CONTENTS

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

PROSE

THE MIDNIGHT HOST

Gregory Neil Harris // 6729 words

Koda and Donnie are two young city boys, hauled into the Virginia countryside by their grandma to meet distant relatives. When the brothers stray into forbidden tobacco fields, old evils arise to bind them to the land forever.

RECLAIMING TESS

Brittany Smith // 6829 words

Despite years of enduring her grandmother’s disdain, Tess is growing into her own and earned the respect of the family’s enigmatic patron god in the process. But succeeding her grandmother as the wielder of his power may well tear her family apart.

CORIALIS

T. L. Huchu // 7015 words

On a moon teeming with unicellular life forms that may form an inchoate intelligence, a pioneer realizes that any lasting human settlement requires an offering on a level far deeper than anyone had imagined.

AN IRRATIONAL LOVE

Marika Bailey // 15187 words

In a kingdom characterized by unbridled greed, realities converge in a cycle of shadow and gold. Will those held prisoner by avarice and darkness find their way free, or will they be chained there forever?

POETRY

Not an ordinary dream

Dike Okoro

EXTRAS

THANKS (HUGO EDITION)

October 2019

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Welcome to the twelfth issue of the Hugo Award nominated, World Fantasy Award winning FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. We’re so excited to have you here with us, whether this is your first time reading one of our issues or whether you’ve been with us since our Rebirth.

As always, we begin by thanking our staff, readers, contributors, donors, and everyone who believes in and supports us. Even though this marks the third year since we’ve announced ourselves to the world, we are still appreciative of every single person that has helped us to prove that Black Speculative Fiction has a place in this industry and in the universe. Because of your belief and support, our Poetry Editor was able to travel to Dublin to represent us at Worldcon while the rest of the staff met in person for the first time! We’re still pretty new in the game, and the opportunity to see and touch each other in real time was momentous for us. We thank you for your help in making that possible.

This issue’s theme is “Chains,” and what a theme we chose to explore in this Black Speculative Fiction Month issue! Chains are an understandably heavy topic for us, as the idea of chains has both historical, spiritual, and metaphysical meaning for black people. All over the world, black people have been chained by beliefs, by sociopolitical systems, and quite literally by the people that enslaved them. This issue’s contributors have handled this massively complex theme with the dignity and creativity that we expect from black speculative artists.

Our cover art for this issue comes from Sophia Zarders, and her vivid, expressive cover is a wonderful take on a potentially oppressive theme. Check out our conversation with Sophia about her process and this cover’s artwork.

The fiction and poetry in this issue are similarly vivid. Gregory Neil Harris’s “The Midnight Host” is a chilling tale of the curses that lie within a legacy. Brittany Smith’s “Reclaiming Tess” is a badass tale of triumph and learning how to accept yourself despite your family’s expectations. T. L. Huchu’s “Corialis” takes us into space, where we examine how our very bones can be chains. And Marika Bailey’s reality-bending “An Irrational Love” takes us to a mythical world where we explore chains that span generations, and how we free ourselves of them.

Our featured poem this issue is Dike Okoro’s “Not an ordinary dream,” and we encourage you to delve into this dream and discover the chains that lie therein.

We are grateful for your continued support of our magazine, and of our dreams. As we enter into Black Speculative Fiction Month, we ask that you continue to support us through subscribing, encouraging your friends to subscribe (or buying them a subscription!), and sharing our work with people who need it. With your help, we can continue on our journey to elevate and celebrate black stories that fuel imaginations, disrupt systems, and break all of the chains.

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 Sophia Zarders

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

THE MIDNIGHT HOST

By Gregory Neil Harris // 6729 words

It was September, but still ninety degrees outside, and they’d been driving in the hot sun for almost four hours. Donnie and his older brother, Koda, were in the back of their grandmother’s ‘89 Caprice Classic, headed to her middle-of-nowhere Virginia hometown to visit some relative neither of them had ever met. Frances, their grandmother, narrated the drive, telling stories about her childhood, pointing out this and that, but this far out in the country there wasn’t much to see. Donnie kept himself occupied by tapping his foot in time with the fence posts they passed. Then they crested a hill and a sea of intense yellow replaced the scrub pine and empty fields that dominated this part of the state. The boys oohed in spite of themselves.

“Y’all ever seen tobacco before?” Frances asked. “My daddy used to work that farm right there. I’d go out with him in the summer when they were topping the plants so they don’t go to seed. They used to make the kids pull weeds and squash the worms.” She chuckled, remembering. “I hated it.”

“What worms?” Donnie asked.

“Big, fat, green ones.” She held up a thumb and index finger. “And they stuck to the plants so you had to pull hard to get them off.” Even in the telling, she was both disgusted and delighted.

“They’re not worms, grandma,” Donnie said. “They’re caterpillars. Tobacco hornworms. Sphinx moth larvae.” He didn’t notice her smirk at him in the rearview. “Why are the leaves all yellow?”

“It’s harvest time,” she said. “They turn yellow when they’re ready.”

“Who’s gonna pick them? There’s nobody out here.”

“They have machines, dummy,” Koda said.

“Don’t call me dummy.” They squabbled until Frances hushed them again.

After a few minutes they slowed down and turned onto a long dirt driveway leading to a low rambler with an eggshell blue porch. Frances parked, and the boys followed her up the warped steps onto the porch.

“I thought I heard something.” An old lady with badly-dyed, orangish hair and a toothy smile came out. She eased the screen door shut behind her. “I almost stayed out back. But I thought, let me go and get some water and make sure that ain’t Frances.”

They hugged and fussed over each other in greeting.

“These are Cindy’s boys,” Frances said by way of introduction. “Koda and Donnie.” She patted Donnie on the head. “This one’s probably gonna be quiet now, but he fussed me to death all the way down. Told me I was driving so slow that time was passing him by.” The old ladies chuckled together and Donnie smirked.

“Mmhm.” The woman looked them over. “I’m your aunt Pearl. How old are y’all now?”

“I’m twelve and Donnie’s nine.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I was wondering when y’all was gonna come visit me. The last time I saw you, Koda, you weren’t knee high to a chicken. And Donnie, you weren’t even born yet.”

Never one to pass up an opportunity for historical enlightenment, Koda started asking his usual million questions, to Aunt Pearl’s great delight.

The quieter of the two, Donnie took in the scene around them. This late in the day the air was still and golden, and aside from the cicadas, totally silent. He was eyeing the thick stand of trees and high grass off to the side as likely places to find insects, when he noticed a thick line of reddish grit that ran off the porch and around the corner. He bent down to see what it was.

“Don’t you mess with that,” Frances said.

Donnie stirred it with a finger before straightening. “What is it?”

His grandma frowned, but Aunt Pearl seemed tickled. “It’s brick dust,” she said.

Donnie was used to the old folks teasing him, so he waited for a moment to see if she’d explain, but she just grinned. “What’s it for?” he asked.

“Keeps the ants away.”

Donnie was skeptical, but he had enough sense to know his limitations. “I never heard of that.”

The old ladies laughed. “When we were little girls we didn’t have bug spray,” Aunt Pearl said. “We had to make our own remedies. We were all-natural and organic before it was a thing. What you think about that?”

Donnie looked at the brick dust with newfound interest. “How does it work?”

“Oh, I don’t know that. But if you get some more for me and spread it around, you can take some home with you and test it. That sound fair?”

Donnie nodded.

“Come on, then.” Aunt Pearl ambled out into the yard with the boys in tow. “I got me a stockpile out here, but I’m running low. The wind and rain wash it away so you got to keep putting more down.” She picked up an empty pail and handed it to Donnie. “Y’all go over to Mr. Hammond’s next door, he always got a pile ground up. He’ll give you some.”

It was a long walk to Mr. Hammond’s, and as they went up the dirt driveway a thin old man came out from behind the house. A patch of cottony hair perched atop his otherwise bald head. Stooped as he was, he moved with surprising speed.

“What y’all boys want?” he said, wiping hands on the front of his jeans.

Koda spoke. “We came from next door. Our aunt told us to come over and get some brick dust.”

The man looked at them skeptically, but he grunted in what must have been assent, and led them behind the house. There were bricks stacked almost to Donnie’s eyes, and a pile of dust that came all the way up to his chest.

“You must have a lot of ants,” Koda said.

“Ants?” The old man scratched at his cotton patch.

“Brick dust keeps ants away.”

“Not ants,” the man said. “Haints. Ghosts.” Donnie felt something behind him and snapped his head around, which earned him a quick elbow from his brother. The old man didn’t notice. He rubbed his bald head, pursing his lips in thought. “Maybe keep ants away, too. Mr. Hammond don’t like them, neither.”

“You’re not Mr. Hammond?”

“No, no, no sir. I’m Harlowe. This Mr. Hammond’s plantation, I just work here.”

“Why’s he have so much brick dust?” Donnie asked, looking around.

Harlowe shrugged and gestured to the pile. “Go on and get you some if you want it. Got things to do—don’t need to be standing out here all day.”

While Donnie busied himself collecting the brick dust, Koda wandered off. A little ways beyond the brick pile was a graveyard of old machines. Nothing looked less than a hundred years old. There were old tractors with disintegrated tires, and even some half-rotted old wooden wagon wheels. He climbed up on what remained of a rusted-out, mule-drawn plow and got so wrapped up in what he was doing that he didn’t notice Harlowe approach.

”Get down from there!”

Startled, Koda slipped and gashed his ankle on a piece of frame. “Ow! Damnit!”

“Don’t be out here vandalizing things that don’t belong to you.” Harlowe squinted up at Koda from his twisted posture. “You wanna get lockjaw? Or gangrene? Wanna have to cut your foot off?”

Koda looked back at him wide-eyed.

“Do you?”

He shook his head.

“Well get down before you get hurt.”

“I was fine until you yelled at me,” Koda said, stepping down and twisting his leg to show a sticky trickle of red running from mid-calf down to the dirt.

Harlowe’s eyes widened. “Y’all got to go now,” he said, practically pushing Koda towards the driveway.

“Can I get a Band-aid first?” Koda asked. “I’m bleeding all over my shoes.”

“No. Y’all got to go.” Harlowe rushed them along, but Koda insisted on bandages, and he was bleeding pretty good by then.

Harlowe grimaced but told them to wait and disappeared. He came back a few minutes later with a bottle of alcohol and some bandages.

Koda winced and sucked his teeth when the alcohol touched the wound, but Harlowe just grunted. “That’s why you don’t need to be out here playing on things. Lucky it ain’t turpentine.” He screwed the cap back on and set it down. “Alright, y’all go on now,” he said. “Got what you came for; got yourself patched up.”

Before they’d taken a step, a rotund white man with a bald head and half-moon sweat stains under his armpits trundled down from the porch. “What’s happening here?” he asked.

“Nothing Mr. Hammond, sir,” Harlowe said quickly. “Miss Pearl sent these boys over for some brick dust. I was just sending them on their way before they get hurt playing on this old junk.”

Mr. Hammond looked Koda over. “Looks like this one already got hurt.” He handed each boy a cold grape soda. “Y’all thirsty? Ten dollars for the both.” He smiled. “I’ll put it on your tab.”

It was corny, but they laughed.

“Y’all kin to Miss Pearl?”

They both nodded.

“Well, I’m Mr. Hammond. This is my property y’all are standing on. Y’all just go jumping on everything you see when you visit someone?”

They shook their heads.

“Got more sense than that, right? Y’all know what liability means?” He paused for a moment to see if they’d actually answer. “It means being responsible for people getting hurt. And I’m not accepting liability for y’all, you understand?”

“It’s just a little cut,” Koda mumbled.

“This time. Next time might be worse.” He pushed his glasses back up and fixed them with his most intimidating look, until he was startled by a cawing crow. “Alright, y’all go on now.” He gave all three of them a weighing look, then turned back towards the house. “Give Miss Pearl my regards. And Harlowe, you make sure them seed hoppers are locked down.”

It felt even hotter during their walk back, and Aunt Pearl didn’t have much to offer in the way of refreshments at the house. She laughed when they asked for the WiFi.

“Y’all want something why don’t you go to town and get it? Get those young legs some work.” Town, in this case, meant the food court at the big gas station they’d passed near the I-85 ramp. It was apparently a hangout for the few local teenagers.

“That place was like five miles away,” Donnie protested.

“Y’all are young,” Pearl said. “Ain’t gonna hurt you. I wish I could walk five miles.”

“But it’s gonna be dark soon.”

“I thought you weren’t scared of the dark,” Frances said, and she and Aunt Pearl looked at them expectantly.

∙ ∙ ∙

Dusk had settled and the moon was already high when they left the house. Koda immediately detoured to the back yard. “Where you going?” Donnie asked. “Aunt Pearl said go to the crossroads and turn right.”

“You wanna walk five miles?” Koda said. “I’m cutting across Hammond’s farm.”

Donnie trotted after him. “But what if he shoots us or something? He didn’t want us there before. Maybe we shouldn’t—”

“We’re not even gonna see him. We won’t be creating any liabilities.” He set off knowing Donnie would follow. “Don’t you want to catch some bugs? Some tobacco hornworms?”

“It’s too late in the summer,” Donnie muttered.

As they neared the property the scrub thinned out and the trees were full of crows. An old split-rail fence marked the border, and on the other side, scarecrows stood every fifty feet or so. The cawing rose to a fever pitch and crows peeled from the trees in bunches. They flew in every direction, but none crossed the fence.

Donnie watched the display with unease and put a couple of rocks in his pocket in case they came any closer. Scarecrows were obviously meant to keep birds away, but these crows avoided the property like the fence was electric. It was strange.

“Maybe we should go back,” he said, but Koda was already climbing over. Donnie considered going back alone, but it was dark, and despite what he’d told his grandma, he was still scared.

He scrambled over the fence and hurried to catch up to his brother, studying the nearest scarecrow with distaste. Even in the thin moonlight, they could see that there was something wrong about it. It looked too real. This one was a middle-aged white man with an unforgiving expression and pale gray eyes that practically glowed in the dark. A frown was evident above the thick, chest-length beard, and deep lines etched his sunburned face.

He was so realistic that both boys’ immediate reaction upon catching his eyes was to avert their own. Donnie found himself tensing for the scarecrow to move or speak. He squinted, searching for something to confirm that it wasn’t real. The scarecrow wore a Confederate cavalry uniform—light gray pants and matching jacket with yellow stars on the sleeves.

Koda tried to pop a brass button from the soldier’s jacket, but it was secured more firmly than he expected.

“Just leave it,” Donnie said, but Koda took his keys out and used a sharp edge to saw through the dark stitching.

The button tore free. He turned it over in his fingers before sticking it in his pocket. “Contraband.”

Rather than pants and a shirt, the next scarecrow wore a khaki-colored robe and a pillowcase hood with holes for the eyes, mouth, and nose. The mouth hole was big enough to see his chapped lips and crooked, tobacco-stained teeth.

Koda recoiled. “Uggh. Why would anyone make a scarecrow like that? A redneck scarecrow. It’s gross.” His sneer softened after a moment and he turned to Donnie with a grin. “It’s not a scarecrow, it’s a scare negro.” He didn’t get the laugh he expected.

“I think we should go back,” Donnie said , but after a moment, Koda marched on.

