch.

Darkness around us moves and shifts. I can hear it scraping along the rock. The upward burst of flame from the dragon’s mouth illuminates the cave, and as the initial onslaught of heat and light dissipates, blossoms of magic flame remain suspended in the air. When the burn of light across my eyes relents, I see the owner of the feather we found, the black dragon. Nihla has lost her words, but she knows how to bow to the dragon. They tilt their head to her, and she immediately goes for the black feather in her pack and holds it out to the dragon as if returning a lost heirloom. She points to it, then to her heart, bows again.

The angular face of the dragon turns to me, their dark eyes piercing in the light of the flaming flowers. I reach for the crest of the dragon’s feathers as they bend their head to me. Their jaw brushes the floor of the cave so I can touch the sensitive feathers at the crown with my numb hand. Dragons can sense a poet on instinct, and this one, having survived on physical sustenance its entire life, sniffs me as if ready to inhale my past.

I start with the most basic and beautiful thing I remember. “My second mother’s name is Brinna.”

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT TAMARA JERÉE

Tamara Jerée is an editor for Luna Station Quarterly, and their poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons and is forthcoming in other magazines. They are a student in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Purdue University and will attend the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2019. You can find them on Twitter (@TamaraJeree) or visit their website tamarajeree.com.

DOLL SEED

By Michele Tracy Berger // 11571 words

1952

She stood in a brass doll stand on the window shelf in Mrs. Lovey’s Irresistible Toys and Candy Store looking out on Eighth Avenue and 72nd Street. The casual passer-by would have easily missed the momentary gleam in the doll’s eyes. She awoke that day and named herself Chevella because that was the only word she could remember from the old language of the doll world. She didn’t remember much of her life before; all she had now was the rubbery plastic odor of her, the mahogany sheen of her doll skin, and the intense yearning for love that yokes all doll forms to the human world.

A sharp voice pinched into her newly awakened mind.

“The new one’s here. Finally. Your body’s been sitting around forever. Didn’t think anyone would come.” The voice continued, “I’m Missy Ann No. 13. Little girls always come in and touch me. One time a Negro girl even tried.”

Chevella could not yet fully use her new doll eyes, so she could only dimly see the doll nearby. Standing twenty-two inches tall next to Chevella, the newly awakened doll, was Missy Ann No. 13. A cream-colored doll with cascading brown hair tied in ponytails held by thick red, white, and blue satin ribbons. Dressed for a picnic, she was, with a crisp white shirt, navy skirt, and a straw hat clutched in her hand. A dainty picnic basket graced her side.

Missy Ann No. 13 added coyly, “I won’t be here long, but stuck in that body, I bet you will.”

“Be nice mon chéri or later I’ll come and pull on your ponytails,” another voice inside Chevella’s head countered. “Welcome friend. I am Marie,” Marie continued. Her voice had a light, musical quality.

“I am... Chevella,” she said, testing out her dollmind voice.

“Yes. we shall talk now, and later you’ll be introduced to the toys. They can’t speak dollmind to dollmind like us.”

And then she heard the voices of the other dolls in the toy store clamoring, raking across her awareness like a flock of hungry seagulls on a vast beach. They chattered about the card games they would play in the evening, how stupid the toys were, and how appealing they were to little girls.

As a thin ribbon of night enveloped the city block, Chevella instinctively knew it was time to finally move. A fluttery feeling in her stomach snapped her mind to attention. The forced stillness of her limbs faded away. Her scalp tingled, and heat flushed her body. Now she awoke as a person would from a long nap. Her eyes took in everything. She stretched her fingers slowly and circled her wrists. Gaining confidence, she rolled from her feet onto her toes, holding onto the doll stand, feeling the exquisite coolness of the windowsill underneath her. Wrapping her arms around herself, she breathed into the hug, luxuriating in newly felt senses. Not only could she hear, smell and see like during the day, but now she could taste, speak aloud and move. Looking down, she ran her hand across the soft gingham dress (complete with a white handkerchief in a side pocket), white lace frilly socks, and black shoes. Her hands reached and felt for her straight ebony hair that hung down past her shoulders and complemented her well-formed head, dimpled cheeks, and wide-set eyes. When humans looked into Chevella’s eyes they would unconsciously register an alertness and curiosity that set her apart from other dolls.

Awake and alive. She had made it over from the doll world to the human one.

∙ ∙ ∙

The dolls and toys gathered in the middle of the store as they did every night, enjoying their nightly rebirth as much as Chevella was enjoying hers. The Original Enchantment that binds the tongue and movement of all toys and dolls during the day fades away at night. And, away from human eyes, toys and dolls took on all the physical sensations of life. Lucienda, a white yarn doll with slate-colored buttons for eyes and pig-tailed golden yarn hair waved her knotted hands at Chevella.

“Come down and join us, Chevella,” she said.

Chevella turned, watching and listening, wanting to understand her new world. Her nerves pressed down into her stomach like tightly coiled springs ready to burst. Unsure of how to proceed, she fiddled with her handkerchief and took in the scene. The shelves on the far side of the store held large jars of candy: butterscotch, jellybeans, gumdrops, and lollipops. The smell of saltwater taffy, licorice, peanut brittle and chocolate tickled her nose. The siren screech of a small fire engine truck jarred her. She saw many toys gathered in the center, including stuffed giraffes, Jack-in-the-Boxes, plastic guns, and rubber balls. Nearby, Missy Ann No. 13 played with marbles.

She noticed several other Missy Anns dressed alike. In fact, she counted thirty-six Missy Anns! Missy Anns Nos. 1-15 were dressed as picnic goers, Nos. 16-25 were dressed in nightgowns and each possessed a pillow, and Missy Anns Nos. 26-36 were dressed as elaborate princesses with a chicory blue bodice, billowy white taffeta dress, white satin gloves, and matching blue slippers. Marie, an elegantly dressed doll with tight brunette curls (who also waved to her), and Lucienda, stood out in the sea of giant Missy Anns.

Marie and Lucinda stacked lunch pails to help Chevella climb down from the window shelf. The fire engine drove up below her, startling her with his scratchy, yet strong voice, “Hey, Chevella, let us get to know you. I’m Sammy,” the Fire Truck said. His enthusiastic greeting matched his outrageous candy red color.

The chatter died down and soon all the dolls and toys focused on Chevella. During the introductions Missy Ann No. 28 said, “How is she going to choose a human?”

“Missy Ann No. 36 nodded. “Yeah, I don’t see how she is going to choose somebody. As dolls we have to choose humans with our doll seed. That is the law.”

Chevella shrank back from the group and tried to gather her voice. Before she could respond, Missy Ann No. 15 addressed the group:

“Does she even have a doll seed? Why did she come through here, to this store?” Missy Ann No. 15’s head shook so hard while asking these questions, one pigtail ribbon slipped off.

Caruthers, a mint-colored unicorn, walked into the center of the circle, cleared his throat, and paused. By far the largest toy in the room, everyone drew back and the Missy Anns quieted. They clumped together, their soft red lips holding a collective girlish pout, yet Chevella noticed the flat coolness of their eyes.

“Leave the child be,” Caruthers said. “We all come for a reason. She still might be able to choose somebody.” Turning toward her, Chevella felt the reach of his wise golden-brown eyes all the way down to her toes. She stood straighter.

“Can you feel your doll seed?” he asked kindly.

“What is that?” Chevella asked.

“Only your most important thing,” Missy Ann No. 15 huffed.

“It’s the one thing that keeps us from being a toy,” Missy Ann No. 36 said, coming to lean against Missy Ann No. 15, adjusting her friend’s ribbons.

Caruthers swung his head to look at the cluster of Missy Anns to the left of him, snorted and stamped his left foreleg before turning back to Chevella. “There are those among us who sow divisions as their pastime. The Wind Mother and Father of Offerings who sent us to tend to humans care for us all. They created us from the same elements that make up humans—air, earth, water, ether and fire. Dolls have just a tiny bit more fire and ether than toys. Toys have more earth in them. Such small differences.”

“We don’t have to listen to a giant ass,” Missy Ann No. 13 said. She turned, snapped her fingers, and most of the Missy Anns retreated to the other side of the room behind the counter.

“Good riddance,” Sammy the Fire Truck said.

Chevella wanted to lean against Caruthers’ sturdy frame and collapse. “I am a little weary,” she said, feeling very stupid. She gripped the cloth in her pocket for comfort.