Between the boys and the paved road that was their destination, there were two rectangular fields of tobacco with a dirt road running between them. They’d have to cut across or go around. Walking around was a longer distance, but going through the tall tobacco would take more time, not to mention being much creepier. Donnie expected Koda to insist on walking through the rows just to be difficult, but to his great relief, he and Koda agreed for once.

Koda was quieter than usual as they started around the perimeter—those faces had shaken him up more than he wanted to admit. He didn’t even tease Donnie for jumping when a grasshopper startled him. They were both on edge. After a couple minutes, Koda turned abruptly, scanning the darkness behind them. “I thought I heard something.” He watched for a few more moments, then shook his head and set off again. They hadn’t gone ten feet before Donnie squawked and ducked into the tobacco.

Koda followed. “What happened?”

“Someone’s behind us. I heard something jangly, like keys or something.” He peered around frightfully. “I told you we shouldn’t go this way.”

“Alright, just relax,” Koda said. “Pretend we’re on a secret mission and someone’s after us. Now we gotta escape and make it to our extraction point.” The mention of their familiar play calmed Donnie a bit, but not much. ”We’ll cut to the dirt road and follow it out to the main road. Just keep quiet and stay close.”

As they crept through the tobacco, the once silent air filled with sound. From the road came the snorts of horses and the squeak and jangle of carts. All around were muffled words and the thwack thwack of machetes against stalks of tobacco. Koda stopped just short of the dirt road and peeked out.

“They’re harvesting,” he whispered.

“At night?”

Koda shrugged. “I don’t get it either, but they are.”

“Someone’s gonna catch us. We should’ve gone the way Aunt Pearl said—”

“No one’s gonna catch us,” Koda said. “Listen, there’s a mule cart coming by. When it passes, we’re gonna creep out and follow it straight to the road. Alright? No one’s gonna see us, just stay close.”

Donnie nodded.

“Ok, get ready.”

Seconds ticked by, then Koda slipped out and Donnie followed like shadows. They ran in a crouch, following the sound of the cart in the dark.

Koda glanced back to check on Donnie, then snapped around again in alarm. He’d almost missed another man, creeping up behind them in the dark, his face red and sneering.

Koda snatched Donnie back into the tobacco and took off with the man close behind. They ran down a row, then climbed over the mounded dirt into another row, then another. No matter which way they went, the sounds of people harvesting kept getting closer. They hid between the tightly packed stalks and tried not to breathe heavily, listening for footsteps above the chopping sounds on every side. They’d lost the man chasing them, but harvesters surrounded them.

“Koda, I’m scared.”

“I know. Just stick close. We’re gonna get out of here.” Suddenly, a clump of stalks parted and they stood face to face with a harvesting gang—five men with machetes for cutting and two young boys to gather it up.

Koda turned to run, but the man closest grabbed his wrist. “Whoa, there!” the man said in a loud whisper, holding a finger to his lips. Judging by how wide his eyes were, he might’ve been as scared as Koda. Koda relaxed a little and the man let him go.

The man ducked his head and looked around. “What y’all boys doing here?” He wore overalls and a straw hat, with a red bandanna around his neck. The others had similar attire—overalls or work pants rolled at the ankles and belted at the waist with a length of cord. They were all barefoot except one. Donnie felt nervous when they gathered around, but he didn’t sense malice—they were concerned. It helped that the man speaking looked a lot like their Uncle Kendric.

“Y’all got to go before the overseer see you,” the man said. He nodded towards Koda, “You especially. Overseer see you, he gonna bring you back and have you picking tobacco like us.”

“Help us!” Koda said. “We climbed in over the fence with all the scarecrows. Help us get back!”

The men shook their heads in unison. “We can’t go over by them scarecrows. Them scarecrows what’s keeping us in.” He tilted his head to Koda. “You too, now.”

One of the others pointed at Donnie. “He can go that way. You can’t.”

“Why not?” Koda said. “I’m not scared of them.”

“You should be. You ever seen a scarecrow look like that?”

Koda had never seen a scarecrow of any kind before. He shook his head.

“Them things ain’t scarecrows,” the man muttered. “Not just scarecrows, anyway. They’re…” he thought about it. “I don’t know what the hell you supposed to call them—Voodoo dolls or something—they hold the overseers’ souls. That’s why they look the way they do. Nobody just made up those faces...they real. There’s a curse here, binds us to the land. Binds them overseers, too. And you closer to death than you know.”

“What’s that mean?” Koda asked.

“You got blood in this soil,” he said. “Them overseers can touch you now. You just a wrong step away.”

“I don’t believe in curses,” Koda said.

“I ain’t believe in curses either when I was your age,” the first man said. “It was two little boys I used to play with who first told me about it. They swore it was true, but they also told me they remembered the Yankee soldiers coming through here—right before they remembered drowning in a pond and watching people pull their bodies out. I didn’t believe a lick of it.” He nodded towards one of the young boys on the crew. “Well, they still here.”

Even though they were outside, it was suddenly hard to breathe. What these men were saying was impossible.

As if he read his mind, one of the boys got up in Donnie’s face. Donnie felt a chill and retreated to give him space, but the boy backed him up against the stalks. Donnie remembered the brick dust and tried to reach into his pocket to see if maybe he’d saved some, but his hand shook too hard. The boy leaned in closer, grinning toothily. Then he walked right through him.

Donnie’s knees went weak and he sat heavily into the dirt. Koda’s legs folded beneath him, too. They were surrounded by ghosts.

“Y’all don’t need to be scared,” the man said. “Not of us, anyway. Ain’t nobody here gonna hurt you.” For a moment, the only sound was the boys gasping for air. “Breathe deep,” the man urged. “We ain’t gonna hurt you. Don’t want nothing from you.”

When no one made a move towards them, the boys calmed down.

“My name’s Orpheus,” said the man who’d been speaking.

He reminded Koda of one of his uncles—dark skin, sharp, kind eyes. The initial fear at encountering a ghost was subsiding. These guys felt like family. “You’re ghosts.”

The man nodded. “And still here picking tobacco.”

Koda started to say something but stopped. Finally, he asked, “Why?”

Orpheus plucked at his shirt, struggling with where to start. At last, he said, “This place been home to so much despair, and misery, and greed, the curse just rose up.” He motioned some of the others to go make sure they were still alone.

“We don’t know exactly when the curse started, but these boys drowned around 1865, so we know it was here by then at least. This land been a tobacco plantation since 1709. That’s ten generations of people toiling and bleeding and suffering. Ten generations of despair.” He spit in the dust. “That’s what made it.”

“Can’t you escape?” Koda asked. His voice grew soft and wispy. “You said the overseers’ spirits are in the scarecrows, so why not just destroy the scarecrows?” It came out less like a question than a plea.

A clamor arose before Orpheus quieted everyone down. “Because our souls are in the tobacco—in the plants and the seeds like the overseers’ are in the scarecrows. And despite what they are, the scarecrows protect us from the birds devouring our souls. So, sick as it is, we gotta keep them scarecrows in good repair. Sending them sons of bitches to hell would feel good—but we wouldn’t be long after.”

It took Donnie two tries to get the words past the lump in his throat. “Why don’t you just take the seeds and leave?”

Orpheus scratched in the dirt and a crease appeared on his forehead. “For one thing, we can’t touch that hopper where he stores it. So much brick dust around that thing we can’t get within fifty yards. And even if we ran away, overseers and night riders all over this place. Won’t get far before they drag you back. Couldn’t just leave even when we was alive. Most of us here was sharecroppers. Owner let you stay here long as you tend the crop. He give you clothes and tools and seed, all on credit. You raise the crop, he sells it, and you get a share of what it makes and pay him back from that. Problem is, no matter how much you pay, it’s never as much as he say you owe. And you can’t leave until you square.”

He looked around to make sure we were still unseen before he continued. “My father tried to take me and my momma and my brothers away when I was sixteen. It was Daddy Hammond’s place then. Now it belong to Daddy Hammond’s grandson. That was right at the beginning of planting season, 1919.” He got a distant look, but kept going. “Tried to get a few other fellas to come too, but they were too scared. Got as far as the Boydton Road before Daddy Hammond’s boys caught us.”

Donnie had become very aware of an immense tightness in his chest. He almost didn’t want to ask the next question, but he had to. “What happened?”

“We got into a big scrap and my brother busted one of them peckerwoods’ teeth out. They shot him dead right there in the street. My momma came at the man and they shot her, too.

“We ran, but they caught us and brought us back here. Tied me to a wagon wheel and peeled my back like a runaway. Made everybody watch. Then they hung my father right in the front yard.

“‘Anybody else wanna settle their debts, come talk to me,’ Daddy Hammond said. And he waited, as if anybody was really gonna say something. Then he said, ‘Get on back to work then. Tobacco don’t plant itself.’”

Orpheus sucked his teeth. “Spilling our blood on this soil tied us to it. If you bleed on this ground and you still here come dark, the curse can touch you.” He reached out to Donnie, but his hand passed through. “You ain’t spill no blood here.” He turned to Koda, “But you…” He grabbed him and pulled him to his feet.

Koda’s eyes went wide and he swallowed loudly.

“You see? We stuck here now because we died here, still in debt. Can’t leave until we pay, and we ain’t never gonna pay back whatever they say we owe. But you two still have hope.” He pointed at Donnie. “Don’t spill no blood here.” Then at Koda, “And don’t you die here.”

“I ain’t gonna die,” Koda said. “But even if I did, I don’t owe nobody nothing.”

“Five dollars,” Donnie said quietly.

Koda turned to look at him.

“When Mr. Hammond gave us the soda, he said ten dollars for the both of us. We each owe five dollars.”

Remembrance bloomed on Koda’s face. “A soda? He can’t enslave me over a soda. And he was kidding, anyway.”

Orpheus frowned. “Ain’t no kidding, boy. Y’all got to go.” He pointed to one of his companions. “Bobby, come give this boy your hat.”

Bobby grumbled, but he handed it over. They fixed Koda and Donnie up to make them blend in. “Now just walk on that way and keep your head down,” Orpheus instructed. “Straight for that nearest scarecrow, like you going to fix it up. You see any riders before you over that fence, you make yourself busy fixing them scarecrows. And don’t look none of them white men in the eye—they ain’t like it when we was alive, and they damn sure don’t like it now. When the coast is clear, get over that fence and stay low.”

“And leave my hat,” Bobby said.

The boys headed toward the fence. Resisting the urge to run took every shred of determination they had, but they did it. There were riders atop horses in the distance. They looked in their direction more than once, but none came over. Then they were over the fence and off the plantation. They crouched low and moved off into the darkest shadows they could find. Koda was leading the way until he stopped abruptly and stepped back.

“What?” Donnie whispered.

Koda didn’t answer, he just turned and pushed him. “Run!” He took off like a shot with Donnie right behind him, and the jangling harness and clomp clomp of a horse gaining on them.

To their right, the ground fell off sharply into a wide streambed, then ran into a thicket on the other side. Koda turned for it, hoping the rider wouldn’t see the drop until too late. “Jump!” he yelled as he leapt the stream and ran for the thicket.

Donnie could barely see. Hanging vines and brambles whipped his arms and face as he ran into the thicket, but he didn’t dare slow down.

Koda snatched him to the ground and clamped a hand over his mouth before he could scream. This close, Donnie could see Koda’s saucered eyes wide with terror, nostrils flaring from the sprint. They were in a little hollow under a briar patch, too deep for a horse to follow.

Donnie nodded and Koda removed his hand. He held his finger to his lips. Donnie looked around, trying to see who was chasing them.

They stayed absolutely motionless for at least ten minutes, before Koda crawled out, motioning for Donnie to stay put. He reappeared a moment later and gestured for Donnie to follow. “We’re off the plantation now, remember they can’t touch you.”

Donnie clutched him frantically. “Wait, don’t go!”

“I’m not gonna leave you,” Koda hissed. “But we can’t go out this way, they’re patrolling. We’re going back the way we came. Through the field in the back.”

“What is it?” Donnie asked.

“You didn’t see him? It was that scarecrow. The Confederate soldier.” Something moved in the darkness. They both spun to look, but it was just wind rustling the leaves. Then the Confederate burst forth on horseback from behind the thicket.

Koda ran. The Confederate chased him, but he changed direction too fast for the horse and darted away. It didn’t matter. The horseman’s net fell over Koda and he went down. Donnie watched with terror as the Confederate trussed his brother up and dragged him off by his feet, back onto the plantation.

The Confederate hauled Koda, still fighting, to the curing barn, and Harlowe stepped up to take the reins as he swung from the saddle. “Run and tell Mr. Hammond I caught a living boy. See what he wants to do with him.”

“Yes, colonel.” Harlowe turned to go.

“Wait a minute,” the colonel said. He shrugged out of his uniform jacket and handed it to Harlowe, then turned his attention to Koda. “Got something of mine, don’t you, boy?” He cracked Koda’s head with his revolver, then fished the stolen button from Koda’s pocket and pressed it into Harlowe’s hand. “Sew this back on for me. Thieving boy likes souvenirs, but I’mma give him something better to remember me by.”

Donnie stayed hidden in the briar patch until the horseman was gone. At first, he worried that Koda would give him up. But as much as Koda screamed, he never said Donnie’s name. Once his fear thawed, Donnie made his way quietly to the barn where they’d taken Koda. He hid in the shadows by an outbuilding to survey his surroundings and immediately wished he hadn’t. The line of scarecrows started no more than fifty feet away. He stayed until he’d worked up enough courage, then he crossed the yard, nudged the barn door, and peeked inside.

The heat took his breath and watered his eyes. The fire blazing in an open hearth in the center made the barn an oven, and rows of wooden shelves were piled with tobacco laid out to dry. More yellowed leaves hung from long sticks dangling from the ceiling, and two men moved them around , shirtless and dripping with sweat. Donnie couldn’t see the horseman who’d captured Koda, but he heard him whistling somewhere in the back.

Koda sat on the ground beside the hearth, hands tied behind his back and secured to a shelf leg. For the first time in Donnie’s life, he was as scared to go inside as he was to be outside in the dark. He looked to make sure nothing was sneaking up behind him, then took a deep breath and slipped in and behind one of the shelves.

Bruised but unbowed, Koda tried rocking the rack back and forth to free his hands, but couldn’t get enough leverage. He managed to knock some tobacco from the top shelf and the colonel came over to investigate. “You ain’t getting out of here so long as I’m the one watching you,” he said. “If you wanna get loose, you better hope there’s an army.”

No sooner had he spoken than the barn door squealed on its hinges. After what seemed like forever, a small, sweaty face peered around the corner. One of the drowned boys.

The colonel barked a laugh and smacked Koda’s head. “Thought you was about to get some help, didn’t you?” He laughed again. “For a second, I thought so, too. I actually held my breath.”

The door swung all the way in. Orpheus, Bobby, and at least a dozen others stood there, holding machetes.

“Turn around and get back out in the field,” the colonel said. The heat in his voice matched the heat in the barn. He took a step towards the open door. “I’m not gon’ say it again.”

“No sir,” Orpheus said. “Not until that boy go free.”

The colonel stared, furious and in disbelief, then started hollering for help.

“Don’t have to be no trouble here,” Orpheus called. “Just let that boy go. He don’t belong here.”

The colonel hollered again. Mr. Hammond came rumbling in through a side door, red-faced and panting, followed by Harlowe and more than a few of his overseers.

“What’s the meaning of this?” He turned about. “Who let these niggers out the field?” The enslaved outnumbered the slavers two-to-one. “Harlowe, run get help,” Mr. Hammond said, and Harlowe hurried dutifully out the side door. For a moment, the only sounds were the crackling of the fire and Harlowe’s scurrying through the yard.

Orpheus’s men surged forward with a roar. Hammond’s men rushed to meet them. With everyone distracted by the fighting, Donnie crept over to Koda. He pushed with all his strength and just barely managed to tip the curing rack.

It was enough.

Koda slipped his wrists free and Donnie pulled him to his feet.

They raced around the corner and right into the colonel. Before they could run, he snatched Koda and tried grabbing Donnie, but his hand passed through. Undeterred, he dragged Koda by the neck into the middle of the barn and put a pistol to his head. He whistled loud enough to get everyone’s attention.

“This what y’all fighting for?” he bellowed. “You want me to let this little nigger go?” All the fighting stopped. “If you don’t get your asses in the field, this nigger gonna be here forever.”

Nobody moved.

The colonel cocked the hammer. “It’s your call, boss,” he said to Mr. Hammond.

Hammond stumbled over to the center of the barn where the colonel was standing. Spit flew from his mouth when he spoke. “There’s gonna be repercussions for this,” he said, taking everyone in with a scowl. “If you think you had it bad before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

He paused to gather himself and wiped the sweat from his bright red face. “I told the boy to get off the property before sundown, but he didn’t listen. I’d even have been inclined to let him go before all this. But now…” He shook his head forcefully. “I can’t abide such insurrection. Clearly you haven’t seen enough examples. But we gon’ fix all that.”

He turned and slapped Koda hard across the face.

Donnie summoned all the courage he had and pulled out one of the rocks he’d stuffed in his pocket. “Let him go!” His voice came out squeakier than he intended.

The colonel turned and took him in. For a moment he just stared, then he laughed.

Donnie raised his arm and set his feet.

The colonel chuckled. “You think you can hit me? You can’t.”

Donnie judged the weight of the rock and let it fly. Every eye tracked its flight. The colonel was right. It sailed wide of him by nearly a foot, but connected with Mr. Hammond’s forehead with a loud crack.

Hammond screamed and dropped like a sack of potatoes. As he lay moaning in the dirt, he put his hand to where Donnie’s rock had opened a gash. A purple bruise was already forming. Blood welled between his sausage fingers and a garnet stream stretched down and splashed the ground. Wordlessly, the colonel helped him up.

Mr. Hammond’s face was ashen as he stared at the red puddle at his feet.

His blood had spilled.

The colonel had been able to touch him. Orpheus and his crew all took a step closer and Hammond backed away.

A commotion arose outside and Harlowe rushed back into the barn, leading another twenty slavers who ran to Hammond’s defense. Orpheus and his men visibly deflated.

“Y’all tried it,” Hammond said, still holding his head. “Surprised it took y’all this long. But that’s gonna be it, boys.”

Then Harlowe spoke.

“Not yet.” He’d moved over in front of the hearth and pulled something from his pocket. It glowed between his fingers in the reflected firelight—the button from the colonel’s uniform. Donnie remembered Orpheus’s words—those scarecrows were invested with the slavers’ souls. How much of it was in that button?

Harlowe had the colonel’s undivided attention. “What are you doing with that?”

“Something I’ve wanted to do for a long goddamn time.” Harlowe tossed the button into the fire.

Nothing happened.

The colonel snorted. The flames took on a green glow around the edges. He went wide-eyed, then doubled over and fell to the ground, as did six more gray-clad ghosts—his command, apparently. The colonel looked up. He shrieked wordlessly as his skin and everything beneath it rapidly melted away. The hearth exploded. Flaming bits of wood and brick shot out and ignited the dry tobacco and wooden poles. The mass of enslaved spirits rushed in to battle the newly-arrived slavers and take out the now-vulnerable Hammond.

Donnie snatched one of the burning poles and dashed from the barn. Flames licked his hands and whipped in his face but he held tight and ran to the nearest scarecrow, sending it up like kindling. A shriek came from behind. He turned to see a pursuing ghost fall, writhing. More came, with Orpheus’s men tangled up with them. The scarecrow he’d just lit blazed wildly and he looked to the next, but his pole had burned too far to hold. He dropped it and scanned frantically for something else to use as a torch before the ghosts were upon him, his panic made worse by the sudden cacophony of crows.

Crows.

With the scarecrow gone there was nothing to stop them. He couldn’t see them in the dark, but their cawing grew louder.

“Protect the seeds!” Donnie screamed. “Orpheus, protect the seeds! Crows!” But it was too late. Before anyone could move towards the seed hopper, the birds were there. Swift, and blacker than night, a midnight-winged pair swept down over the flaming scarecrow, carrying sticks in their beaks. They lit them in the flames, then flew into the darkness, visible only by the fire they carried.

Donnie was heartbroken—they were so close. When Hammond went down he thought they had a chance, but now this. Helplessly, he watched the crows fly in the direction of the seed hopper. Nothing could stop them.

Then the next scarecrow exploded into flame. The thought came to Donnie that he must have been a general, because when he went down, at least twenty went with him.

Cawing, cawing, cawing. The raucousness intensified and a wave of crows swept through the opening the first two had created, headed straight for the seed hopper. Orpheus and his men ran for the seeds, screaming and fighting the birds with anything they could find, but there were just too many. They broke into the hopper and gorged, a swirling mass of black feathers and beaks.

The battle was lost. The ghosts stopped fighting. Some stood listlessly, others collapsed.

Donnie rushed over, screaming and kicking and lashing out with a stick. “Don’t give up! Keep fighting!” Koda ran up and helped scatter birds until they were out of breath, but they were the only ones. Donnie finally slumped over, exhausted, tears hot in his eyes. He wiped his face and turned away when Koda came to put his arm around his shoulder.

Every one of the enslaved had gone absolutely still. They rapidly faded away, silently, peacefully. Such grace stunned the brothers. Even in destruction, they went in peace. Faces that hadn’t smiled in a hundred years split into grins and wetness glistened on cheeks. Donnie cried and Koda dropped to his knees.

“Don’t fret.” Orpheus smiled, his voice strong and clear. “They lied about the crows, too. These birds ain’t our destruction. They’re taking us home.”

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT GREGORY NEIL HARRIS

Gregory Neil Harris is a Maryland native who recently migrated from Brooklyn to Atlanta, where he enjoys playing guitar, photographing bugs, and finding echoes of post-Reconstruction history. He has previously published work at Typishly and Chaleur Magazine, and is currently working on a breakthrough method to recall his dreams with better clarity—and if that works, a novel.

RECLAIMING TESS

By Brittany Smith // 6829 words

“It shouldn’t be you.”

Willow’s voice is hoarse, rattling against her bones and sallow skin, as it escapes up her throat and out her cracked lips. Mother moves to the side of the hospital bed, a bottle of water in her hands. She offers it to Willow, who ignores her and continues glaring at me. Her eyes, grey and wispy from cataracts, attempt to burn holes in me until I’m ash before her once again. But I stand in the doorway, blocking the view of the hallway, and stare back at Willow, Mother’s mother.

When I was younger, she was Grandmother most times and Grandma during those sparse moments when she was nice. But now she’s just Willow, the family’s matriarch, the head acolyte connected to a lesser god’s magic, the woman dying from an incurable disease. And I will be her replacement, much to her displeasure.

She shakes her head, or attempts to. The movement is too much for her. She’s grown weak over the past few weeks, not just from the sickness, but from her powers slowly escaping, dragging across spacetime to reach me. It’s the only thing we’ve shared in years.

There’s a five-letter word in the depths of Willow’s eyes begging to escape from her mouth and fill the room. She’s called me it before. I’m sure she would call me it again over and over behind my back, to anyone who would listen. Family, friends, strangers. It didn’t matter. Willow wanted everyone to know that I wasn’t her first choice. Or her last.

Like she said, it shouldn’t have been me.

But it is me and she’s powerless to change that fact, something that fills me with pride. I keep that emotion buried because Mother is here and she wants me to be civil, which means taking the brunt of Willow’s anger and bottling up everything I want to say. And like the good daughter I am, I comply because it’s how I was brought up. Let grown folks speak their mind, no matter how their words may hurt or make you hate the deepest part of yourself.

I sigh and run my palm over my locs, glancing towards the window. It’s sunny outside, despite the mid-January chill in the air. I want to be out there, walking through a park, lost in thought on what to do next. Wondering when Willow will finally die and I can inherit the last bits of power that she’s stubbornly clinging to.

“How did you do it?” Willow asks.

“Mom, please.”

Willow’s eyes snap towards Mother, who stumbles back on her feet, still unnerved by those pupils. Mother sets the water bottle on the tray in front of Willow and retreats to the stiff sofa pushed against the wall. She glances at me and smiles, encouraging me to step into the room and embrace Willow. Start the type of relationship she always wanted us to have since I was first born. And I want to give in to her silent request because I want to see her happy, even if it meant swallowing all of the pain Willow has inflicted on me for years. I want to make Mother happy, even if it means denying the parts of myself that Willow despised and openly mocked.

Mother is caught between our battles, though she sticks closer to Willow’s side than mine. It should upset me, but I learned long ago that Mother, like so many others, saw sweetness in Willow that wasn’t really there. Or maybe it was never directed towards me because, no matter what, I’d never be enough for her.

She has other grandchildren. Ones who are opposite me in many, important ways. Straight. “Healthy,” aka not fat. Polished and well-kempt. They’re presentable to the public, easy for society to digest. I was the outlier. I didn’t like being separate from the rest of the family, having little contact with them outside of Willow’s home. But what could I do?

“I just came to check on you,” I say. Willow’s eyes narrow. “Heard you’ve been having a bad reaction to some of your medicine.” Heard you nearly died, but dammit you’re still here.

“That’s sweet of you Tess,” Mother says, clasping her hands together in front of her chest. But Willow doesn’t respond. Only reaches for the bottle of water and takes a small, slow sip. I shift on my feet, needing and wanting to escape.

I want to ask if there’s anything I can do for her, make it as genuine sounding as possible. But there’s only one thing that would make her happy and I’m not willing to give it to her. I remain silent, slightly sweating under the buzz of the fluorescent lighting and wait for this visit (more Mother’s idea than my own) to end.

Willow puckers her mouth and on instinct I flinch, a reaction to all those times she fixed her mouth in a similar way before tearing into me for something minor.

But she surprises me by saying, “I’m still here and feeling much better. Thank you.”

I’m sure there’s something buried in her words that will strike me later in the day when I have time to mull over them. But for now, I don’t care. I release a breath and force myself to smile.

“You may even get out of here soon,” Mother says beaming at Willow.

“I’m sure I will.”

A nurse taps my shoulder and I step to the side, still mostly out in the hallway, to let her enter. She says it’s time for Willow’s morning pills. I seize the opportunity presented to me.

“I have work in a little. I should get going.”

Mother looks sad, maybe because I’ll no longer be a buffer between her and Willow’s foul mood. Willow looks bored, unconcerned with my announcement or the nurse trying to hand her pills in a plastic cup. I hover for too long and finally Willow looks at me with those cloudy grey eyes and this time, I don’t flinch. Surprisingly.

“You can’t stay longer?” Mother asks.

Willow continues to stare. I could stay just to annoy her. I don’t have work today or for the rest of the week. But I also want to escape. I’m tired from playing nice to someone who should love me but doesn’t.

I adjust my jacket. “Take care,” I say to Willow. “I’ll visit again when I can.”

“Take care as well. Until next time.” It’s an automated reply. Words we both don’t mean. But it’s convincing and Mother looks hopeful. I want to throw up.

∙ ∙ ∙

Willow wasn’t the only person who believed I wasn’t worthy of her mantle once she passed. There are plenty in the family shocked at the notion that I would inherit Willow’s powers, but they whisper and gossip among themselves, cutting stares in my direction when I’m near. Mother is one of those that secretly hates my impending inheritance. It hurts.

But there are only two people who openly state their displeasure. Willow, who is bound to a hospital bed and can’t move far without assistance. And Lucas, the man currently leaning against my beatdown Subaru, my cousin and the oldest grandchild. The person who should become what Willow once was. The person meant to follow the plan Willow created long ago when our god first approached and bonded with our family.

I see him as soon as I step off the elevator. He’s staring directly at me, a slight frown on his face, his dark eyes narrowed to slits. Lucas took our many childhood lessons to heart, never daring to leave the house in anything less than his finest clothing. He always presents his best self to the world. He’s dressed in a black suit with matching button up shirt. Impeccable, like he just arrived from the barber with a clean shape up and close shave along his strong jaw. He sighs and pushes away from my car, drawing himself up to his full six-foot six inches height. The hairs on the back of my neck stand erect. He’s pissed.

“Tess.” My name is an insult coming out his mouth. He and I were close when we were kids. I looked up to him and followed him around everywhere. But we grew apart as he delved into his studies and training, and I was left in the shadows to follow whatever whims suited me. I long for the days when we were friendlier. Now we’re reduced to hard, cold stares, tight lipped smiles as greetings.

“Hey, Lucas. How’s it going? Here to see Wil-Grandmother?” He used to be ‘Luca’ to me, my favorite nickname for him. Only I was allowed to call him that. Now he’s always Lucas, just like grandmother is always Willow.

It sucks.

I keep several feet between us. I’ve been training, but my few years of weightlifting and endurance building is paltry compared to Lucas’ multiple decades in the gym every day. My magic gives me an advantage. But I don’t want to fight him. Not here in this parking garage, several feet below the hospital. Not during a family gathering. Not anywhere, anytime. I can’t help it. In some ways, he’s still Luca to me. Even if my name is a curse in his mind.

“I need to speak to you first,” he says.

“About?”

He stomps towards me. “Don’t play dumb. How did you do it? Why? Why did you do it?”

His deep voice echoes off the concrete walls. I don’t have the defenses to deal with Willow and Lucas in the same day. I’m tired. I want to retreat. Maybe this is why I shouldn’t have the powers. I’m still a kid in their eyes. I still feel like a kid, surrounded by bullies on the schoolyard. I can raise shaky fists to defend myself, but they’re meaner, tougher, not afraid to get hurt. They’re better. Not like me. A fact I’ve been reminded of nearly every day of my life.

I stammer. Falter. I can’t answer his question other than to say I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. Just like I don’t know why I was never good enough for Willow. Or why Lucas looks like he wants to break me. Or why Mother can’t see how much this family, her family, hurts me every time I’m near them. I don’t know why!

The air chills around us as my magic seeps out. Alarms go off and I glance around, watching as cars change colors and shapes. A silver sedan is now a black coupe. A motorcycle shifts into a wide minivan. The concrete beneath our feet goes from a drab grey to a pitch black. Cracks form in the ceiling and I step back. This is my doing, but I struggle to control it.

Lucas grits his teeth, glares and grips my shoulders so tight I feel his nails threaten to break my skin.

“Calm down before you bring everything down on us.”

And I try. I shut my eyes and take four deep breaths. My hands stops shaking. The alarms die off one by one and when I open my eyes everything is as it once was. I think I’m okay, or at least, okay enough to get away from Lucas.

“I have to go,” I say, side stepping him and pulling my jacket closer to my body. “Willow is still awake if you want to see her.”