Marie moved to the center, dressed in the high couture of the eighteenth century: a pastel pink silk Josephine dress with a high waist and low bodice that fell to ankle length. Three small red feathers poked out of the bun in her hair. A perfectly round mole dotted the left side of her face and she held a small parasol. With a firm gloved grip, she turned Chevella and guided her out of the circle.

“She just got here from the other side,” Marie said in a stern, but kind voice. “Leave her be. Don’t any of you remember what it was like?”

Chevella felt the stares of the remaining Missy Anns burning into her back, but the group’s conversation sped on to discuss the day’s radio shows. I have no answer for them, she thought. It was all still so new—the toys, doll-speaking, doll seeds, the smell of candy, the freedom of movement.

“Rest now,” Marie said, gathering up her dress. She took one of Chevella’s hands and they climbed the lunch pail stairway. With care, she eased Chevella back into her doll stand. “All will become clear later.”

∙ ∙ ∙

The next night Missy Ann No. 13 pointed a finger at Chevella and said to the group, “She’s not doing her choosing. We have to choose. Can’t she feel her doll seed?” She looked around to the assembled group, dolls mostly in the front and toys in the back.

“I don’t understand,” Chevella said, her stomach lurching. During the day, hadn’t she stared at many people? Didn’t her hopes rise when a girl of about five with carrot colored hair, clutching her mother’s hand, came to the window gazing at her? But then the moment passed, and the mother tugged on the little girl and the crowd swallowed them. All day, near misses.

I should appeal to humans, Chevella thought. I’m here, ready to choose and be chosen; ready to love.

“Oh, how can she choose when she’s a doll who looks like a Negro?” Missy Ann No. 13 said throwing up her hands.

“She probably doesn’t even have a doll seed,” Missy Ann No. 22 said lying on her stomach, absently doodling with a discarded crayon on a sheet of yellow construction paper. Under her breath she added, “She’ll never get bought because she’ll never be able to choose.”

The princess Missy Anns halted their several games of checkers. They sat up, alert, nodding in unison with their fellow dolls.

“Take it back,” Lucinda said, rocking from side to side and clenching her yarn hands.

“I’m only saying what I see,” Missy Ann No. 22 said.

Sammy the Fire Truck’s sharp bell (one of his many sounds), snapped like a whip he as rode around the circuit of the room.

Chevella closed her eyes for a moment and rubbed her head.

“Now wait a minute. How would either of you busybodies know?” Sammy the Fire Truck said, flashing his headlights on Missy Ann No. 22 and No. 13. “Chevella hasn’t even tried yet…” he turned to face Chevella. “…have you?”

Before Chevella could answer, the Missy Anns rose like a well-ordered flock; they clapped their hands over their ears and chanted, “Horrible toy!”

“Stop it!” Marie said. She rushed to the center of the circle, pointing at Chevella with her parasol. “Listen to me. Dolls are special. We become the form and the shape given to us. We understand humans because we are like them, in looks and temperament. By night, we see, hear, taste, touch just like humans. We feel on the inside, too. We have doll seeds, that’s our essence—that’s why we can choose humans. We understand who they are and who they can become.”

Lucinda added, “We can sometimes see their thoughts, too.”

Marie nodded. “Yes, it’s the extra ether, or star space, in us.”

Questions raced through Chevella’s mind. “Where’s your doll seed?” she asked Marie.

“For every doll it is different. I feel mine on the inside of my cheek,” Marie said.

“It could be anywhere in you, you just have to feel for it,” Lucienda offered, her lively button eyes looking back at Chevella with tenderness.

As if holding court Marie sermonized to the others, “See, I am French... that is what I know... croissants, the history of the…”

“…more like a common tart,” one of the Missy Anns sniggered.

“…I have come to know everything French. Think about what you know, and what you feel deeply, Chevella. You will know things about humans, all humans.”

“What do they know?” Chevella said in a whisper pointing to several of the Missy Anns who were off to the side of the circle having a spirited conversation about how they might feel when their paint began to flake off, and their hair fell out.

“They know how to be silly little girls,” Marie said, louder than Chevella’s whisper.

Putting her crayon down, Missy Ann No. 22 drew up to her full height, “We are the most popular dolls of our day. Aren’t we Missy Ann No. 5?”

“Personally, I’d like to run every one of—” Sammy the Fire Truck said.

“Don’t,” Marie said pointing her parasol at him. “They love it when they can divide us.”

“Maybe Chevella can go home with Mrs. Lovey,” Missy Ann No. 23 called out. She reclined on a chaise lounge supported by a pile of pillows taken from one of the giant dollhouses. “She’s got some strange ideas.”

“They know what some little girls dream of,” Lucienda said with a sad wistfulness. Chevella sensed Lucinda’s yearning and the feeling of it settled into her heart.

“We can feel that we’re wanted. We sell all the time,” Missy Ann No. 23 jeered.

It’s true. Chevella couldn’t count how often Mrs. Lovey fussed with them. Or, how disappointed a girl would sound after her mother found out the cost of a Missy Ann and announce she just couldn’t afford one of them. The sharp and penetrating cries of the girls’ regret knotted up her stomach for hours.

“Negroes don’t have any money to buy dolls or toys. Mr. Lovey says that all the time,” Missy Ann No. 5 interjected and cocked her head to one side.

“He also said that Japan was going to win the Great War,” Sammy the Fire Truck said.

“Shut up, toy,” Missy Ann No. 13 snapped. “Why do you think you know what’s best for dolls? No toy can choose a human like a doll can.”

“Oh yeah? Dolls are so damn special cause of your dumb extra part. Toys have our own special connection with humans. We’re not that different from you.”

Chevella sucked in her breath as Sammy the Fire Truck backed up, revved his engine and careened toward Missy Ann. No. 13. Her blue eyes widened, but she stood perfectly still with her large foot raised ready to crush him. He drove up, then used his brakes, stopping less than a quarter inch away.

“Enough!” Marie shouted.

Missy Ann No. 13 nodded to the other dolls, lowered her foot, and walked away.

Defiant and proud, Chevella thought. Not shrinking like me. Looking around, she saw in the smugness of the Missy Anns’ creamy faces how they wore their sense of being wanted like a knight’s armor; strong, resistant and durable.

After glaring at Sammy the Fire Truck, Marie resumed, “Your doll seed is what is given to you for the new world. It will develop sure and true. And, when it does, you will be able to choose. The doll seed draws us in perfect correspondence with humans. It’s why we were created. We can choose many humans, many times, again and again.”

“What happens if I don’t have one? Or, if I can’t choose?” Chevella asked, looking around the circle.

Shaking her head, Marie said, “No, chéri, that is impossible. You must have one.”

“It is not impossible, Marie,” Missy Ann No. 16 said, giving her a sidelong glance. She skipped up to the group. “Remember Miranda?” A sour, thin-lipped smile spread across her face. The accusatory question hung in the air, quieting the whole store.

Chevella shuddered. For a moment she considered crawling under Caruthers, who was snoring in the corner. Instead, she managed to ask, “Who’s Miranda?”

“It is a sad story.” Lucienda shook her head. “She—”

“She JUMPED DOLL,” Missy Ann No. 31 said, laying a gloved hand over her heart.

“If you do not use the doll seed then you can’t live. It is too hard and painful for a doll to not find love and be loved. Miranda did not ever use her doll seed. She never chose. She jumped doll.” Marie said.

“And went back to the old world?” Chevella asked.

Lucienda shrugged, “When dolls jump, who knows where they go.”

“If a doll jumps it’s because no one wanted her and she couldn’t make it on this side,” Missy Ann No. 16 sneered. “Food for thought, eh, Chevella?”

“We don’t know what made her jump doll,” Marie said, sitting down on a nearby cushion. “But I think when we can’t or won’t choose, a void gets created on this side and we can tune into it. I’ve heard that when humans drive over a tall bridge, they sometimes wonder about what it might feel like to put one leg over the railing. What it might feel like to fall into the open sky. What it might feel like to surrender. We can feel like that, too, but because we are part of the Original Enchantment and connected to humans the feeling opens something else up from the other side.”

“None of the Missy Anns have ever jumped doll. Never needed to,” Missy Ann No. 16 said, folding her arms.

Just then a high neigh broke through the conversation. “Jumping doll is just that, Chevella—talk and legend.” Caruthers stood and shook his white mane. “You concentrate on finding your doll seed and you’ll please The Wind Mother and Father of Offerings.”

“We’ve been talking of nothing but somber business tonight. Mrs. Lovey keeps the radio on during the day. If you listen to it, you’ll learn the ways of humans and that will help trigger your doll seed,” Marie said, squeezing Chevella’s hand.