He grips my arm at the elbow, twisting hard. “Why? Why did you betray us? Are you that vindictive? Why do you hate us?”

“I don’t,” I say, which is true, because despite everything I love my family. Even Willow. A little.

He lets me go with a shove that’s strong enough to push me into the Jeep across from us. The back-window cracks. He glowers at me. I stare at the ramp leading to the exit. I feel him mulling over what to say next. But he straightens, pulls down the bottom of his blazer, smooths out the wrinkles and adjusts his tie.

Then he spits on the ground between us and walks to the elevator. I wait until I hear the chime of the elevator’s arrival and the doors open and close before walking to my car, rubbing my sore shoulder.

∙ ∙ ∙

I hit the ground hard and squint at the blazing sun overhead. There’s clapping, the audience on the sidelines shows approval and awe for the move that sent me falling back. I roll over to my side, wincing as a stitch blossoms in my side. I’m slow to get to my feet and when I’m finally standing again, I feel woozy, like the ground and sky are spinning in opposite directions. I stagger back, expecting a strong hand to reach out and hold me steady. But my opponent, Luca, is preoccupied.

Grandmother sits under the shade of a tree. It’s a hot day, the high projected to reach close to 95 or 96. Her eyes are hidden behind large sunglasses, but I know she’s paid careful attention to our sparring.

“Good job Lucas,” she says. “I see the improvement. You’re getting faster. More control over your movements. And…” She trails off and I feel her eyes slide over to me. She puckers her lips. I shrink into myself. “Your cousin didn’t even land a hit.”

My face burns from embarrassment and I look away, rocking on my heels. Someone snickers behind me.

She finishes her glass of sweet tea and stands. “That’s enough for today.” She waves Luca over and he hops off the platform, sprinting towards her. She slides an arm around his shoulders and leads him back inside her home. Luca glances over his shoulder at me. This isn’t the first time he’s won against me. It’s essentially a fact that he’ll always win because it’s what Grandmother wants. Luca and I were raised to always give in to her wishes.

He’s still staring. I smile, though it’s weak. I feel my tears coming in quick, and mouth, It’s okay. It’s enough for him and he turns back to Willow.

It’s Saturday and while my friends from school play together and venture over to the mall, I spend the day at my Grandmother’s home studying and training. It’s been my routine since I was ten. Arrive in the morning and listen to the history of Grandmother’s bond with Rust. Learn more about magic that we can’t wield until Grandmother names one of us as her successor. Break for lunch at one. Then practice our fighting techniques, learning new, more complicated moves and positions as we grow older. The day ends with sparring matches as we try to prove to Grandmother and possibly Rust that we’re worthy. There are ten grandkids fighting to outshine each other, but we all know who Grandmother most closely watches.

I’m alone outside and I wipe my tears with tightly closed fists. I’m thirteen, about to turn fourteen in a few weeks. I’m too old to throw a tantrum after a loss and my family has stopped coming to comfort me. I know that in a few minutes, my mother will come out, car keys in hand and usher me away from everyone else.

Dinner will be served in a few hours, but Mother and I rarely stay for it. I don’t know if it’s because she knows I don’t want to sit among a bunch of people who always cheer as I hit the ground, or if she’s embarrassed that I can never seem to stand up for long during a match.

“I didn’t think it was that bad,” a voice says.

I look up at the balcony that wraps around the house and spot a dark figure peering down at the makeshift arena. He sits under the shade of the awning that extends from the roof, keeping most of his body hidden in shadows. But his long legs dangle over the balcony’s edge and he kicks them in the air. “You’ll get him one day.”

I’ve rarely spoken to Rust, Grandmother keeps him close. I’m surprised he’s not near her now as she basks in Luca’s performance. He should want to be by Luca’s side so they can discuss their plans for when they bond.

I hear him chuckle. “Chin up, Tess,” he says. In a wisp of smoke, he’s gone.

Mother comes out the back door then and asks if I’m ready to go. I’m still staring at the balcony.

“Yeah, I’m ready,” I say, nodding.

∙ ∙ ∙

There’s only one place to go after an encounter with Willow and my family. I pull into the parking lot of Schmidt’s Diner and turn the car off with an exhale. Doreen is outside. A small plastic clip holds her frizzy, greying hair up, causing it to fan around the top of her head. The skin pinches around her brown eyes as she smiles at me and raps against the car’s window.

“That bad, huh?” she asks.

“Always.”

“Come in. I’ll start on your favorite.” She’s holding a cup of coffee, which she hands to me as I climb out the car. “Oh, and your partner is here.”

“I could have used him back at the hospital,” I say, before taking a tentative sip of the coffee. It’s warm, the cream and sugar blended in a perfect mixture that is sweet enough for my liking and strong enough to help me survive the rest of the day.

The inside is brightly lit from overhead fluorescent lights and sunlight that comes in the windows. The air smells of fresh pancakes and fried eggs. A line cook rings the bell and shouts that another order is ready. Customers are spread out, hunched over their meals at the counter, while others sit at the plush booth. I wave and greet some of the familiar faces I see as I walk in on the heels of Doreen.

Rust’s ankles rest on the corner of the table he’s sitting at, his face hidden behind a newspaper. But he senses me coming.

“How’d the visit go?” he asks.

I push his ankles off the table and slide in the booth across from him. He scoffs but continues using the paper as a cover.

“About as bad as I expected.”

“Hm. Is she pissed at me?”

“Of course. But don’t worry, most of it is directed at me. I’m the easier target.”

He finally lowers the paper and gives me a hard look, his nostrils flaring.

Rust is a god. Literally. He belongs to the reincarnated Pantheon. Same gods, new names. Same destructive, society-ending powers, new parishioners who seek their blessings. Same thirst for mass recognition and adoration. That’s why they choose families to bond with. It’s the easiest way to build a following. Once an acolyte is chosen, they’re given near free reign on how to bring in parishioners. Perform miracles. Entertain the masses with their borrowed magic. Prophesize on future events. It didn’t matter so long as the gods were receiving some type of praise and wonder.

Rust is a lesser-known god, one who doesn’t receive a lot of respect within the Pantheon. When it was time for him to pick an acolyte, he was limited in who he could approach. Some candidates even scoffed at the idea of bonding with him. He was easy to overlook. We’re similar in that way. But it doesn’t seem to bother him as much as it does me. I think that’s why he hates whenever I make comments like the one I did.

As a shapeshifter and illusionist, Rust can take whatever form he likes. Woman. Man. Asian. Black. Short. Tall. Fat. Skinny. It doesn’t matter to him.

“In fact, I have no real appearance. You see me how you want to see me,” he said one time.

He asked how he appears to me and I said he looks like a distant relative. Tall, muscular, with a round face and soft amber eyes. Dark brown skin like my father. He could be an A-list actor.

Rust leans back in his seat. “I feel her being pulled away from me.” He shivers. “It’s never a pleasant sensation.”

There’s a part of me that wants to ask if he knows how much longer it would take, but I can’t seem to form the question. Doreen comes back to refill my coffee and gives Rust a disapproving look. She likes him, just not his feet propped up on different parts of her diner. She asks if he wants a refill on his Coke. He glances at it and smiles.

“Please and thank you.”

She rolls her eyes with a smile and grabs his glass. Rust is studying me again. I realize I’m rubbing my sore shoulder and stop. He puts up his hands, palms facing me.

“Can I see?”

I nod without saying anything and he scoots out of his booth, sliding in next to me. I turn towards the window and hiss as his hands slide down the back of my shirt, lightly touching my shoulder. Then a warmth passes through me, a magical heating pad.

“Lucas?”

“Yeah.”

“Ass.”

“…Yeah.”

Rust has been a silent observer to Willow’s behavior for years. He knows everything about my family, how I feel about them, how they treat me. He no longer cares much for Willow, detests her really. And he hates Lucas. I’m sure they had a run in after it was clear I would take Willow’s magic. Rust never mentions it to me and I don’t ask.

When he’s done, he pats my shoulder and slides back in the booth across from me. Doreen carries a tray in her palm to our table. She sets down his drink, two plates with four stacks of pancakes, another plate of crispy bacon, eggs sunny side up and toast.

“Cheers you two.” Doreen pinches my cheek and goes off to help another customer. We waste no time digging into our meals.

The diner feels like what my home should be. I’m relaxed, the thought of my family pushed to the darkest parts of my mind. Rust and I crack jokes and try to steal food off each other’s plates. Doreen offers food freely and without judgment, wanting to feed us well since Rust can’t cook for shit and I’m running low on funds. We eat until we’re full, rubbing our stomachs over our shirts. He belches and the elderly woman across from us glances in our direction with a look of pure disgust. It causes us to laugh all over again. Doreen swats at us with her apron as she comes over once again to refill our drinks.

“I’ll kick you two out if you keep bothering my other customers.” An empty threat she makes often. Rust and I calm down anyway. He turns back to his newspaper and I stare out the window. After a few minutes, he shivers again. I look at him from the corner of my eye. But he shakes the paper and doesn’t say anything. Still, we both know what it means.

Soon.

∙ ∙ ∙

“I don’t want to go anymore,” I whisper.

Mother’s jaw clenches tight. “What do you mean?”

I hug myself and turn away from her, pressing myself closer against the car door. “I always lose. Luca’s better than me. I’m tired.”

“Stop whining, Tess. You can do this if you just focus.”

I imagine Grandmother saying something similar to Mother when she was a young girl. Stop crying. It’s only a scratch, you’ll heal. Get back in there and FIGHT. She’s said those things to me before when I’ve trained with Luca and my other cousins. It’s meant to be comforting and encouraging. But Grandmother’s brown eyes are hard as she stares down at us, her mouth stretched in a thin frown. I’m the only one who still shrinks at her words and her gaze.

“You’re still in the running,” Mother says. I want to laugh. In the running to be Grandmother’s successor? Even if Luca wasn’t the clear favorite, I wouldn’t stand a chance. Grandmother would never pick me. If she didn’t think anyone could live up to her success, then she wouldn’t name a successor. She did it with Mother’s generation, passing over her six children because she felt they weren’t good enough to inherit the magic of a god. It’s why she pushed us, her grandchildren, too hard. Grandmother could live for another generation, maybe even two; the magic should allow for that, even when her physical body began to age and fade. But eventually, she would have to release her hold and leave that magic to someone she trusted. She wanted to leave the power in capable hands. Strong hands.

Hands that weren’t mine.

Why should I keep humiliating myself in front of my family?

“I can’t do it,” I say.

The red light we’re sitting at changes to green and Mother presses down hard on the accelerator, causing us to lurch forward.

“Stop complaining. We all have our burdens.”

But you can stop mine, I want to shout. I never raise my voice to Mother or any adults. I yell and rage in my mind, but it never escapes. I never hint at it. I just sit in a silent fury, pretending my family’s words are all good-natured fun, how family is supposed to be. And when it’s clear to do so, I make an escape to a quiet part of the house and read about the magic that I’ll never touch.

I only have five more years to endure the sparring, the criticisms, the feeling that I’ll never match up to Luca. Grandmother has different bank accounts for me and my cousins, accounts that transfer to us when we turn eighteen. I think it’s meant to buy our continued loyalty. We’re free to use the money however we choose, but we’ll always remember it all comes from her.

I can never truly escape her, but I can put distance between us. Find an apartment in the city, get a steady job and make my appearances at family gatherings when I’m summoned. I can pretend to be happy for Luca when he inherits her powers, when he makes a lifelong bond with Rust. It’s what many in the family do already, even though they act as if their feelings of adoration and devotion are genuine. Maybe they are genuine. I can’t truly say. Maybe they’ve convinced themselves it’s supposed to be this way; that this is how all families are. Maybe I’m taking the coward’s way out.

Suck it up. It’s family after all.

∙ ∙ ∙

My apartment sits on the outskirts of the city in a little neighborhood filled with convenience stores, one-room churches, sunbeaten basketball courts and other small apartment complexes. My family never visits. They don’t like the appearance of it. The cracked bricks on the exterior, the rusted railing leading up to the entrance, the old cars with dents and scratches in their paint that fill the parking lot.

But I love it. There’s music playing somewhere in the distance. In the summer, the smell of a grill being lit for a barbeque is always in the air.

Mrs. Vega is outside on her balcony, transplanting some of her houseplants to new pots. She’s elderly, close to Willow’s age, but still manages to run laps around me and Rust at times. I call out to her and wave.

“Will you need some help carrying them back inside?” I ask.

She pushes grey hair away from her eyes and forehead. “I’d appreciate it.” I tell her to come knock on my door later when she needs me.

There’s an orange flyer taped to my front door, an announcement for a community meeting next month at the elementary school behind my building.

My apartment is small, a studio that I rent for about $900, sans utilities. I share it with Rust, though he doesn’t need to sleep. He floats in and out according to his whims, usually when it’s time for a meal. I’m not sure how he spends his time, though I know Willow can still summon him whenever she wants, despite his burgeoning connection to me. It’s fine, though. He has a cell phone and always answers when I call.

I toss the flyer on a counter, hang my jacket in a closet and flop on the couch in front of the TV. But instead of turning it on, I reach for the book on the coffee table, a green cloth bound tome that came from Willow’s home library. She doesn’t know I took it. And she doesn’t know it’s the reason I’m her successor. Something she overlooked because she never believed someone would try to undermine her. Willow had her plan and Lucas was going to follow it. The family would continue to function as it normally did, with Lucas using the magic to impress the “right” people. I would continue to benefit from it all, but it meant staying silent and compliant.

I was taught to give into Willow’s wishes. But this book showed me a way out of this cycle.

∙ ∙ ∙

I was invited to the family’s Midwinter holiday party out of necessity. It wouldn’t look good if I wasn’t there. I donned the nicest clothes I had, black slacks pressed and wrinkle free, a black button down and a bright red necktie to complete it. There were some disapproving glances, mostly from Willow. To hide from them, I pushed my way through the crowded rooms until I reached the library. It’s empty. Or at least I believed it to be empty.

“How goes it, Tess?”

Rust was seated on the balustrade of the second level, his long legs swinging in the air, while he nursed a drink from a highball glass. I spotted him at different times during the party, sporting a bored expression while Willow tried to impress everyone. I’m surprised he’s not next to her now, performing tricks to entertain the guests.

I sink into a chair and sigh, loosening my tie. “I think I need several more flutes of champagne,” I say. He snaps his fingers and a tray appears before me, clattering as it hits the wooden table. I touch one of the glasses, but it isn’t an illusion. “Thanks.”

He tips his head in my direction. “These events are draining.”

“At least they see you,” I say.

“Only because they want something. Trust me, that’s not how I want to live.”

“It’s still better than being invisible. An afterthought.” It’s how I feel around my family. The one that is remembered after a moment of pause.

“It’s an invisibility of a different sort. We shouldn’t compare. It sucks for the two of us.” He watches me over the top of his glass. His image starts to become hazy and soon he’s no longer on the balustrade but sitting across from me. He finishes his drink and reaches for a champagne flute. He’s still studying me, but unlike the other stares I’ve received during the night, it’s less judgmental, more concerned. It’s hard guessing at Rust’s thoughts, and I’m too afraid to ask.

“You want them to see you?” he asks, nodding to the library doors and the party happening just on the other side. I nod. It’s what I want, the only thing I’ve wanted since I was young and overlooked by Willow, Lucas, Mother. I wasn’t enough for them and I didn’t know why. I wanted to know how to change myself, make myself look good in their eyes.

I needed to know why.

“I’m supposed to bond to Lucas in a few weeks.”

“Willow finally named her successor?”

“Her hand was forced,” he says, glancing off to a darkened corner of the room. I wonder what he means, what forced her to name Lucas so soon. He was ready, sure. But Willow wasn’t ready to give up her powers yet.

“It’s not what I want, though,” Rust says.

I fold my hands in front of me and ask, “What do you want?”

Have humans ever asked a god that? I didn’t think so, judging by his grin.

“I want to do right this time. Wow people, sure,” he says, opening his palm. A small fox appears in his hand, silvery from illusionary magic. I watch it, smiling. “But there’s more to me than whimsical tricks and I want humans to see that. Respect it. I thought Willow would give me that chance. When we first met, our interests aligned. It’s why I wanted to bond with her.”

I’ve heard the story before. One repeated over and over as I grew up. Rust appeared before Willow one day and offered her a partnership, which she accepted within seconds. Maybe because she wanted to do good, like Rust thought. With magic she could help her family and friends. Protect her community. Build a world where she and others like her were no longer stepped on.

“I saw something in her. Or I thought I did,” Rust continues, focusing on the image in his palm. He looks at me quickly. “But she changed over the year and I was proven wrong. Now I’m stuck with your family.”

I want to tell him it’s not that terrible, but it’s a lie that I struggle to speak aloud. I’m stuck with my family, too. I’ll never escape them and I feel guilty for wanting to try.

Rust closes his palm and wisps of smoke slip through his fingers as the fox disappears. “Lucas won’t give me what I want. He’s too much of an ass. Too much like Willow.”

I feel like I’m learning secrets that aren’t meant for me. He and Lucas will work together. If he wants people to see this other side of him, he needs to speak to my cousin.

“I wish I could help you,” I say.

He smiles against his glass. “I know, Tess.” Rust tugs the bottom of his ear. Willow is calling for him. He stands, grabs another drink with a sigh and heads to the door. When he’s gone, there’s a heavy book on the table next to the tray. I recognize it:

The Adoration of Gods.

Inside the cover is a sticky note that simply says, “Take me.” I do, slipping out a side door to my car and place it in the backseat, before rejoining the party. Once I leave for the night, I carry the book into my apartment and discover more writing on the inside cover.

Read from cover to cover if you want to be seen.

I finished the book a week later, discovering another secret Rust wanted to share. A spell to interrupt the future Willow and Lucas had planned. I was hesitant to utter the words. They were meant for Lucas, the oath that would bind him to Rust, allow him to tap into the power of the god whenever he needed. But I think about what Rust said to me at the party. How Lucas was like Willow. There would be another me for Lucas to torment. It would never end. Bully. Bullied. Over and over. Unless…

The spell is simple enough to say and when I’m done, Rust stands in my living room, a look of shock on his face which gives way to a smile.

“Well,” he says slowly. “I guess I’ll need a key to your place.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Lucas and Willow see my actions as a betrayal. After I uttered the spell and started a connection with Rust, I felt similarly, like these powers didn’t belong to me and Rust tricked me into doing something that damaged my family.

But I sat with my feelings for a while and thought about all the times my family hurt me. I wasn’t getting back at them. I was proving myself to them. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted them to see me not as a waste of space or a petulant child. But as someone who struggled to love a family that so easily cast me aside. I was tired of being overlooked, especially when I was just as capable as Willow’s other grandkids. I wasn’t the best, but neither was Lucas, no matter how high of a pedestal everyone put him on. We were in an arbitrarily judged competition with one another, vying for the attention and love that Willow was supposed to give freely.

I was always the loser for reasons that made no sense. Because I was fat and had no desire to alter my body. Because I was into women when I was supposed to lust after men. Because I was sensitive. Because I was different than everyone else in the family and sometimes, I dared to take pride in that fact.

I was different. I was me. I was Willow’s successor whether she liked it or not.

There were pieces of me I couldn’t change, and pieces of me that I refused to change. I always defied Willow, even when it was never my intention.

I couldn’t play nice with her without giving up large parts of myself. It was a survival technique so many in the family adopted. It was what Mother did, giving up her love of painting and a desire for a professional career in order to get an “acceptable” management job with a shipping conglomerate. Marrying a man she loved but wasn’t truly in love with. Ignoring my visible pain to appease Willow. It’s what Lucas did, shunning me when it was clear it would bring him closer to Willow and Rust’s magic. Dragging himself to the gym to prepare his body for a power he never understood, because he didn’t truly know the person who supplied that power. It was killing us on the inside, but I was the only person to shout: “Enough. No more of this bullshit.”

What I did wasn’t an act of betrayal. It was an act of defiance. My first “fuck you” to Willow, the woman who I longed to love because we were family and family was supposed to be important.

But Willow was no longer my family. I just had to accept it.

My family was Doreen, the other customers at Schmidt’s Diner, Mrs. Vega who always invited me over for a meal when my refrigerator was nearly empty. My family were the people I encountered almost every day, the ones who made an effort to check on me, to ask me how I felt, the people who knew just how much I hurt whenever I was around Willow.

It was Rust, the strange god with no permanent appearance, who gifted me a book and a chance to do something I wanted to do.

My family were the people who would come by with cheap champagne and liquor whenever Willow died, who would help me mourn in whatever strange way I needed to. It was the people who understood that blood relatives could be shit, so it’s better to love people who actually see you for who you are.

Fuck Willow and everyone else.

∙ ∙ ∙

It’s late at night, close to midnight. I’m in the kitchen, washing the last bit of dishes in the sink when a strange feeling passes through me. I’m light-headed for a moment. My sense of stability is shot. I shut my eyes, gripping the counter to keep myself from dropping to the floor. I breathe in deeply and exhale through my mouth.

A warm hand touches my shoulder, squeezing.

“It’ll pass soon.”

When I open my eyes again, Rust is sitting on the counter next to me, a knee tucked under his chin. We look at one another and I understand what just happened. As I stare at Rust, a new weight settles on my shoulders and I welcome it.

My cell phone rings. I know it’s Mother. I know what she’s calling to say. I’m sure Lucas is torn between coming here and kicking my ass or staying at the hospital and mourning with everyone else.

“We’ll deal with this in the morning,” I tell Rust. He nods and hops off the counter, opening the fridge and pulling out two cold beer cans. He tosses one to me and heads to the small porch. I finish rinsing the last dish, placing it in the drying rack and join him.

“How do you feel?” he asks, as I crack open my beer.

I try to answer, but something heavy fills my throat, spreading down into my chest. I laugh as tears build in the corners of my eyes. I want to shout, wail, release a deep, guttural, animalistic noise. I’m mourning and I’m free.

Rust cups the back of my neck. I inhale, lifting my head and letting my chest fill with cold air that pricks my insides.

Then I exhale. And my mind is quiet.

Settled.

∙ ∙ ∙

BRITTANY SMITH

Brittany Smith is a writer based in Northern Virginia. Though she is new to writing speculative fiction, she thoroughly enjoys sending her characters on grand adventures across fantastical lands. She earned a B.A. in Political Science and Italian from the University of Virginia and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of New Hampshire. She currently works as a Special Education Assistant at a local high school, though she hopes to transition into the Library Science field soon. Her work has appeared in The Bangalore Review and Penny Shorts. You can find talking about her current works in progress over at her blog mylifeisbooked.blog or on Twitter @britbratsat.

CORIALIS

By T. L. Huchu // 7015 words

It’s easy to tell when a world is roused. Cyclones, earthquakes, lightning, drought, anomalous happenings. The omens are obvious. Harder to spot is the subtle build-up, for worlds lie in deep time and are slow to anger. If the universe is a clock, they are the hour hand and our lives are measured by the tock of the second hand. Most of us have forgotten how to read the lay of the land. Our ears are deaf to the voices in the wind, the soles of our feet numb to the gentle nudge of the soil we trudge upon, our hearts closed to the soul-song upon whose notes life and death flit.

I kneel, reach down and place the palm of my hand on the dirt to feel the pulse of this place.

“Subsidence,” says Garande. He’s inspecting the comms array, sunk halfway into the ground like a shiny giant caught in quicksand. Its tilted at a precarious angle. Beneath lies a box containing finely calibrated equipment.

“We made extensive ground surveys before setting up here. This isn’t supposed to happen,” I reply. “If the variable flux state is altered by so much as a billionth of a decimal place, that’s it, no more superliminal comms. We can’t call home. It’s half a thousand light years to the nearest settlement. This is not good.”

“What do we do, Thandeka?”

“Something’s off about this place. Can you feel it?” I ask, standing up.

Garande cocks his head. As a biologist, he prefers the realm of the empirical; feelings don’t have a place in the papers he writes. But Garande’s too polite to say what he thinks when silence can do the talking for him. The cloudless sky above is sparkling pink; like looking out from inside a finely cut sapphire. A humid, musky breeze blows from the east. It’s early morning and we’re on the underside of the gas giant our moon orbits. It dominates the sky with the yellow sun in the opposite direction. Garande puts a protective hand on his belly. In profile, the exaggerated curvature of his spine, the source of his back pain, is even more pronounced.

“I’ll talk to the chief and get a work detail together, so we can dismantle the whole apparatus and set it up elsewhere,” I say, standing up, and wiping the dirt onto my trousers. “For now, I have to put it in hibernation, then lash and tether the structure to stabilise it.”

He nods. I’m speaking his language again.

“I wish I could help, but…” He opens up the hand on his belly, a subtle gesture, and rests it there again.

“It’ll be fine,” I reply, adjusting the toolbelt round my waist.

This early in the day, the hulking mass of our ship casts a long shadow. It lies west, where the sun rises. There are holes in the hull where materials have been stripped for building, leaving it like a wounded whale beached on the sand. I’m thinking that the best option is to rig the comms equipment atop the superstructure until we can find a more suitable location.

∙ ∙ ∙

I walk out through the line of shelters in our hamlet. There’s about twenty here, small cabins we made of locally quarried basalt and cannibalised panels and windows from our ship. The rock is dark and shaping it into building blocks is hard work, but our people have been stonemasons since we built Great Zimbabwe, after Musikavanhu led us from the Great Lakes in Central Africa. They say if you cut us, rock chips fall to the ground. Already the shelters are bedding in. Native plants cling onto the walls like barnacles on the hull of an ocean vessel. Their vivid colours of green, red and gold stand out against the dour basalt. Cables sunk in the ground link the cabins to the fission engines, which were re-engineered into a power station; energy enough for a hundred years.

“Iwe,” Sekai hails me through the window, waving her apparat about. “I was talking to my baba on Mharapasi’s Belt and this thing cut off. What the hell?”

“I’m sorting it,” I reply.

“Baba’s aged badly since we set off, I can’t afford to waste another minute.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s going to take a bit of time.”

“Nxa.” She kisses her teeth and slams the window shut.

I push on, going faster, lest anyone else hails me. I follow the footpath past Panganayi’s tuckshop, heading out of the settlement towards the outlying farms. A certain lethargy weighs upon me. The euphoria of settling a new moon, one so perfectly goldilocksed for us, has already worn off. It’s been three years now, and the grind of daily life has taken over. At some point I stopped looking at the stars we came from and started bedding down my roots here.

“Mararaseiko?” Chief WaMambo calls out, shielding his eyes from the sun. He’s a tall, dark man, and the leopard sash draped from shoulder to hip identifies his clan’s totem.

“Tarara mararawo,” I reply.

“Those dark rings around your eyes tell a different story, young lady,” he says.

The chief has always been a perceptive man. I haven’t been sleeping well. It’s hard to sync into the polyphasic rhythm of the moon. For a small minority here the six-hour rotation on Corialis confuses our circadian attuned bodies. The bonus of seeing more sunrises and sunsets is ill recompense.

“Alpha comms is leaning badly and could fall over at any time. I need you to assign three people to help me dismantle it.”

“Did you know two of the algae vats are leaking? If this is an issue with the naciflex we could potentially lose our entire harvest. The design was meant to last a decade at least,” Chief WaMambo says, his voice even. “I saw Alpha comms earlier when I was doing my rounds. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Something’s very wrong—”

“Thandeka, you picked the site for the tower. You headed the construction. Now I have to pull people from their jobs just to fix your screw up.” The chief’s tone is colder than nyamavhuvhu winds.

I want to tell him that I don’t think the mishaps, minor accidents and damages happening around this place are natural. That they are signs of this world’s growing displeasure. Something must be done to restore balance. But Chief WaMambo was captain on our vessel, he’s a man firmly wedded to the scientific method. My warnings will sound like gibberish to his ears, so I bite my tongue.

At the nearby vats, farmers wearing khakis straighten at the sound of his annoyance. They wanna hear this because comms affects their ability to contact the loved ones they left on Carina-Ruregerero. A hard glance from the chief sets them back to work again. Civilisations aren’t built by the scientists or intellectuals, they are laid down brick by brick on the backs of grunt workers turning the land, teachers, homemakers rearing children, folks who work with their hands and can swing their fists. People like me.

“It’s my fault, it won’t happen again.”

“You’ll get your help. Just don’t have me cleaning up after you again.” Chief WaMambo turns his attention back to the naciflex vats that dot the land.

∙ ∙ ∙

The stars sped by as streaks of white against the unending blackness of space on the port hullcam. No ships had actual windows, but the screens gave us the illusion we could peer out. If we actually could, all we’d see was a blur of white light and not much else. The images on the screen made things less claustrophobic in the medilab, a white space with silver units, screens, beeping noises, and medical equipment.

I’d flinched as the razor scraped against my scalp. Its hiss and crackle came like bursts of static on my skull. There was the ploink ploink of razor into a water basin as Garande cleaned off the foam, my ginger hairs floating out with the waves. Shake. Wipe. Shave. Following the contours of my skull.

“Funny, for all the tech on this vessel, nothing beats an old-fashioned steel razor for shaving,” Garande said.

“Don’t I look weird without my ‘fro?” I asked.

“You look like E.T.’s butthole,” he said with a laugh.

“Not funny,” I replied, punching his thigh.

“You’re gorgeous,” he said, and stooped to kiss my bald patch. “I love your big brown eyes.”

“That’s much better. Now do your job.”

My skull felt cold, and when he was done, I was smoother than when I was born. Every hair on my body–head to toe, eyebrows, lashes, nostrils and all–was shaved and plucked until not a strand remained. It’d sting when it grew back, but this was the way of it.

Garande and I stood abreast, inspecting our new look in the full-length mirror as we waited for the doctor to arrive. “Good. You’re ready for the next phase,” Dr. Ngulube said, inspecting us. She was in her mid-forties, the oldest person on the vessel by a bit. “Proceed to the decontamination unit.”

“Aye, aye, captain,” Garande said with a goofy laugh.

If Dr Ngulube’s instructions were terse, it didn’t mask the kindness of her nature. She wore a white cleanroom suit, so I couldn’t see her face, just her eyes. This stage was critical for the success of our mission. I felt some discomfort walking across the cold floor. My nails were cut too short. I closed my eyes and held my breath when the orange light came on. Multidirectional nozzles sprayed a mist of chemicals, alcohol and topical antibiotics.