∙ ∙ ∙

Chevella stood in the toy store for three months, morning through sunset, waiting and trying to push herself into the minds of humans. Marie and Lucienda gave her daily pointers up to the day they were bought. Marie chose a doll collector: an older woman in a tailored gray suit who was visiting her niece in the city. A gangly girl with black wavy hair and protruding teeth bought Lucienda. Lucienda chose her with ease. Chevella’s sadness snaked through her whole body when she saw the child outside the store, throw Lucienda up into the air, and catch her, then snuggle her friend close.

She waited and tried to do as many of the Missy Anns had done, call humans (mothers, fathers, sons or daughters—it did not matter to her) to her being—choose them. Lucinda’s parting words, in dollmind were, “You plant an image of yourself in them and your doll seed moves around, makes itself known... and you have someone. It’s not hard, just have patience, Chevella.”

She spent hours searching for it. She scanned every part of her body, probing for the very essence of her like a surgeon looking for the right place to cut to find something hidden, listening for something to whisper back to her. Was it in her ear? In her tummy? Behind her nose? Her attempts to enter a person’s mind felt like momentary tadpole-like extensions, barely breaking the surface of a person’s thoughts. She floated about in the jittery flotsam of the person’s conscious thoughts with no real direction, unable to sink deeper.

Learning about humans went easier. She kept listening to Mrs. Lovey’s radio. And she did learn of the times. The Korean War, the Mau Mau rebellion, and the kids who died a quiet polio death all fascinated her. She learned of human imagination and dreams, how they cheered when Rocky Marciano became world heavyweight champion after knocking out Jersey Joe Walcott, how Mrs. Lovey and her husband loved the hit song “Singing in The Rain,” how people couldn’t tell if Elvis was a sinner or saint. Listening to the radio drowned out the taunts and mental static the Missy Anns emitted, a buzzing, malignant frequency.

One afternoon she noticed she had one white gentleman all to herself. He looked at her and she could feel him wanting to come in. She sensed he was thinking about a doll for his six-year-old polio-stricken daughter, confined to a wheelchair.

Yes, I can do this. I can choose him. Straining with mental effort, she squeezed her insides and telescoped her mind outward, reaching for his.

Missy Ann No. 15 on the window shelf (she had replaced Missy Ann No. 13) shouted in dollmind, “She’s trying to get this man!” nearly breaking Chevella’s concentration. Other Missy Anns whooped and collectively surged forward with group determination, reaching for him like an eagle hunting prey.

Don’t! She pleaded. This is the fifth time you’ve done this to me! She was pleasant to them and laughed at their inane jokes, but nothing helped since her other friends had left. Hurry, she told herself. She entered his mind, placing her doll image there. But shortly, as if she rested on a glass surface, her image faded. Some unconscious part of this human with watery blue eyes laughed at her, mocked her. She could feel his desire for a different doll—a doll of fairy tales, fantasy, and soft pink lips. A line of dolls that looked like his family.

She drifted. Tried to pull free from his mind, but how? Ah, why didn’t I ask Marie and Lucienda for advice? She bumped through gray tunnels full of long yellowish tubs, the baths of his imagination and memories. But she tired quickly and soon his mind’s eye began moving her again. I must get myself back.

Then she lay on her stomach, deposited into one of these tubs. A see-through version of the man stood over her, in a silver colored suit, peeing on her. A wave of human urine splattered onto her doll image. It felt as real as she did at night. The steady stream hit her back and she felt the weight of it soaking through her clothes. Drawing up all her energy, and viscerally pulling away from his thoughts with a final tug, she left his mind.

“She didn’t get him,” Missy Ann No. 15 announced.

“Maybe one day, Chevella,” Missy Ann No. 11 said with the merest hint of sympathy.

Chevella, too stunned from the encounter, couldn’t reply. Had they seen or felt what she felt? No, she realized, or they would be cackling right now. Would someone want to pee on any of the Missy Anns? she wondered. She drew into herself, tucking away the shame and confusion around her like a shawl.

Later that day Mrs. Lovey worked on rearranging the items on Chevella’s shelf. As usual, she talked while she worked.

“When is a nice Negro girl going to come in and get you? You’re occupying some of my best shelf space.” Mrs. Lovey shook her head and fiddled with the hem of Chevella’s dress.“I’m going to have to sell you to my maid... Her niece would like you… but she’d never be able to afford you. Maybe I was wrong about this... about you.”

Chevella simultaneously heard the disappointment in the woman’s voice and the collective snickers of the Missy Anns.

Later, Chevella tried to let Sammy the Fire Truck’s words comfort her.

“Do not cry too hard. I have been here a long time, too. My price is so high I will need a wealthy housewife to buy me,” he said, punctuating his thoughts with a cheerful ring of his bell.

They sat behind one of the large dollhouses. She bent down and gave the truck a gentle pat. He did his best to console her after hearing her story and she appreciated him for it.

“Yes, Sammy,” she said, not believing him at all.

∙ ∙ ∙

On a bleak, gray winter afternoon, a Negro man approached the window and looked at Chevella. He pressed up close to the window, his breath catching in the December air and fanning out over the glass. Chevella took in his face: a generous mouth with a full lower lip, a sharp chin with a cleft, a flared nose, and a perfectly groomed thin mustache. Below his high forehead were inviting, deep-set, brown eyes that reminded Chevella of a sunflower’s soft furry center.

It was his eyes that made her heart leap. At first Chevella read his face as human-attractive, yet also sad and all wound up with hope for events of the future. But upon a closer look she could feel, rather than see, a breeziness of personality that could burn the sadness off. Chevella then felt a sharp stabbing pain in the back of her left knee. It spread across the entire back of her knee, pulsating with a current of doll life. My doll seed! The throbbing created a rhythm in her body and the steadiness of it made it effortless to slip into his mind and peek at his thoughts.

“I have it! I have a doll seed! How do I use it?” she blurted out to the other dolls.“He’s mine!” Chevella shouted, hearing the sharpness of her urgency.

“Go ahead, he’s Negro,” Missy Ann No. 15 said, then almost as an afterthought, muttered, “Like I would want him.”

The comment pierced her, stripping away her momentary joy. Chevella hesitated, then lost her concentration and the man walked on into the cold city air. He receded into the throng of people. The pain in her knee quickly subsided.

She sat, not knowing what to make of Missy Ann No. 15’s statement. It reminded her of the feeling of being peed on, a casual yet simultaneously primal act. She waited and wanted to ask someone, but who could she ask? Wasn’t she supposed to try for Negroes, too? Is that what she knew? Did she know anything at all?

∙ ∙ ∙

After losing the man, Chevella became a sentinel, more determined than ever to find her potential human again. She wanted him to come back. Over several nights, she kept by Sammy the Fire Truck’s side and under the protective and calming flank of Caruthers. She tucked away her anger and regrets and made quiet company.

One day, an hour or so before dawn Chevella awoke to a hissing sound in her mind. Slowly the hissing subsided only to be replaced by a strong humming of juuuu, juuuuum, juuuuuu jummmm. She saw that Missy Ann No. 15 wasn’t in her stand.

“Chevella! Chevella! Chevella!” Their voices called out to her. The humming continued. “Juuuuuuu Jmmmm Juuuuuuuuum. Chevella.”

“Missy Anns?” she called out.

She got down from her stand and watched for a moment. Most of the toys were preparing to settle back in their places for the morning. Some nodded to her as she passed by, others gave her a quizzical look.

She walked over to the farthest end of the store, kicking a loose butterscotch. The door to the basement was ajar. It led downstairs to the storeroom, a place that she had seen once months ago.

“Who’s there? Missy Anns, are you down there?”

The only reply she got was the voices calling out to her.

“Stop it!” she said in her dollmind voice. She turned around to go back to the window, but their voices bugled inside her head. She pushed at the door. Chevella went down the large stairs slowly. She’d come to the edge of a stair, sit down and then edge herself over it, jumping down to the next step. She tired by the fifth step. And still the humming persisted, growing stronger and stronger; she stopped and held on to a plank of wood between the railings. Determination urged her on, for a moment overriding the fear pooling inside her.

At the bottom of the stairs Chevella looked around, her breath labored. One of the two overhead bulbs provided a dull light. In the middle of the storeroom boxes of unopened toys, wooden pieces of an unassembled rocking horse, and newspaper stuffing surrounded her. Wads of twine resembling snakes lay along the floor, and a broom stood in the farthest end of the corner. A small heap toward the back of the room caught her attention. A brightly colored peach cloth that had crooked letters in black paint spelling out her name scribbled on it covered…something. The something was talking.

“JUMMMMM,” the collective voice said.