“Raise each foot in turn. Spread your fingers and toes,” Dr Ngulube said through the intercom. “Bend over, please. Spread your cheeks. Thank you.”

The spray stopped. Vacuums switched on to suck out the vapours. When I took a breath, the air stung. Garande reached out his hand towards me.

“No touching!” Dr Ngulube said. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“Proceed to Sterile Room One. You’ll be spending the next week there. Please take the first course of antibiotics on the table to your left.”

It sank in that we were really doing this.

Over the next three months, Garande and I would go through seven sterilising zones, take multiple courses of super-strength intravenous antibiotics and topical applications, antifungals, antivirals, bathe in alcohol gels and decontaminants, UV light therapy, tubes up ass, mouth, and every orifice, until we lost the one percent of our body weight that was made up of microbial life. We’d lose a lot more from malnutrition and sickness before we made it to the probiotic stage, where suitable symbiotic replacement lifeforms indigenous to Corialis were introduced to form a new biosphere for our bodies.

I felt as though I’d been put through a shredder, then all those strips churned into mincemeat and dipped in hot chilies. My nerves were ablaze. Analgesics didn’t help none. Bouts of diarrhea as food became hard to digest without bacteria in my gut. I was lethargic throughout; I’d been warned it would be painful, but that didn’t prepare me for how traumatic the whole ordeal was. Evacuations and colonic irrigations. Depression and anxiety. Halfway through, I just wanted the whole thing to stop, but I’d signed the forms. There was no turning back from this one-way ride.

∙ ∙ ∙

At dusk’s breaking, the charged-up pole of our red giant glows with dazzling electric blue auroras, swirling and sparkling. Alpha comms is secure and the work team won’t be ready till the morning, so I set out to find Garande and walk him home. Calcite flowers sprawl across the plain. From space, Corialis looks like a mauve pink gem because of the way reflected light from the giant refracts through the atmosphere. Down here it’s a riot of colours, every spectrum on the rainbow and more. Corialis is a young world and I feel its vibrant energy course through me from the moment I get out of bed. Walking through the flowers is like stepping into a kaleidoscopic sculpture park. We call them flowers, view the taller structures as trees and shrubs, but, in real effect, the flora here is more like a terrestrial coral reef.

All of the lifeforms discovered on Corialis so far are unicellular. There were no complex organisms on the surface, in the water, or underground. Instead, the mineralised structures secreted by the various life-forms grow out into sculptures of vents, fractals, elongated tubes, lily-like discs, and nebulous formations that run through the landscape.

I find Garande knelt down, so intently taking readings off his multimeter, he doesn’t notice my approach until I’m right next to him. The device is hooked up next to a mass of coiling brown, blue and yellow algae strings that grow across the landscape like a mass of jumbled wool in an upturned haberdashery. His apparat lies on the dirt next to him, recording the measurements he’s reciting next to it.

“Pause data recording. Hey Thandeka, check these readings out.” He expands the screen on the apparat and scrolls to reveal graphs of his measurements.

“I’m looking at?”

“I’m measuring the impulses running through the biomass, and it’s incredible.” Garande brings up another graph, squiggly lines running through. “See that correlation with a standard neural map? This is far more complicated. For a start, the level of activity far exceeds anything a single brain could do. The info here is overlaid, multiple processes running parallel to one another, but fully integrated with sophisticated feedback loops.”

“Inga.”

“Now, if I—” He takes a crude device, a low voltage battery and wires, and shocks one of the strings. “See how the multimeter peaks, right? That’s my signal going through, but then the natural signals stop after the interruption. The reading on my meter goes to zero… wait for it… there it is; do you see that? A low intensity signal passes one way, and then the other. And it’ll keep doing this, almost like it’s testing for something. If I shock it again, the test signals change in frequency. Check that one out—it’s exactly the same as my input.”

“So it reacts to stimulus. Every living thing does.”

“I think the data points to some kind of non-sentient intelligence built by all these interlinked unicellular life forms, Thandeka. Information flows that span the entire moon.”

“The sun’s getting low. I think it’s time to go home for some maheu,” I say, standing up and offering him my hand. Garande’s got an intense look on his face, I’ve seen it before. He’s deep inside of an idea. He takes my hand and rises, slowly, with a groan. There’s dirt on his loose-fitting kurta and he rests his left hand protectively on his protruding belly. He’s wearing flip-flops, his feet are so swollen he can’t fit into normal shoes. I gather his equipment for him before we head back home through the wide plane of Honde Valley, stretching out through dwalas in the distance with the mountains beyond.

∙ ∙ ∙

We were the first to ingest Corialis’ bacteria and fungi, Garande and I. Though tests had been performed on various animals from Earth, we still couldn’t be sure about the efficacy on humans. Had me and Garande died, our bodies would have been jettisoned into space, and different strains of microbes used. There was no going back to Carina-Ruregero. The rest would have had to try or die in the void of space, for the risk of cross-contamination was too great, and the means to go back impossible for there wasn’t a magnetar neutron star within range to power a jump back home. Active magnetars were ultra-rare and short-lived, only numbering a few hundred in a galaxy with two-hundred billion stars.

“This stuff tastes like Greek yoghurt,” Garande said, offering me a spoonful. His hand was shaking. Slight tremor. Hair had started to grow on his forearm.

“It’s disgusting,” I said.

“Come on, we’re the first people to eat anything from this new world and you wanna send the order back to the kitchen?”

I looked up at the cameras monitoring our every interaction. Sensors scanning our bodies for the slightest anomaly.

“I can’t wait to get off these IVs and eat solids again.”

“And, I want our baby to be the first native born Corialian.” There was a naïve excitement in his voice that was infectious. The way he looked deep in my eyes, revealing every part of his soul was sweet to behold. “We’re pioneers, Thandeka. They’ll have to put our names in the history books. Founding fathers… and mothers.”

Finding planets was easy. Our ancestors back on Earth once thought they were the only world with life in the whole universe. A few millennia later, they learned of other planets, but still doubted any could have life. They looked at the two hundred million stars in our galaxy and the trillion planets and moons, and believed, somehow, theirs was a fluke. They were wrong. The Milky Way alone is teeming with life. There’s too few of us to catalogue and study it all. There were so many habitable worlds within our reach... Or so we thought at one time.

When the first settlers took Dotito, they found an Earth-like planet orbiting a yellow star. It was rich with water and just the right levels of O2 in the atmosphere, so uncannily like Earth they called it a double. Plants. Animals. Carbon based life-forms so recognisable, they thought Dotito was a gift. Hundreds of thousands relocated there in waves unlike any other settlement since. And, for a while, Dotito prospered until the settlers started falling sick and dying en masse, as horrible as anything the peoples of the New World experienced when the Europeans arrived on their shores. No one was immune from it. The plague ravaged them, until none were left.

The problem had been known since H.G. Wells published ‘War of the Worlds’ in 1897. Wells’ Martians might have won the war against Earth’s armies, but they did not reckon against the bacteria they’d not been evolved to live alongside, so they died out before their conquest was complete. Creatively, this was a lame ending, a deus ex machina that ruined an otherwise enjoyable story, but Wells was prescient in suggesting the presence of complex lifeforms, the boogeymonsters of pop culture imagination, were seldom a hindrance to whether a planet was open for colonisation.

Dotito retaught us the lesson that certain planets were closed to us because of their microbiome. On the flipside, the catastrophic devastation of Karanda which followed a few hundred years later taught us that our microbial life, the stuff on our skin, in our gut, everywhere, the stuff that made us us, could wipe out an innocent world by setting off a planet-wide ecological collapse. A once vibrant planet became a dead, toxic ball of dust.

Garande once told me that the ancient people of the common tongues ritually mixed a small sample of soil with water and drank it whenever they settled a new area. They believed this helped connect them with the land. In the twenty-first century, the economy of the briefly lived first Zimbabwean Republic crashed, sending the Shona to other parts of the earth like Europe, America, Australia and Asia. When the children of these exiles were faced with this infirmity upon their return home, the soil-water cure was again revived as a remedy for stomach ailments.

“I think I’ve just farted for the first time in months,” Garande said, putting the bowl of yoghurt down.

“Tinyarewo, sha,” I replied. “Too much information.”

The only solution was for us to adapt to the world we were settling. Strip ourselves of our biosphere and receive one from the planet. Symbiosis with our host worlds had startling consequences. The people on Dhlodhlo 4 experienced life spans of up to five hundred years. On Mapungubwe, the settlers grew no shorter than eight feet tall. Accelerated neural processes for folks living on Chipadze’s Moon made them virtual walking computers when it came to solving mathematical problems. On New Natale, what the settlers lost in their ability to see colour, they more than made up for with a new, preternatural tolerance for stellar radiation, making them our most intrepid spacefarers.

As I lay on the gurney next to my husband, dreaming of the home we’d make, I wondered what Corialis had in store for us.

∙ ∙ ∙

Tonight one quarter of the sky glows bright with the stars. There’s a convex line arcing through, cutting a patch out of the sky, filled with blackness. Nothing’s there but void. Our moon is transiting into the double-night season where we are hidden from the sun behind the gas giant. The elliptical orbit we chart creates six distinct seasons relative to our position between the sun and planet. None is more spectacular than the double-night, which for two months presents us with nothing but darkness, and the days consist of two nights–a night with stars and a night with the blackest sky, our moon hidden in the umbra of the planet blotting out the sun.

The electric lights burning outside cast a fierce white glow.

Garande’s snoring away in the next room. I held him for a while, spooning, since this far in his term, he’s only comfortable lying on his side. But I don’t sleep too well. Once Garande is settled, I stole away from the bedroom and moved to the living room where I could play some music and think. I choose the Mberikwazvo Marimba Orchestra. Their melody suspends time and lets me drift out into space.

I drink a glass of spring water.

An ammonia scent sits in the air, kind of like when compost has too much green material. It’s unpleasant and I take it as another sign. I’ve been trying to read the signals, but few among us are still of the Mwari faith. Not even my husband, who prefers instruments and measurements to his gut. And so, most days I experience this double-consciousness, suppress this part of me that doesn’t quite fit into the scheme of things. At night I can be myself, wave my hand and turn on the screen to ask for Sekuru Sibanda.

He pops up, an old man with white hair, scraggly white beard, with a crown of black feathers on his head. Bare-chested, with beads around his neck, he sits on an ox-hide in a smoky cave. His face is coloured light and dark by the dancing flames of a wood fire crackling out of view.

I clap my hands in the traditional way to greet him, right over left, and open my mouth to speak, but he waves the tail he’s holding to silence me.

“And lo, Mbire wekwaMhashu fell out with his brother Mbire Mukonowehwiza, and decided instead to break away and take his people west.” His voice is sonorous, amplified by the cave walls. “Mbire wekwaMhashu had not the means to wage war with his brother, and he lacked the heart to swallow his pride and make peace.”

Sekuru Sibanda takes a gourd from the floor, pinches some snuff, and sniffs it. This sets him off sneezing, and I clap my hands to honour the great mhondoro spirit inside him.

“His people followed him, for they trusted in him, when he stole away from the chiefdom in the middle of the night. They did not say good-bye to the owners of the land, of all that is seen and unseen, those in the wind whose voices whisper to us. That beer they drank for themselves. Mbire wekwaMhashu forgot what his elders taught him, ‘Natsakwaunobva, kwaunoenda husiku,’ for the anger against his brother was too great. And so, they journeyed west where he dreamed that he would become like Musikavanhu and found his own empire.”

Sekuru Sibanda shakes his head, and there’s a slight glitch, a natural skip in the movement. This is a neuro-mapped AI version of the real Sekuru Sibanda, guardian of the sacred Njelele shrine where the voice of Mwari Himself speaks half a galaxy away. The real man is too busy for all those who seek his intercession, so we get this weekly updated AI version who thinks and behaves just as Sekuru himself would. He serves as the personal n’anga for all the believers in the Ubuntu Collective scattered across the stars.

I want to ask him something, but sometimes he speaks in riddles, verse, aphorisms, or as he’s doing today, he tells parables, or stories of the distant past. There are times he answers directly, other times not at all.

“In Gokwe they weep still for Mbire wekwaMhashu and his people, for they found nothing but a sea of red sand in the Kalahari. Not a drop of water to drink. And still they did not pour libations, foolishly pressing west against the setting sun. First the children succumbed to the heat. Then the men and women, one by one, leaving a trail of bones as they went. That hell became theirs, for you can only possess a piece of land once you have bones in the soil. Mbire wekwaMhashu did not make peace with his brother and he failed to make peace with the land, and so his people perished. Alas, those who would be ancestors are now wandering spectres blown hither and thither by scorching winds, for none were left to carry their names and...”

Sekuru Sibanda opens his mouth, but his head drops to his chin, and he snoozes in an instant. I clap my hands, but he doesn’t wake, softly snoring as he does. There’s so many questions I want to ask. Sekuru can’t be woken. Just my luck, even my AI n’anga gets to sleep, but I don’t.

∙ ∙ ∙

“You hear Banda’s roof was blown clean off at the outpost last night?” says Nyarai, falling in beside me on the footpath. “Mad winds out there.”

“That’s a shame. I didn’t think we got gales that bad out in these parts. Where’s Tonde and Deliwe? They’re supposed to be on this job with us.”

“Deliwe’s been sent off with Sekai to the outpost. Tonde… well, when has he ever been on time for anything?”

We’re already a man down before we’ve started the job. Ill omens everywhere. Light’s real low cause we’re in this partial eclipse; the planet’s swallowing the sun. The air’s chilly. Winds blowing roofs off. There’s a tightness in my chest I can’t shake.

My toolbelt slaps against my thigh as we near Alpha comms. The polyphene structure’s holding at a seventy-five degree angle, just within the structural limits. Any more would be too much—which is why I anchored cables to stabilise it. At least I’ve got a steady pair of extra hands with me. Nyarai’s usually assigned to the power plant, and she doubles as a handywoman fixing stuff in the cabins. Her sister Sekai’s our chief builder, but everyone’s got an extra set of skills up their sleeve.

I scroll through my apparat, find Tonde and message, “Get your ass here right now!” He’s eighteen, still at that age where getting out of bed in the morning is a pain.

The comms tower is twenty meters tall. The top bit is a booster for our radio signals. The apparats communicate directly if within range of one another, but further out, we need a relay. The Counterfactual Quantum Communication System module sits in a black box beneath the radio equipment of the tower. The Q is protected by mesh all around and only a handful have the code to get in. That’s the most important part of this station, because it allows for instantaneous, superliminal communication with the rest of the galaxy. A signal from here sent to the recipient world light years away arrives in less time than it takes my voice to carry across a small room. The only delay is in the equipment we use to manipulate and decode the information electronically into usable data at either end. At least that’s what the manual says. I didn’t make the damn thing, I’m just the grunt who maintains it.

“Top to bottom job?” Nyarai says looking up. “The light’s not that great.”

“Everything goes in that trailer there in order. That’ll make it easier for the reassembly.”

“Two-day job with four, makes it a three dayer for us now.”

“The graft’s in removing the tech without damaging it. Dismantling the structure’s a doddle,” I say, getting my harness ready. “We need a slide sling to lower the pieces down.”

“Whichever way you wanna do it. I’m just the help here.”

Nyarai’s the easiest person I’ve ever worked with. Laid back, diligent, doesn’t let ego get in the way of the job at hand. She’s humming a tune, a folk love song from the ocean planet Gungwa-raMasare, one of the worlds of the Cassiopeia region. It also helps that she has a great voice and enjoys singing at work. It makes the time pass quicker.

“So, when’s the baby due? I see Garande waddling past my place every day,” Nyarai shouts out as I climb to the top of the tower.

“Another two months,” I reply, a little out of breath. It’s a hard climb up this tower, my gear weighs me down, and my hands are freezing.

“Are you ready?”

“Is anyone ever?” I say, and she laughs. “He wanted it, so he’s changing the nappies when it comes.”

“I left my first with his father on Carina-Ruregerero. Things weren’t working out, you know? I had to get away. We talk everyday now, well...we will again when your Q’s working. They must be wondering what’s going on.”

“Another week and it’ll be back to business as usual,” I say. I don’t want to ask whether she has any regrets about leaving. Some things are better left alone like that. Nyarai knew when she came here there was no going back. Corialis is too far from a magnetar, so unless there’s a breakthrough with the tech in this lifetime, video calls are as good as it gets.

We came in a two-part ship, main craft and the sterile entry vessel. After we’d been cleansed and re-biomed, we moved down to the sterile entry vessel which was designed to survive entry into the moon’s atmosphere. The rest of the contaminated main vessel, vented its air and water in space to prolong the life of its components, and flew off as an autonomous exploration drone mapping the stars beyond. Even if we tried to rebuild the entry vessel and repurpose it as a cruise ship, the engines that now form our power plant weren’t designed to produce enough thrust to launch us into space.

I reach the apex and secure my gaff. I rig up the slide harness to transport pieces down to Nyarai, looking up from right below me. The air has the metallic tang of copper in it this morning. It’s the smell of blood.

I keep one hand on the polyphene struts and reach into my toolbelt for my adjustable wrench. The plan is to remove the transmitter first and then start on the support structure. Tonde still hasn’t showed, the little bastard. I’ll be having strong words with him when he does. I adjust my wrench and get onto the first bolt. Give it a firm go, but it won’t give. In the cold weather the polyphene’s contracted. I shift my weight and try to turn it again. This thing’s frozen in. I pull back hard, and the wrench slips out of my hand.

“Nyara—” Before I finish shouting, there’s a cry and Nyarai goes down. “Oh no, no, no, no. Please. Are you okay?” I yell down.

No response.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” In this light she wouldn’t have seen the wrench fall. I shout out her name. Nyarai’s lying prone on the ground, body at an awkward angle. I think I’ve killed her. A figure in the bleak light runs fast towards us. It’s Tonde, at last. I shout to him to call Dr Ngulube and check on Nyarai. It’ll take a few minutes for me to climb back down. My hands are shaking.

I unclamp my gaff and start making my way, a sick feeling in my gut.

∙ ∙ ∙

Everyone was glued to the hullcam’s feed as we approached our new home. The ten-year voyage was nearing an end. Despite our ship’s powerful engines, we’d been travelling so fast that in order to stop, we had to complete multiple passes ringing through the system and its nineteen planets to get enough of a gravity assist to slow us down. Five of the planets were super Jupiters. Their combined gravity wells together with that of the sun finally dragged us down to cruising speed.

I stood with Garande at the screen, staring at the vastness of space. Our gas giant sat proud in the midst of her system like a mother hen covering her eggs.

Garande’s hand squeezed my shoulder.

“Have you ever seen anything like it, Thandeka?” he asked.

I shook my head and rested it against his arm.

“All this, just to have one little moon with life,” said Garande, nose virtually on the screen. “I’ve read all the feeds, there’s no place quite like it. Seven hundred years Vanhu have known about Corialis, and we’re going to be the first to walk there. To live there.”

I felt him tremble, a mix of awe and adrenalin. The ship arced again, thrusters on full retroburn. He spoke excitedly about how this was a world on the cusp, like an early Earth. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on the prokaryotes and eukaryotes, archaea, bacteria, fungi, virus, protozoa; to study new organisms not yet known to science. To make his name. To be the first.

This was a place of infinite possibilities. Some aboard the vessel wanted a fresh start, they were getting away from old relationships and skeletons in the closet. There were those who came here to seek their fortune from rich minerals in the crust. Others sought adventure. Garande was driven by his incredible curiosity and the desire to make a name in his field.

That left me. Why was I here? Came halfway across the galaxy to some germ-infested world in a tin can, for what? I was happy on Changamire Dombo. I wasn’t particularly interested in making a fortune–one square meal a day was good enough for me. I came all this way to be with him, to start a family.

Garande kissed me on the crown of my head, stars, moons, the infinity of space whizzing by outside.

∙ ∙ ∙

Machines beep and hiss, readings blinking on screens, as I enter the sickbay. Brilliant lights overhead bounce off pristine white walls. My shoes squelch as I step through the disinfectant, onto the floor. I hesitate seeing Sekai on an armchair in the corner of the room.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

“Don’t be silly, Thandeka, could have happened to any of us,” she says, gesturing to the chair next to her.

Sekai is all muscle, massive physique wrought by hauling the stones and material that built this sickbay and everything else in the settlement. The corners of her lips turn downward in a way that makes her look like she’s frowning even when she’s not.

“How long before we get comms back online? Baba has to be told about this. Lucky thing only the tip of the wrench glanced her left temple. The head hit her shoulder, breaking a couple of bones. Dr Ngulube thinks she’ll be fine in a few weeks.”

Sekai came here to be with her sister Nyarai, look after her. I’d just made that job much harder.

“A couple of days,” I reply.

“I’ll come help you shift the tower, okay?” Sekai says. “Just make sure you keep a tight grip on your tools next time.”

She laughs, and I just about manage a smile. Nyarai’s on the bed resting. The painkillers have knocked her out. I’m more determined than ever to get the comms fixed so she can call her daughter.

∙ ∙ ∙

As the days pass, I come to my decision. After the comms are fixed, I tell Sekuru Sibanda what I must do. He’s silent. In this latest update, he looks older, deep cracks on his face, hair white as wool.

“In a generation or two they will have forgotten you, and so it should be,” Sekuru says and bows his head.

“Please tell my husband where I’ve gone and what I’ve done,” I say, clapping my hands in supplication.

He grunts and takes a pinch of snuff.

I get up, go to the bedroom where Garande is fast asleep. I kneel in front of him and study his face. The rising and falling of his chest. I breathe the air he exhales, and then I kiss him, and kiss his belly. He stirs slightly and I fear he’ll wake, but he doesn’t. Serenity is stenciled on his face. I get up and walk to the door. At the threshold, the urge to look back overwhelms me.

My legs feel leaden, but I push on. I put on my jacket because it’s cold, and my toolbelt out of habit. Before I step outside, the last thing I take is a small calabash of synthetic traditional beer that I bought from Panganayi’s tuckshop.

I walk past the cabins and the newly completed workshop. The soil beneath my feet is soft and wet. Seasonal rivers and springs have sprouted with the release of warm brine through channels running from the surface to the underground ocean that’s squeezed and flexed by tidal forces affecting the moon.

The air shimmers with pink and red particles as if a firework set off ages ago is now, finally, fading. The double-night season has begun.

I make it to Honde Valley where the terrain shimmers in a lightshow of bioluminescent brilliance. Vivid greens, subtle blues, violets and ambers form lines and abstract patterns. There are no stars at all in the sky. The only light is from the distant hamlet’s electrics, or the organisms that dot the land. This marks the end of the evens and the start of double-night season as the moon fully transitions behind the gas giant. We won’t see the sun for another two months. The lifeforms that had gorged themselves in the evens season now burn nutrients.

The sky above is pitch black.

My torchlight guides me through the glowing coils of red and grey algae. I follow the path Garande showed me, across the hot springs bubbling and burping, past the yellowy sulphurous sand plains where salt statues jut up, until I reach the caves that bore Mutungagore Mountain.

I enter a cave, following the coils of algae. Stalactites drip down from the roof above me. The wind howls against the walls of the cave. I push deeper still into its heart, where I find a glowing pool. The colourful waters of it swirl and mix like a lava lamp. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“I’ve come to make peace, nevaridzi venyika,” I say.

I pour the beer onto the floor for my offering.

Garande told me these churning pools are filled with life. They mix up genetic material from all over the planet. They take and give up their haul depending on the seasons. Deep and vast, we don’t yet know how far they go, but it is thought some may reach the ocean below.

I take off my clothes, leave them in a heap, along with my tools, and wade into the pool. We take, take, take, and give nothing back. But the circle of life is give and take; it’s built on reciprocity. Mother Earth may have tolerated us because we were her bastards, but Corialis doesn’t know us, she doesn’t have to.

“Accept my offerings and let’s strike a bargain.”

My heart beats fast. The water rumbles to a boil. I’m sucked under. It burns, it hurts, molten metal on my flesh, in my mouth and lungs. Something gives as my legs turn to jelly and I feel giddy and high, my insides pulped to mush, pain, needles. Corialis dissects me like a child dismantling a toy to get to the clockwork inside for the tangled reeds and spores. Unending connections, organic and inorganic carbonates of astounding intricacy form the matrix of a non-sentient intelligence built of the interdependent mass of unicellular life. I allow it, thinking peace, for the first ancestors of any land are born out of self-sacrifice for the sake of the future. The living and the dead are but part of a continuous present, separated only by an illusion.

∙ ∙ ∙

The agony gives way to a cool, blissful wave of violin scores, thumping mbira, harpsichords, rhythms and notes intersecting in a palette of the most intense light, more powerful, complex, diverse than any orchestra. I sink deeper underwater. Every part of me broken into. Single. Cells. I’m absorbed into this multividual, the uberconsciousness of Corialis, giving it my every thought, hope, desire...all that I am.

At last we are part of this world. The ecological balance we broke by settling here is restored. Life for life. I will intercede with Corialis on behalf of the living.

And when Garande and the chief send out a search party, they will not find me. In time, if they are wise, they will see the signs. The shape of my nipple on a calciate flower. Tufts of moss resembling an afro. A face in the clouds. I will be in the air they breathe, the very soil they tread upon. When they spill beer to the earth, I shall drink. When they play drums nehosho, I shall dance and send them rain. And when they pass, and Corialis claims its share, they need not fear for they will join me in the pantheon of the ancestors.

This world is our home now.

∙ ∙ ∙

T. L. HUCHU

T.L. Huchu’s work has appeared in Lightspeed, Interzone, AfroSF, The Apex Book of World SF 5, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, The Year’s Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016, and elsewhere. His stories have won the Nommo Award for African SF, and been shortlisted for the Caine Prize and the Grand prix de l’Imaginaire. He enjoys working across different genres, especially SFF, crime and literary fiction. ‘The Library of the Dead’, the first novel in his ‘Ghostalker’ fantasy series, will be released spring 2021. Find him @TendaiHuchu

AN IRRATIONAL LOVE

By Marika Bailey // 15187 words

I. In the beginning, there was darkness, and she was infinite.

Ayo doesn’t believe in praying, but she will do it today. It is a holy day, and she has been given a part in it. Stillness comes, the moment the gods remind the world of their gift by taking it away. That’s the kind of bullshit gods do. A foot to your neck to remind you who’s in charge.

She can almost hear her skin sizzle under the late morning sun. Too hot for the braided wig she’s been forced to wear. The beads tied to the ends of each braid, amber and pearl, click and clack in the breeze as she tugs it off and throws it to the ground. The mutters from the crowd at the sight of her bare head are almost as good as the feeling of the air on her scalp.

Under his silk embroidered canopy, her father will be scowling. No need to turn and see it for herself. His stare burns all the way down her back as she turns to receive ceremonial blades from a temple attendant who must be her own age but seems much younger. His hunched shoulders and tight face relax when she takes the swords from his hands, and he can run back to his fellows.

The sabers are delicate curves of electrum, as bright and slender as the last wink of a waning moon. And worth a lord’s ransom. Like any of the foreign princes that sit to the left and right of her father, hostages all.

The priestesses’ chants echo across the circle, rippling waves of sound that match the breaking of the surf below. The wind, lifeblood of the archipelago, accompanies them, but quieter now. The sun reaches to the very height of the sky, and the wind dies down to nothing. For the first time in months, the air goes still. Not just here on A-mali, but throughout the archipelago that bands the entire world. The god-winds shudder and fail.

Ayo begins to dance.

You look like your mother when you dance.

Somewhere, outside of the world inscribed by her arms and legs, voices raise again to the waiting sky.

To the gathered crowd, the girl is night herself, bannered with stars. Cold and infinite, even under the heat of the sun.

The sound of her feet pounding against the stone is deep, felt in the bones. As if more than the weight of one girl is falling on them. Heel-toe-step-ball-change-leap. Leap and fly away. Her movement, the coalescing air, the sun-warmed stone combine into a prayer, a song, a story.

∙ ∙ ∙

The Stone’s Telling

Once upon a time, oh star of my heart, there was a man who wanted. His name was Nyibosu and he lived in a city of white walls overlooking the sea, a city nestled in a golden harbor where ships swept in and out with the tides, carrying fortunes that could buy whole kingdoms. Over all of this, he was king.

This city, center of a sprawling empire, was untouched by plague or strife. Its people were industrious and cunning. In their ebony hulled boats, they traveled across oceans many would not dare, bringing back treasures of gold and onyx, and in many cases new wives and husbands.

The land was bountiful. The city, sitting at a crossroads of the god-winds, was rich. All trade passed through the hands of the Empire of A-mali.

What I am telling you, my love, my heart, is that it should have been enough.

But for Nyibosu, there was no such thing as enough.

From one moment to the next, the sun was too bright or too insipid. Wine weak, water pallid. The night too cold and the day too warm. Silk felt too soft against his skin or chafed him raw. His wealth hung around his neck like a pig-iron yoke, or, he was heard to complain, was too puny to fulfill the needs of a chicken farmer, much less his station.

Nyibosu collected around him the profit and produce of nations across the seas. Pearls from the ten thousand fathom deep coves of the Angwetu. Spiced golden figs from distant Sheba. Silver fleeces from the hidden flocks of mountainous Olln. It was not enough. Could never be enough.

Riches, once yearned for and desired, turned to coarse clay in his hands. Ancient tomes were revealed to be pedestrian. Famous performers, far overrated. An entire wing of the palace was dedicated to a copper forest, home to jeweled clockwork birds. It was coveted, and then discarded.

Nyibosu, disappointed once more by some prize proven to be not quite what he wanted after all, turned away from the faces of his people and retreated once more into his want, a comfortable and well-received companion.

Until a minister had an idea. (May their soul rest in Shefret’s most complicated hell.)

Nyibosu was utterly uninterested in marriage. Not uninterested in women. The palace midwives could attest to his efforts in that area. However, the idea of finding a partner to share his life with simply did not appeal to him.

But what if they phrased it as a shopping expedition?

King Nyibosu, upon hearing his chief minister’s idea, flung open the golden doors of his royal chambers with a smile on his face and the joy of a potential new acquisition in his eyes. And, after months of deliberation, messengers were sent in each direction from the empire.

“The Great Nyibosu, King of A-mali, Azure Crowned Jewel of the Sea, Beloved of Oshun, Land of the Blessed, seeks a wife.”

The requirements following thereafter were detailed and enumerated into the hundreds.