Slowly she approached the cloth, squeezing her handkerchief. A ring of mouse feces surrounded what was under the cloth.

“I know you’re down here, Missy Anns!” she said, suddenly afraid of what sat under the cloth.

Chevella pulled back the cloth and felt her stomach clench from both fear and at the nightmarish sight before her. She stood transfixed by the figure of a large doll, three times as large as the Missy Anns. The doll’s head drooped to one side like overripe fruit, and what was left of its blonde hair looked like clumps of cooked spaghetti left to rot. Chevella forced herself to take in its face, which was smeared with black paint and had deep grooves under its eyes. The doll wore a faded dress the color of applesauce. Her dirty stockings were dotted with holes, and the big toe of the left shoeless foot poked obscenely through the stocking.

To be so near a doll, yet everything about it abandoned and gone caused Chevella to crouch and cover her face. Was this Miranda? For a moment, Chevella felt as if, like this poor doll, all her love would leak out of her, never used, never known.

Suddenly, bright light flooded the room, and then came the Missy Anns, running from every direction, forming a ring about her shouting:

“JUMP DOLLLL JUMMMP DOLL JUMMP DOL JUMMMMMPPPPPPPPPP DOLLLL!”

The Missy Anns pecked at her, pinched her, pushed her and bounced her around the circle.

“As a doll you are worthless!” Missy Ann No. 33 shouted.

“You don’t belong here…” another voice said.

“Please, please, stop,” Chevella cried. “Help! Help me!”

They chanted and whooped around her. They pushed! The doll crashed into her, causing her to fall on the wooden floor with a thud. The dead thing pinned her. Chevella writhed and screamed trying to get from under it.

Her dollmind grasped for the wild, sweet face of the man who came to the window. If I get out, I will choose him. He will come and take me away.

From what felt like far away she heard Caruthers demand, “What is this madness?”

His voice boomed from the top of the steps, calling on the Missy Anns to stop. A moment later Chevella felt a soft mouth carefully hold her leg and pull her from under the dead doll.

One of the Giraffes nuzzled her face. Caruthers continued to scold the Missy Anns. Chevella held the face of Giraffe close, holding on to the furry knobs on either side of his head, feeling herself shake uncontrollably. The Missy Anns retreated like muttering vultures, cheated of their feast.

∙ ∙ ∙

Daybreak approached as all scrambled to get back to their proper places. The toys did a good job of cleaning Chevella up, though a small speck of paint remained on the palm of her hand that they could not remove. The Missy Anns stayed quiet but their silence radiated an oily, palpable displeasure, making the air feel thick and sticky.

They knew they outnumbered the toys by three to one. As the Original Enchantment crept over her limbs, Chevella could still smell the places where the mouse feces touched her skin. Chevella vowed to turn her outrage into new determination. She would leave the store! The man would save her, she knew it.

When the Negro man came again later that afternoon her heart jumped. She locked him into her gaze; he would not escape this time. The doll seed popped twice behind her knee. She wished she could reach down and rub it, but she concentrated all the harder on him. Putting her in his mind, she saw him surrounded by different types of children—his present, she assumed. This picture stroked anticipation and a feeling new to Chevella—giddiness—washed over her.

After a moment he came in, sauntering through the glass doors. He waited patiently in front of the store.

After finishing with a female customer, Mrs. Lovey looked up and said, “Yes, may I help you?”

“Yes Ma’am,” the man said with warmth, “Mighty fine store you have here.”

“Thank you, we’ve been here for many years.”

“Uh-huh, my wife has passed by here several times. She loves your displays,” he replied. “I’d like the doll up in the window... the Negro doll, please.”

When Chevella heard the cha-ching of the register, and when Mrs. Lovey wrapped her in tissue paper, she was sure that some adorable girl like the man, all sad smiles and breeziness, awaited her.

As they approached the black car, the man began to talk to Chevella. The sun came through the clouds and Chevella felt as if it smiled for her.

“Oh now, honey, what’s your name? The lady in the store never told me. Well, sit back, and enjoy the ride,” he said, sliding her in the back seat, removing the paper and bending her so that she could sit up. “There you go.”

He opened the driver’s door, slipped in, and looking in the rearview mirror said, “I’m Benny. You sure are one very lucky lady. We’re going to meet Mr. Kenneth Clarke. You have got to play your part. We all play our parts. Yes, indeed.”

Chevella listened but her attention was drawn to the bustling life on the streets. So many people!

“—I’m just a peon, a graduate student that is, but one day I’m going to do what Dr. Clarke is doing.” Benny looked back at her in the rearview mirror again, laughing.

“Yes, in just a few more years, things are going to be real different. Change is blowing strong through all of us. Indeed.”

Small piles of letters, journals, and magazines addressed to a Benny Harwood at the New York University, Department of Psychology, lay on the seat beside her. Benny. My Benny.

His car smelled of cigars and hibiscus and jasmine, the kinds of flowers Mrs. Lovey sometimes kept in the store. The smooth ride gave her mind the freedom to wander back to the incident of the previous night. It doesn’t matter, she told herself. I can choose.

Yes, and oh yes, how she would be the envy of all in that little store. She would soon be held in the arms of children with their love, kindness, lollipops and playground wisdom. Chevella daydreamed on. She rode with Benny, the man who bought her, who saved her, whom she chose. She rode along ready to start her new life; the only regret that stood on her heart was not being able to say a proper goodbye to Sammy the Fire Truck and Caruthers.

Later that night when Chevella could move, she slid herself carefully from the hotel nightstand where Benny had sat her and made her way over to his bed. She had waited for so long for this moment, heard so much about it from other dolls, and here it was. The snuggle time! Close-up, she sat next to Benny and looked at him. Her Benny. She put her ear close to his heart and relaxed into the rhythm of his life. She curled herself around his arm. It would be hard to tear herself away at dawn.

∙ ∙ ∙

1953

The little black girl standing in front of Chevella had two thick braids on each side of her head and wore a stained green jumper. She stared at Chevella for a moment and then went over to Emma and pointed at her. Without hesitation, the girl pointed to Emma and said in her clear, six-year-old voice, “That’s who I want, Dr. Clarke. This doll.”

“Very good,” Dr. Clarke said from across the room in his throaty rich voice. Dr. Clarke was a well-groomed Negro man of about forty with an even complexion and a smattering of various-sized dark moles scattered across his face. He made a mark on the thick sheets of paper stuffed into his clipboard.

Again, Chevella thought, spirals of rage rippling through her. It had happened again. How many times, she wondered, would this scene repeat? She sat in the makeshift “laboratory” of Dr. Kenneth Clarke and Benny—his graduate assistant. This “laboratory” was really a hot schoolhouse in Charleston, South Carolina.

For the last year she had sat with Emma, a mostly silent white doll with dull, tawny colored hair and a milky complexion, and watched as little black and white girls and boys tried to answer a set of questions developed and delivered by Benny and Dr. Clarke: Which doll is prettier? Which doll looks cleaner? Which doll would you want to take home with you if you could?

Interested at first in what Benny, her chosen, wanted, she went along with the psychology experiment—whatever that was, giving it her best. She thought that if she complied, she’d be free. She did not want to choose again, she wanted to please Benny. She kept trying to choose the black child, thinking that would make him happy, but the game yielded no special attention or tenderness from Benny. So, with effort, she began to block the black children and try not to choose them and that seemed to make Benny and Dr. Clarke happy. Then she aimed for the white children.

One day it occurred to her that Benny seemed happy if she could not choose anyone and if no one chose her! Her doll seed ached from trying to choose and he had no idea about her pain.

Frustration ran through her as she let the memories flood in. Anytime a black child did pick her, which was rare, Benny and Dr. Clarke would make a sour face and shake their heads, scratching their marks down with care. She was fixing Benny now, wasn’t she? She had stopped choosing anyone. On strike now, she refused to probe the kids’ minds one bit. Not even one bit! She sat and watched them all pass by her. It had meant day after day of blankness, the moments running into days, days running into weeks; all her joy and love shriveling up. And she always felt so tired. Too tired to try to snuggle with Benny, impossible most nights because she was usually with Emma in the trunk of the car.

She looked at Benny as he escorted the child out of the classroom. Traitor.

∙ ∙ ∙

Benny sat on the edge of an old school desk, shuffling through papers. Dr. Clarke poured himself a cup of coffee from his thermos.

“Kids are hard work, Dr. Clarke.”

“I know,” the older man said, nodding. “You have been doing a fine job. How’s Carolyn holding up?”

“Oh, the traveling has been hard on her, but thank goodness we’re staying with some of her folks here in town.”

“Glad she could come and visit with you, on this leg of the trip, and that she’s got family here,” Dr. Clarke said, taking a sip of his coffee.

“But they don’t understand what I’m doing with you,” Benny said, excitement strumming his voice higher. Chevella noticed how after a long day with kids or traveling and setting up, Benny liked to “stretch” his thoughts with Dr. Clarke. Dr. Clarke struck her as a good listener and most reflective at the end of the day.

Bored, she reached out to Emma in dollmind.

Emma. Want to talk?

Emma stayed silent. She was hardly a companion these days.

“Her people think we’re just trying to stir up trouble. They think because we’re trying to show how detrimental racism is, we’re saying that whites are somehow better. That we want to be white—that white schools are better. Dinner time’s different now… Oh, we argue about it all the time. Older folks can be—” Benny hesitated. “Sorry sir… no disrespect.”

“None taken, son,” Dr. Clarke waved him on, Chevella thought, encouraging his thoughts.

“I try to tell them what a free and open society might look like. The fact that children consistently choose that white doll,” he said, pointing to Emma. “Means something.”

Dr. Clarke took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

Nothing to say. Emma finally answered. Dumb men.

I don’t think they’re dumb. Chevella’s thoughts drifted to the differences between humans and dolls that her travels gave her time to think on.

It’s the small lick of fire in us that makes us so like them, Emma. We are like them at night, we feel and move, but our bodies don’t bleed or get hurt in the same way. The fire element in their bodies pumps their blood and gives them passion. But when things aren’t right among them, we feel that, too. Benny’s reaching for something better—

And it ain’t you. Dumb men with too much fire.

Chevella sighed and wished for the company of her old friends from Mrs. Lovey’s store.

“Old ideas are never going to get this country out of the mess of we’re in Benny,” Dr. Clarke said waving his hands as if to move on to another subject.

He paused then said, “Well, Benny, I’ve been holding out on you. I have some great news. It should make you feel a whole lot better. This morning I had a conversation with Thurgood.”

“Yes,” Benny’s said, raising his eyebrows.

Why do you think we’re tired all the time? Dumb men, Emma said.

They have their reasons.

Trying to make us choose over and over again. It’s wrong.

“I didn’t want to tell you until we were finished with our work for the day.” Dr. Clarke leaned over and grabbed Benny’s shoulders. “Thurgood and his men want to use our work with the set of desegregation cases coming up before the Supreme Court.”

Benny’s mouth quivered. He let out a shout, then self-consciously looked around the empty schoolhouse. “I don’t believe it. Your work will be famous.”

“If they win, son, and there’s no guarantee in that,” Dr. Clarke said. “But I would like to buy you a drink before we each go our separate ways tonight. A friend from Howard told me about a place not far from here.”

“You’re on. I can call and let Carolyn know I’ll be late.”

They talked on about the implications of this development as they packed up the dolls, stray papers, and books in a big suitcase. Their voices raised and lowered, and they laughed at times, too. They locked the suitcase with the dolls in Dr. Clarke’s car and left to get a drink and celebrate.

Emma and Chevella listened as the men’s voices trailed off into the sticky South Carolina air.

“All this going to be over soon, better enjoy it while you can,” Emma said.

“Maybe it’s a good thing. Supreme Court. What does that mean?” Chevella asked.

“Doubt it. Dumb men,” Emma said with a grunt.

Chevella trusted that Emma knew of what she spoke—Emma had been the second white replacement doll for this experiment. Chevella wondered what this change meant for her. Benny is mine. She knew Benny’s smile and his moods. She knew Benny liked to eat his grits with ham, buttered rolls, and applesauce, if a diner had it on hand and if the diner served Negroes, which wasn’t often in the South. She knew Benny talked a lot about the Klan, and how careful a driver he had become on Southern roads. She knew Benny loved his wife, even though she was barren. She knew how he tapped his feet when trying to decide on something important and how he sometimes held his breath when the children were choosing between her and Emma. And she came to know Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, New York, and Washington D. C. How could she not?And she came to know the schools of the South, the often dirty, rickety facilities with leaky roofs.

And, she also knew Benny never bothered anymore with her hair; her plain white dress was smudged from motor oil that he had forgotten to wipe off his hands somewhere between Ohio and Virginia, just like Emma’s. Her hair was beginning to mat, just like Emma’s. Chevella wished she could move and stamp about and shout. How can I choose a good human when he wants me not to? She still didn’t understand the topsy-turvy world of humans. She wished Marie or Lucinda were around to guide her.

When she looked at Benny’s face, she no longer saw breeziness. Instead, she saw ambition, progress, and the eager desire to make his mark on history. Fire, fire, fire! Did he, or Dr. Clarke really look at the children anymore? she wondered. They hadn’t noticed the troublesome little white boy, with kind eyes, who had rubbed snot on her. He had picked her up, inspecting her. Up close, she heard his stomach growling. Had they heard? Did they care? She wanted to ask them, when this case (she thought that was the right word) goes to court and all is said and done: Then will she and Emma be loved? Would she snuggle with him more? She loved Benny, but she longed to be with a child. Where was her child? Instead of a child companion, she had gotten speeches, theories, and the cold calculations of adult men.

∙ ∙ ∙

1958

Chevella sat in Minnie’s Resale Shop on an oak lined street in a small town in West Virginia. No fancy doll stands or candy smells here. The patrons that came were down on their luck. How she missed Marie, Lucienda and Sammy from the toy store, and even the occasional hesitant touches of the children in the experiment. Minnie, the proprietor, was friendly enough, but she didn’t know a thing about how to make toys and dolls look good. Chevella was crammed in a small box of used toys, between a Jack-in-the-Box with a faulty spring, a small hand-built log cabin house with two logs missing, a stuffed rabbit, and a collection of battered toy soldiers. The toys were all friendly enough, but they were toys and she was a doll; she tried to keep her attention focused on her future, but her memories drew her back.

Benny, my Benny! I miss him. Since Benny’s death in a suspicious car wreck in Missouri, Dr. Clarke abandoned her and Emma to a thrift store and left to continue his research up North. She had made up her mind: she was not going to make the same mistake. She was not going to be betrayed again. She would choose differently and better this time. She would choose a child.

Today, several families milled about. There was a white woman of about thirty-five, squeezed in to a long polka dot dress and black buttoned-down shirt, with her meaty feet forced into too-small shoes. At her side was Katherine Ann, her dark-haired eleven-year-old daughter. The mother and daughter pair walked slowly around the perimeter of the resale shop; the mother holding her daughter’s hand tightly. Katherine Ann’s mother released her hand upon seeing a chenille bedspread, and Katherine Ann headed toward the toys.

At the same time, Denice, a black girl of about nine with a bottom tooth missing and smelling of peaches spotted Chevella. She picked her up and was about to run to her grandmother when she paused.

Chevella’s doll seed popped and she momentarily reveled in the forgotten sensation, but with all her will she ignored the tug toward Denice and fixed her attention instead on the white girl coming toward her. She tossed and turned in Katherine Ann’s mind, finally feeling the freedom of a child’s imagination; here was wonder and possibility. Yet part of Chevella’s attention was drawn back to the black girl’s kind eyes. Pulling away from the white girl for a moment, she zoomed into Denice’s inner space, feeling deep pools of gentleness–this girl talked to flowers and made daisy bracelets for her friends.

No, she thought, she wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. She was not going to be betrayed again. Negroes have problems. I don’t want you, go away, Chevella thought. Too much trouble you’ll be. She pushed out of the girl’s mind. For a moment, Denice looked befuddled, and shook her head, but Chevella continued focusing all her effort on Katherine Ann.

It felt different. Benny was gone. Maybe her doll seed was broken. It always ached, and it hadn’t worked right since.

For a moment more, Denice absently played with Chevella’s hair, then suddenly dropped her back into the box, as if given an electric shock.

Katherine Ann arrived at the box of toys and reached for Chevella.

Katherine Ann brought Chevella close. They carefully studied each other.

“Katherine Ann? I’m ready to go,” her mother called.

“Over here, Mama,” the girl replied.

Pride washed over Chevella; she would not be alone for long. I have chosen.

“Mama, I want this doll,” Katherine Ann said matter-of-factly.

At first a look of disbelief, then displeasure flared over the plump woman’s face.

“No. Put that thing down,” she said in a tight, clipped voice.

“Mama, I want her. I think she’s pretty. Please. You said I could have whatever I wanted from the sale bin. Remember?”