Oh beloved, there were titters. Outright guffaws in many corners, that a man would order a wife as he would choose a new pair of horses. Most simply ignored it.

But there are always those who feel that a number of daughters can be...surplus to requirements. There were corners of the world that received the King’s declaration with, if not joy, then calculation at this chance to so profitably rid themselves of a girl who was rather too good with the account books, or her sword-arm, or her words.

Ships returned to the azure bay of A-mali, bearing images of princesses, ladies, honorables, divine daughters, demigoddesses (via their step-parents in all such cases), and at least one confirmed phoenix maiden.

Their portraits were painted on scrolls, embroidered on silks, and carved into thin sheets of fragrant myrrh bark. There was at least one portrait via epic poetry. From a princess of the djinn came a small glass bottle that, when bobbled by a careless clerk, released pink smoke which gave all in the room dreams of a curiously beautiful woman with a snake’s tail instead of legs.

Nyibosu wanted none of them.

Well, our fates do not always arrive as they do in stories, with great proclamations or revelations from the gods. Many times they come on silent feet, the turning of a cheek, or the arrival of a small and weathered ship.

It was the Song of Amina out of Port Efe, a small merchant sloop that regularly traded the seas near A-mali. Carrying dried fish and small cargoes of starfruit and speckled ackee from the orchards of Abarr. The captain, Benoit, was a woman who resembled driftwood in all ways, pale and thin, baked hard by the elements. Her mouth was barely more than a slash at the bottom of her face, her eyes tiny black knobs. She was even more severe than usual on this day, as she escorted a rare passenger to the docks of A-mali.

“Thank you, Captain, for your commendable service on this journey.” Magister Daeed nodded with a brightly condescending smile.

Benoit nodded back, her eyes darting to the Magister’s companion--or cargo? But she did not carry slaves and the woman had never spoken, not a word in all these weeks. Even when she’d asked. Even when she’d begged.

She looked back at Daeed’s beaming face, as insincere as it ever was.

“We will be docked here for several days, if you need a return vessel.” She said looking again towards the woman.

“Oh no, my dear, I think we will be here for quite some time.” Daeed turned with a wave and disappeared down the gangplank and into the crowd, the woman a shadow at his heels.

Benoit stared after them for as long as she could.

Daeed made his way unerringly through the crowd, pulling the creamy velvet of his cloak away from the pulls and tugs of traffic, pickpockets and grime. As he moved from the docks into the city proper, he never looked back at the figure following him. He merely accepted that there was nowhere else she could go but with him. As the crowds became too thick for reasonable passage, an automaton-pulled chair was hired to convey them both towards the palace.

Inside, he allowed his eyes to return to her as they always did eventually. She looked, not out at the city passing by in a kaleidoscope of brightly colored buildings and laughing people, but down at her hands. Her delicate fingers brushed across her wrists where two fine lines of gold, chains light enough to have been painted on with a brush thin as a whisper, lined her skin.

“You should be used to it by now, don’t you think?” He asked, his eyes pale as hoarfrost, seemingly white in the dark of the chair.

She said nothing.

But the stones of the harbor, the road leading to the hill that the palace stands on, have felt the passage of the man and woman. They groan under the weight of fate, a ripple spreading down into the bones of the island.

The first the palace guards saw of them was Daeed bending his great height out of the chair, a man-sized praying mantis in silk velvet. The pale cast of his skin marked him as being from quite far away. A shrouded woman followed close at his heels.

Ah, another one, they all thought.

“Presentation hours are between the eighth and twelfth bells, sirras.” Abeng, the most senior guard said to the approaching foreigners. “Feel free to rest and take some food in the market beyond.”

Daeed smiled. It was not very convincing, but the guard was not who he’d come to fleece. “I think that His Majesty would like to see the jewel I have brought him, immediately.”

He gestured behind him where his shadow stood, the light breeze wafting through the semi sheer silk veil covering her face. Abeng had begun to speak when the wind raised the veil, and he saw her fully.

Oh beloved, how the stones shifted in worry. Fate’s tangled whorl bearing down upon them without mercy or reprieve.

Abeng was a good man. He sent half of his pay to his mother and aunt back in the tiny village he came from. He drank no more than a man should and raised his sword only in duty and never in anger. The woman’s face, the existence of such a face under the prosaic noonday sun, undid him more than the sight of an enemy line ever had. What he saw there, he has never shared where anyone, neither air nor darkness or immortal stone, could hear.

But Abeng was also a very good soldier. He called for his sergeant.

The sergeant called for the captain. The captain dragged a minister out their office, lunch napkin still tucked into their collar.

The treacherous god-wind rose up again. It revealed not much, the curve of a cheek, the arch of a dusky bottom lip. The minister’s napkin dropped to the ground with a plop. He blinked, fiercely, as if one who’d stared too long at the sun.

Daeed and the woman were brought into the palace.

Rosewater and iced fruit were offered. Refreshments after their journey. Daeed refused all but the least of these, impatient to be seen by the king.

Several hours later, he arrived. Properly announced, the king stepped out from behind chamber doors resplendent in red and gold. His robes were embroidered with the imperial flying fish, their scales picked out in emeralds and their eyes with rubies. A band of gold weighed down his darkly coiled hair, oiled to a shine.

He was regal, if affected boredom can be mistaken for such.

Daeed bowed and gestured the woman forward. She stood, back spear-straight as any soldier in the palace and as ready as they to face blood. The unrelieved black of her robes shone stark against the room’s gold and silk. As if all light was drawn to her and refused to shine in any direction that was away from her.

Nyibosu tilted his head back, attempting to glare down at her. They were the same height, but he tried beloved, he tried.

“What is this?” He asked. Waving a hand at the veiled and silent woman. Stalking around her, golden bells sewn into his hem chiming with every footfall. Gingerly, he fingered one edge of her austere overveil and curled a lip in disdain.

He pulled it away from her, cracking it through the air like a whip.

Nyibosu stilled. Unaware, the occupants of the room all held their breath.

This part has been told many times, moving further from the truth with each retelling. We have heard every single story. Collected and kept them in our vaults of silence and secrets.

Some say that she was a pillar of flame and Nyibosu, undaunted, oh beloved, cast a spell from the ring on the third finger of his left hand to turn her fire to flesh.

A lie.

There are others who say that she was terrible to behold. That the guards were cowed by the sight of her, tears falling down their cheeks in fear. The King took a golden chain from his own royal neck and bound it around her once, twice, three times. And when he passed around her monstrous form the third time, she transformed into a beauty.

Such lies they tell, beloved. The gods would weep.

But what follows here is truth, for we of stone have kept her companionship for more hours of more years than any creature should bear. We have drunk her tears and borne her frustration and cradled her cheek. So know this:

Leagues from where you sit, beyond the reach of sailing ships, up where the Cloud Kingdoms reign in floating pearlescent cities, there is a small country called Iamb. There, in remote and deadly quarries prone to both flood and fire, exists a stone called Eye of God. The gem, one of our most precious cousins, is dark as the velvet underbelly of Bast herself. In that perfect darkness shines the light of millions of stars.

Such was her skin. Her eyes. Her hair.

Nyibosu was confronted with a feeling of complete and overwhelming smallness. He vaulted over it and immediately into lust.

“What is her name?” He asked the magister. But his eyes, they were only on her. As if he would pull her into his mouth and eat her up, snip, snap, snak!

“She is…”

Daeed does not have a chance to answer, interrupted by a voice that begins softly and then blooms like a thousand petal chrysanthemum.

“three birds gather

along a cliff

shadow passes

fly flee away home.”

Nyibosu holds his hands to his face, shocked at the tears falling down his cheeks.

So we, the stone know, and so we swear. Beloved, let the Mother return us to the beginning darkness if we lie.

∙ ∙ ∙

I. Continued: Ayo, Princess Under the Sun, Dances

The final time her legs propel her skyward, time grinds to a halt. On the earth, and below every being is held in pause. Waiting. Listening.

Below, he has also listened. To the beat of Ayo’s footfalls against the earth, drumming down to him, deep below the royal garden’s golden gates. It would be wonderful to see the dance for himself. But there are no windows here. Small portholes that let through light, but nothing that allows him to see the world above. He has gotten quite good at listening.

On many days, the sound of her voice is the only thing that keeps him sane. And while he wishes, desperately and hopelessly, to be able to see her dance, the sound of her feet against the stone is almost like being touched. The way the undergarden shivers from the sound bleeds into him, until he is almost in rapture with the sensation of the dance.

It lifts him out of his body as he imagines his sister rising from the earth in a leap, gravity a mere suggestion. The aches and pains of his body fade away. The throb of his heavy head, the off-balance hum of his blood receding.

The monster of the labyrinth closes his eyes. Not that the undergarden could ever be considered bright, but the deeper dark behind his closed lids, is something else. His body calm, his mind reaches out to feel the world around him. The winding, twisting life of the garden, corridors of root and vine curving back into itself in an endless labyrinth. The taproots leading below but also above, up through the air. Still for this one day, of four days in a year. Transfixed in a beam of sunlight is Ayo.

He can reach her, almost. Almost.

The Stillness breaks and the wind returns. It lifts her higher. To the crowd she is a spear rising to the heart of the sun itself, the great wind’s bride.

Across the city, machines which had ground to a halt, automata and conveyance, cantrip and calling, burst into renewed life. The tidal wind returning magic to the world the people of A-mali have built. To fill its lights, fill their sails, and even build walls for its prisons.

In the circle, time has slowed, but not enough to keep her suspended forever. Ayo falls back to earth. She feels something break, the beginning of a tenuous and delicate meeting.

The ground shakes. Beyond the deafening beat of her heart, she can hear the roar of the crowd. And beyond it, under her feet, a cry of desperate pain.

She looks up. The king does not cheer for his daughter. His eyes are dark, burning, and watchful.

Ayo does not pray, because she knows there is nothing the gods can do to save her.

∙ ∙ ∙

II. She brought forth life, as a river of milky stars, dripping from her hands. Come, she bade her siblings. Come and drink.

Bel unpacks the tools of their monthly ritual with her usual unhurried grace. She has done this a thousand times and perhaps will do it a thousand more. She unrolls a cloth bag into which are tucked a bowl, brush, and silver knife. She mixes water and sweet flakes of rose soap to make a lather. When she smooths it across Ayo’s scalp, the younger woman closes her eyes, relishing the coolness, and the feeling of Bel’s fingertips. The knife, thin as a sliver of the icy moon, is colder yet. Front to back it pulls across the curve of her head. No curl left unharvested.

It takes only a few minutes. The light in the room has barely changed.

Ayo feels another shadow intersect with hers, becomes completely still.

Daeedalus the magister inspects Bel’s handiwork, scarred fingertips not quite touching the girl.

“Excellent work, as usual,” he says.

Bel nods, lips pressed grimly together.

“Just skin,” he says, meeting Ayo’s gaze in the mirror.

“Yes, magister. Just skin,” she replies.

He makes a face that would be a smile on someone who wasn’t a monster. On him, it is a creaking floorboard at midnight in an abandoned house. His eyes, bright and cold, hold hers in the mirror and she wills herself not to shake.

“Your father expects to see you in audience at the tenth bell,” he tells her. “He has a surprise for you.”

Ayo looks away first. He looks pleased and sweeps out of the chambers. A dark shadow flits away from the wall and runs after him.

Bel sets down the blade she’s held clutched white-knuckled in her hand. She has yet to react differently in the presence of the man who rules in all but name, who changed an empire by giving its king what he wanted over and over again.

“Are you ready?” Bel asks.

Ayo wraps her arms around herself, feeling cold in spite of the warmth of the day and the sun shining through the high windows.

“No,” Ayo says. “But that’s never mattered anyway.”

Bel puts one soft dark hand on her shoulder and Ayo leans into it, breathing in the scent of her skin and trying not to cry.

The audience chamber is new. Built within her lifetime. The rest of the palace is simple white stone, mined from a nearby quarry of some long dead ancestor, that reflects the sunlight into the waters below like a halo. This new addition makes Ayo feel as if she is in the belly of some great beast. Towering columns rise and arch into buttresses carved with the ritual masks of the empire’s warriors. From every corner, around the paneled-glass windows, War Dogs snarl down at her. It is a joke of a room, a monstrous distortion of space and power. Daeed built it for her father. The year her mother was disappeared.

Walking the aisle that leads to the throne, eyes turn to watch the king’s heir approach. She looks nothing like him is what they whisper. What they always say. She looks like her mother. But don’t say her name, don’t even think it.

They could be twins.

No, Ayo thinks. I remember mama.

She was just herself. Another rabbit caught in a trap, like the poor doomed hostage princes.

Reaching the throne, she stands within arm’s reach of her father and kneels on the impossibly cold stone.

His approach is a rustle of silk, the chime of golden charms sewn into his robes, heavy thudding footfalls. She does not recoil when he lays one hand on her bare scalp. Practice made perfect.

Nyibosu’s voice booms inside the hall, but echoing inside of itself, as if hollow.

“It is decided that the heir will marry. She will marry and return to balance what was stolen.”

He looks at her when he says “stolen” and the darkness behind his eyes seems infinite.

Ayo wants to scream but does not. There too, a skill long honed into biting perfection.

Along the walls, casting reflections in gold and glass, the encircled fire watches down on the people below. Seeing everything, missing nothing.

∙ ∙ ∙

The Fire’s Story

Nyibosu named his bride Pasiphaë and married her three days later. (This is not her name. She will never tell him her name. But we know that she is Essis.)

The king walked around the sacred fire three times, to the beat of the ancient drums. When she looked up, the new bride saw nothing in the eyes of her husband but reflected flames and hunger. The light shimmered from the crushed lapis dusted across her cheeks. The length of her tightly coiled hair was washed in rosewater and dressed with myrrh. Delicate golden chains crisscross her body, over, under and around.

The woman known as the Queen (to most), or Pasiphaë (to the man who has married her) begins her life in the palace. She spends as much time in the gardens as possible. The walls belong to him. And the gold, the pearl inlay, all of it reeks of blood to her. A cage.

Pasiphaë’s love of the dirt amuses the man who calls himself her husband. If only he knew, she thinks to herself, what lives in the earth. But he does not ask her anything. Nor does he wonder why she does not speak.

She does not think he finds it a problem.

Soon enough the palace gardeners become used to the Queen and her silences. She is interested in their work and has no delicacy about compost piles or digging ditches with her own precious hands. Skills she then teaches to the girl who has been given over to her as a maid. Bel is her name, and she too has no fear of dirt or work involved in pulling fruit from it.

When Essis is elbow deep in the earth the pain of bindings fades to something she can practically forget. The garden becomes her peace. She builds it, by leaf and by root, over the span of years. Until it has taken over an entire side of the palace. Rose-hedges and passionfruit bowers twining and interlocking into a world of her own making.

Daeed too is busy. The king has given him everything he ever wanted. Money and a simple demand to create. As long as the king is amused by it. He churns out mechanical delicacies for Nyibosu’s ephemeral interest. Wings of wax, automatons made of seashells and limestone light enough to walk on water. The magister is a man of his word, building magical constructs to entertain and enrich A-mali’s king.

Nyibosu is delighted.

The queen can feel every pull of the inventor’s magic. The flame that forges his metal, and gives life to his imaginings, all of it flows through her.