“Don’t be simple, Katherine Ann.” She hissed, snatching Chevella from her daughter. “She’s colored.”

“I know,” the girl said, rolling her eyes. “But, she’s the only doll here. I looked.”

“Kids are hard to argue with,” Minnie said, approaching the feuding mother and daughter.

The mother blushed as Katherine Ann promptly took the doll back.

“What if I make you a deal?” Minnie asked.

“What kind of deal?” the mother asked, looking around and lowering her voice.

“Eleven dollars for the doll and the bedspread. If you’re taking that bedspread, that is. How’s that?” Minnie asked amiably, slightly rocking on her heels.

“Mama, please. You promised,” Katherine Ann said, squeezing Chevella.

Chevella heard the wheezing ring of the register and a hand stuffed her in between the folds of the chenille bedspread. She felt safe.

∙ ∙ ∙

Cuddling with Katherine Ann the night before had Chevella in a good mood. Katherine Ann sauntered to school the next day with Chevella tucked in her bag. At recess, Katherine Ann and her friends gathered in the play yard and headed toward the only shade available and their usual spot—a bench under an old mulberry tree whose leaves grew strong in the spring.

Sue, a blonde girl with buck teeth said, “My dad gave my brother and me our first allowance. I’m gonna save mine up for something I really want.”

The girls began setting up their playthings: paper dolls, toys and tea sets. Chevella imagined they did this every day.

Katherine Ann casually pulled Chevella out of her bag and sat her up on the bench.

“Ewwwww… what is that?” Glenda, a red-haired girl cried, pointing.

Screwing up her face, Katherine Ann said, “It’s a doll, stupid. Mama got it for me at the resale shop.”

“It’s ugly,” Glenda replied, sticking out her tongue. Sue nodded.

“Don’t say that,” Katherine Ann said, blushing.

“Why your Mama got you a darkie doll?” Sue asked.

“Ewww,” Glenda repeated.

Without waiting for a response, Sue shrieked: “She’s got a darkie doll! Katherine Ann’s got a darkie doll!”

“Does your mom like a house full of darkies?” Glenda said and within a few moments her ranting solicited the attention of girls at the other end of the yard.

“Katherine Ann’s got a darkie doll!” Glenda continued, varying her pitch, sometimes cooing, sometimes raising her voice.

“Stop being such a jerk. She looks better than anything else around here,” Katherine Ann shouted.

Chevella agreed. Most of the toys, she noticed, looked a bit down on their luck. Just like the kids.

Most of the other girls snickered and stared. Other girls joined in with Glenda’s taunting and soon the whole schoolyard surrounded the little bench. Katherine Ann seemed not at all prepared to face a set of screaming kids, and while they shouted at her she bowed her head and traced her foot around a small hole her shoe dug in the ground.

Sue grabbed Chevella and threw her up in the air. While aloft Chevella remembered when she saw Lucienda thrown in the air by a child. This has gone all wrong, she thought.

“Give her to me!” Katherine Ann said. In a flash, Katherine Ann took hold of Sue’s shoulders and began shaking her.

A pinch-faced woman, her hair held in a low bun with a pencil, broke up the group of shouting girls and confused boys.

“What’s going on here?” she demanded as she got between the girls. “Are you all a bunch of ruffians? Little ladies don’t scream, and they surely don’t pull on one another.”

Sticking her chest out, Sue said, “Mrs. Richardson, Katherine Ann’s got a darkie doll.”Holding Chevella by her feet, as if handling a dirty diaper, Sue handed her to the teacher.

The teacher blinked a few times, then looked at Katherine Ann and back down to Chevella. She pulled in her lips several times and shook her head.

“Is this your doll?” Mrs. Richardson asked in a tone that reminded Chevella of the Missy Anns.

“Yes,” Katherine Ann said in a voice so low, Chevella could barely hear her.

“I see. Katherine Ann, start packing up your things. Your recess is suspended.”

“Glenda, Sue and Katherine Ann, you have detention today.”

Glenda called out. “Why we got to get blamed?”

Mrs. Richardson just looked at her. “Miss Taggert, are you up to questioning my authority today?”

“No ma’am,” Glenda said.

“Good, because for a moment I thought you were. This nonsense has already interrupted my lunch break, did you know that?”

“No, ma’am,” Glenda pouted. Chevella could hear some of the girl’s bravado draining away.

“And that’s enough for everyone,” Mrs. Richardson said, addressing the group of staring children. “Go back to playing.”

The girls packed up their things. Glenda and Sue headed to the school. Katherine Ann lagged behind. Mrs. Richardson stopped Katherine Ann. Holding Chevella at arms distance, she said, “This is not a doll you need, or one you should have.”

“But, I ...” Katherine Ann stammered.

The teacher’s green eyes that Katherine Ann had to that day thought of as gentle and warm, flashed coolly when she added, “I’m sending a note home with you to your mother. A disturbance like this is will be put on your record.” As Mrs. Richardson huffed off, she threw Chevella to the ground.

As the kids walked past her without making eye contact, Katherine Ann tentatively picked Chevella up out of a puddle of ice cream, lollipop wrappers and leaves. The leaves were still green, but with a hint of yellow and orange brown foretelling of the coming fall.

∙ ∙ ∙

1968

Darkness enclosed Chevella. They had been working off and on in Katherine Ann’s bedroom, she guessed, for the better part of an hour.

“I just don’t know what I’m going to do. She was all I had,” Chevella heard Katherine Ann’s mother say.

“We are going to get you through this... step by step, Suze. And God will help, too,” said Justine, a friend of the family.

“Can you do her clothes today, you think?” Justine asked.

“Yes, I’ll try... everything else we can tell the superintendent to get rid of.”

“I’ll go downstairs and get the rest of the boxes for Goodwill.”

Katherine Ann’s mother approached the closet where Chevella sat on a shelf under a pile of clothes. She heard Suze’s sobbing, but focused on her own trough of grief. Katherine Ann’s overdose six days ago in this cramped, run down flat on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, did not surprise Chevella. Chevella thought about how the apartment contained the remnants of the two Katherine Anns: the creative, imaginative child and rebellious woman. Half-finished sketches, oil paints, and used brushes sat against a wall in the living room, whimsical fish were drawn on bedroom walls in blues and oranges. Remnants of the recent Katherine Ann were there, too: stolen cameras, silverware, and radios waiting to be traded for drugs, piles of smelly clothes, puke in the bathroom and needles in every room.

After the school incident, Katherine Ann hid Chevella from her mother. After Katherine Ann moved to New York, she occasionally took Chevella out from the closet and talked to her about her art and dreams. Chevella used all that time to think.

I didn’t choose right that day, Chevella thought. I chose what was easy and ignored the goodness that had been in front of me—acting more like a human than a doll. It was never a perfect fit between her and Katherine Ann, yet the girl had always showed kindness to Chevella. And, Chevella felt grateful to have known a child—a troubled child, yes—but a child all the same.

Katherine Ann’s mother muttered and squinted. She had been separating shoes and now, with effort, tried to match them up. It was a meaningless task, something to give her hands to do. Chevella understood.

“You take care of her, hear Lord? She was a good child, strange but good. She should have never come to this disgusting city.” She stood up ready to tackle the top shelf of the closet. Chevella saw Suze’s hand reach up and touch her leg.

Grunting, she brought Chevella down along with some winter sweaters.

Seeing Chevella, she yelled, “You! How could she keep you?”

She threw the doll across the room.

Please, I loved your daughter. I chose her, probably for the wrong reasons then, but I still loved her.

“You ugly thing. Mess all started from the damn day I ever brought you home for her.” Suze walked over to where Chevella lay crumpled, her dirty white dress up over her bruised body. With a howl, Suze picked up Chevella by her legs and smashed her against the wall.

Katherine Ann’s mother clawed at Chevella, ripping the old, faded, stained white dress with ease. She pulled Chevella’s arms off, threw them across the room.

“What is it? Suze, what are you doing?” Justine ran over and grabbed her friend’s shoulders.

Shaking, the woman slumped incoherently to the floor. She pushed the doll in Justine’s lap and said, “Get it out. Get it out.”

Justine looked back and forth between Chevella and her friend. She grabbed a bag of trash, went outside around the back of the building and threw both the bag and Chevella in a dumpster.

∙ ∙ ∙

It was finally dark. She had been in and out of waking for some time. She heard the rats first; they squealed and squeaked on their nightly prowl. It took her a moment to sit up and assess the damage. Both arms were gone, like her clothes, and she still had a large gaping hole above her thigh from a careless cigarette burn inflicted by one of Katherine Ann’s roommates, years ago. She jerked her legs and examined her feet. They were eroding into nubs of rubber, most of the toes gone years ago.

Moving from under a bit of rotting cantaloupe, she listened. In the distance she heard voices talking. After a few falls, Chevella slid her way down from the heap of trash into the night air and slowly shuffled toward the voices.

Rounding a small bend of rubbish with tires piled high, she stopped. This close, she heard the voices with clarity.

“Hello, up there. Who’s there?” she boomed in the loudest voice she could muster.

“Be quiet, someone’s here,” a voice said.

She squinted in the night and waited.

“A doll, a doll…hello, are you up there a doll or a toy?” Chevella said.

“Toys and dolls, if you must know.”

“More dolls than toys,” another voice said.

“I’m coming up,” Chevella said pleased with the prospect of company. Without arms, however, she could not easily climb her way up through the debris. She fell on the same bent blender blade four times. After a slow attempt with little progress made over an hour, she resigned herself to shouting, “Hey can you come down? I can’t get up there.”

The long silence made her think that they had moved on.

“Later,” a female voice said.

As the inky blackness of night thinned and gave way to dawn, she settled herself and waited.

The next night she called to them again. She kicked over a rotting book and sat on the edge of it waiting for the voices to come down.

“This better be worth the trip,” she heard one voice say.

“Shut up and move your arm up some,” another voice said.

Two figures descended the mountain. A baby boy doll carried a blue rubber ball, bigger than a tennis ball, but not by much. She saw that he was a well-constructed doll, with eyes that blinked.

Chevella gasped when she saw that his companion was a Missy Ann No. 17, though worn and without her pillow. Half of her face, a hideous storm of charred blacks and purples, revealed an empty eye socket and a gaping mouth. Her blue nightgown was cut, now functioning as a top that stopped at her stomach. In her arms she carried the head of another Missy Ann–Chevella couldn’t tell which one. The Missy Ann’s white almost-bald head reflected the little light the sliver of moon offered.

“Well, look who it is!” Missy Ann No. 17 said. Her voice sounded deeper than Chevella remembered.

“Chevella,” the head said.

Chevella could see that the years hadn’t been kind to either of the Missy Anns. Etched into the face of the Missy Ann head without a body were deep black grooves over what were once delicately painted flaxen eyebrows.

Chevella’s hopes for good company sank.

The baby boy doll put the ball down and it rolled to her.

“Hello. How did you come here?” the ball asked.

“Someone threw you in the trash, didn’t they?” Missy Ann No. 17 said.

“It’s not true,” she started and then stopped herself. It was true. Turning her attention to the baby boy doll and the ball she said, “I’m Chevella. What’s your name?”

“I’m Edward and he’s Star,” the baby boy doll said.

Overcome by the absurd situation, she laughed. “We’re the same now, toys and dolls, aren’t we? There is no one to choose. Not now. Not here. We’re all in the big human trash heap.”

Pointing her finger, Missy Ann No. 17 stepped forward and said, “No! We were in a fire in a girl’s house. Isn’t that right Missy Ann No. 2?”

The bodiless doll cocked her head to the side, “Someone will always want us. We can be cleaned up and restored. No one will ever want you. You’re even uglier than before. Much uglier.”

Star the Ball rolled back to them. “How unkind.”

“Shut up, toy,” the Missy Ann head said.

“Yes, you wait and see. Sometimes humans come by this dump to scavenge.” Missy Ann No. 2 continued.

Star bounced himself up and into Edward’s arms. Edward said, “We’re going to watch the pigeons near the gutted pickup truck. Do you want to come?”

“No,” Chevella said. Sitting down, a heavy weariness came over her. She knew they were right in a way. What chance did a dirty dark doll in a garbage dump have? What was left for her? For any of them? But if a doll seed can choose humans in life, she wondered, can dolls follow humans in their death? The vacant face of Miranda flashed in her mind. No, she wasn’t like Miranda. Miranda had only known pain, and she’d coped with that pain as best any doll could have.

Chevella had loved. She had given her heart. And, she had been loved too, albeit briefly. Couldn’t she know something? Neither Benny nor Kathleen died normal deaths, she thought. She ruminated on all that Marie had taught her about dolls and humans. Sitting there, an idea hit her as if it floated to her on the wind.

She got up and shuffled. “Hey, Missy Anns!”

“What is it?” one called back.

“I want you to help me JUMP DOLL.”

“What?” cried Missy Ann No. 2.

“She’s lost what little sense she once possessed,” Missy Ann No. 17 snickered.

Chevella, with her unsteady gait, approached them. “Can you do it?”

“I don’t know…why?” Missy Ann No. 2.

“Why do you care?” Chevella said.

“Of course we can,” Missy Ann No. 17 interrupted. “We’ll be glad to get rid of you.”

Star rolled from around the heap toward the dolls, but Missy Ann No. 2 screamed. “Get out of here, toy!”

The Missy Anns’ weak voices started the chant. Jummmmmm Jummmm Jump doll. JUMMMMM. At first all she could feel in the rhythm of the chant was a choking anger, heavy and python-like. Chevella struggled for breath. She let their sounds guide her down past the hurts, slights and memories of mistreatment she held deep inside her.

“JUMMMMMMPPPPPPP JUMMMMP…”

Now the chanting felt different, as if each breath took her closer to what she believed could be true. She felt their every syllable swell in her like ripe fruit, filling her with potential.

Maybe she could follow humans from one place to the other. Maybe somehow dolls and humans were connected in the doll world? Humans called death the final resting place, but if they were chosen by a doll and loved, where did they really go? What were dolls without humans? What were humans without dolls?

Maybe the Missy Anns were the ones afraid this time, she thought. Yes, in the vise-like dollmind frequency, she could feel their frenzy, their suffering from holding onto a place that was misery and pain even for them. Their world had shifted right under them. Did they know they couldn’t crossover because of their fear, because they could not let go? she wondered.

“JUMMMMPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!!”

It started as if a fly landed on her arm. Then her body felt as if many flies were landing on her, walking and probing her body. She felt something gently pushing down on her limbs. The noise of the dolls began to fade away. Her skin prickled up as she felt the darkness drawn to her, sticking to her, exploring her. Her skin drank in the pleasant sensations. The earth trembled; she lost her balance and fell onto her face. She rolled in the dirt and debris as the ground opened, as if being ripped apart by unseen hands. She slid eel-like down into the rip. In her last thought, she laughed: The Missy Anns were wrong, as usual. This moment felt like a homecoming.

She awoke on a riverbank and knew herself as Chevella. Her form was different now, less human-looking. She gazed at her gray, spindly body and was reminded of giant mushrooms. Her mind latched on to Benny and Katherine Ann, the names she could remember from the human world. Other gray forms sat on the bank or stood near it. Rising, she saw the river was deep with memories—thousands of memories bursting to the surface and retreating again. Every single moment of her life on the other side bubbled up. She doubled over and shuddered as déjà vu swept through her.

After some time, she turned away and looked around. Others here must be seeing their lives, too.

A form like her, but taller and even less human-like approached. The white mycelial-like buds on its head extended and touched her face. “A jumper. Rare here.”

Its face (a generous term in Chevella’s opinion), was perfectly round, lineless and with an opening ringed by short tentacles.

“Where is here?” Chevella asked.

“The dream place of The Wind Mother and Father of Offerings.”

“Do human souls pass through here?” she asked. She could feel the odd sensation of her head swelling as she spoke.

The slender stalks that were caressing her face retracted.

“No,” it replied.

Chevella’s body sagged to the ground. The ground felt damp and comforting.

“But,” it continued, “Humans are made with the five elements.”

“Yes,” she said. Looking up at him, she blurted what she remembered, “Fire, ether, air, water and earth.”

“In this place, the Elements themselves can be called upon and asked to yoke together what once formed a human soul. When made, if it wants, the soul can stay here for a time.” The form bobbed its head. “It is a weighty task.”

“Show me,” Chevella said.

And, the form did.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT MICHELE TRACY BERGER

Michele Tracy Berger is s a women’s studies professor, a writer, a creativity expert and a pug-lover. Her main love is writing speculative fiction, though she also is known to write poetry and creative nonfiction, too. Her creative writing has appeared in The Chapel Hill News, Glint, 100 wordstory, Thing Magazine, Oracle: Fine Arts Review, Flying South, Carolina Woman, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, Ms., The Feminist Wire, Western North Carolina Woman, and various anthologies. Her sci-fi novella “Reenu-You,” about a mysterious virus transmitted through a “natural” hair relaxer, was published in 2017 by Book Smugglers Publishing.

Michele is completely undone by the sight of pugs and has to restrain herself from collecting any item they appear on. She lives in Pittsboro, North Carolina with her partner Tim. Come visit her at her blog ‘The Practice of Creativity.’

A SONG FOR MIDDAY

By Maz Hedgehog

Darling, we are massive:

Creatures made of echoes and

Quickened flames

Glow bright,

Have no fear of your heat

Or their orbit; you will

Bear their eyes like so much

Broken glass. Yes, they will cut you,

Threaten to spill the last of your

Pain, drain you of your vulnerability

And joy, make you debris

To build their worlds from.

You can feel the shards,

Each new scar a new kind of grief but

You will be fine;

You are aflame after all.

Melt them down and set them smooth,

Make marbles to show to your little ones

Tell them how you survived,

How you burned your fear

And shone bright enough to light whole worlds.

When your time is done

And your final bursts ripple across our universe

We will join your echoes to ours

They are a song to carry

To the next

And the next

And the

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT MAZ HEDGEHOG

Maz Hedgehog is a bi Black spoken word poet who loves to reimagine folklore and mythologies. She’s performed at events across the North West of England and beyond. Her debut chapbook, Vivat Regina was published by Superbia Books in partnership with Manchester Pride in February. Fond of flowers and theatrics, Maz creates poetry that’s fantastical, lyrical and occasionally a little surreal.

Ọ́jí Íjè [KOLA JOURNEY]

By Uche Ogbuji

1. Ónyé wètárá ọ́jí, wètárá ńdụ̀

The curved trunk of kola tree #12 stoops over Úgó

As he peers over Ógèchí’s deep rest chamber controls;

He whispers blessing: “yá gà zíé” before waving the wake gesture—

Return from deep rest has claimed too many space faring souls.

He can feel Ógè’s fate braced against the venerated tree

Behind them, grown into very ribs of the ship’s hull.

Her eyes flick open, whites clean around pupils—no sick green-gray;

Her chamber registers wakeful arcs of sense across her skull.

Straightforward briefing for this trip, ụ́mụ̀ ńnà—standard crew

Of twelve for an interstellar silvicultural scow.

Your anchor species is Cola acuminata. I need

Not remind you how precious—more than just the co-op’s cash cow.

2. Ńtàkị́rị́ ímé-ụ́lọ̀ gà bàtá ńdị́ ényì ìrí ma ọ bụ́rụ́ na ị́hụ̀nányá dị n’ètítí há

Úgó helps Ógè up to sit in customary silence, then:

“Ị́ tétá gó. Ọlị́à!” You have woken. “Ọlị́à”, she croaks.

He smiles: “Kèdú”. She grimaces while replying: “Ọ́ dị́ ḿmá”.

In a sudden swell of action their quiet exchange provokes

She takes a shovel breath, stretches her limbs and makes to stand,

Her feet finding a humus anchor, toes spadeing the soil.

He leads her to a pair of kola wood stools; she sits and sifts

Through growth-suppressed yet tight-kinked hair to ply her scalp with shea nut oil.

You will cater to the ship-bound biome for delivery

On Hab Tau Ceti. Resource plan for the century trip

Charts for one awake at a time, with eight days’ overlap;

We’ve grown each kola tree to seat a rest chamber in its root grip.

3. Ónyé wètárá ọ́jí, wètárá ùdó

Úgó breaks open the kola pod he’s plucked from Ógè’s tree,

Strips pulp from one of the seven nuts, splits that with a knife,

And counts six lobes: Ọ́jí ńdị́ m̀ḿụ́ọ́ na ńdị́ ḿḿadụ́ jiri gbáá ńdụ̀.

Kola with which mankind and spirit make covenant of life.

Things shy of names shift in radiation of hard space. The dish,

Clear and inset with nanosensitives glitters resonance

To touch as each picks a lobe to lip while speaking the rite words.

Flower of old beat shows bloom in Ógè’s vital instruments.

This kola varietal has proved quite fruitful on our ships.

You’ll be able to greet each other well for comfort as you go.

To the first timers, Ọ́ gà dị́ ḿmá! To those on the second,

Thus last voyage, Mother Earth honors you. To all: Ka chí fóó!

4. Ọ́jí lùó ụ́lọ̀ o kwúó èbé-é o sí bị̀á

A simulated breeze of late rainy season blows along

Úgó’s days with Ógè. After eight days, on Ǹkwọ́ next

He’ll bid farewell ther ward waterleaf and agama lizards;

Ógè will settle him under his kola for deep rest,

Then nine months lone before waking Dike under kola 1.

Ọ́jí is fruit of well-taken fate. Against disease or collision

The crew communes with Chís on Tau Ceti, eager to receive.

Their view gives stars for masquerade eyes of ancients minding their mission.

Íjè ọ́má nu! Íjè ọ́má!

∙ ∙ ∙

Igbo language notes for Ọ́jí Íjè [KOLA JOURNEY]:

Ọ́jí—kolanut or kola tree (Cola acuminata)

yá gà zíé—it shall be well

Ónyé wètárỌ́jí—kolanut á ọ́jí, wètárá ńdụ̀—(proverb) He who brings kolanut brings life

ụ́mụ̀ ńnà—father’s people (i.e. my fellow townsfolk or countryfolk)

Ńtàkị́rị́ ímé-ụ́lọ̀ gà bàtá ńdị́ ényì ìrí ma ọ bụ́rụ́ na ị́hụ̀nányá dị n’ètítí há—(proverb) A small house can hold ten acquaintances as long as there is love amongst them

Ị́ tétá gó—you have woken (common morning greeting)

Ọlị́à—hello (warm and informal greeting)

Kèdú—how (i.e. how are you)

Ọ́ dị́ ḿmá—it is well (i.e. it is well with me)

Ka chí fóó—good night (literally: until the dawn)

Ónyé wètárá ọ́jí, wètárá ùdó—(proverb) He who brings kolanut brings peace

Ọ́jí ńdị́ m̀ḿụ́ọ́ na ńdị́ ḿḿadụ́ jiri gbáá ńdụ̀—translated in the next line. Fact that kolanuts are named according to how many lobes are found in them emphasizes their importance

Ọ́ gà dị́ ḿmá—all shall be well

Ọ́jí lùó ụ́lọ̀ o kwúó èbé-é o sí bị̀á—(proverb) once kolanut reaches home it reports whence it came (i.e. kola is important so people remember who properly brought it)

Ǹkwọ́—final day of the 4-day week (Igbo calendar is a lunar one)

Íjè ọ́má nu—safe journey, all

ABOUT UCHE OGBUJI

Uche Ogbuji, more properly Úchèńnà Ogbújí, was born in Calabar, Nigeria. He lived in Egypt, England and elsewhere before settling near Boulder, Colorado. A computer engineer and entrepreneur by trade, his poetry chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado (Aldrich Press) is a Colorado Book Award Winner, and a Westword Award Winner (”Best Environmental Poetry”). His poems, published worldwide, fuse Igbo culture, European classicism, American Mountain West setting, and Hip-Hop. He co-hosts the Poetry Voice podcast and featured in the Best New African Poets anthology. On Twitter as @uogbuji.

CREATOR SPOTLIGHT

FIYAH aims to highlight works of speculative fiction by Black writers across all mediums. Our comic feature this quarter is with James Wright and his project “Contact High.”

Contact High is written by James F. Wright, with art/colors/lettering by Josh Eckert. It was originally released digitally in the summer of 2017, and then in print in Spring 2018.

A digital version can be purchased from our good friends at Gumroad. (Note: All digital sales income will be donated evenly to Lambda Legal and the Southern Poverty Law Center). Print editions are available directly through James at any convention he tables at.

We asked James to tell us a bit about the project in an interview:

Contact High is, in a nutshell, a queer sci-fi action love story, which is a lot of elements to pack into a 26-page comic. It’s set in a future where human touch is a drug and has thus been outlawed. The origins of this biological change are never explicitly stated, though people have their theories. Regardless, as a result, everyone must wear protective suits at all times or risk confinement. Our story follows one such person, Ziggurat, who is apprehended and taken to a V.E.N.E.E.R. facility for “rehabilitation,” when he learns that his estranged partner, Apex, is being held in the same facility, and he does what he must to reconnect with him.

You can check out the rest of our interview with James here, along with some Contact High art in the following pages.

Title: Contact High | Release Date: Spring 2018

Buy links: Gumroad | INTERVIEW

THANKS FOR READING!

If you dug it, you can make a donation and appear in the next issue of FIYAH.

FOLLOW US: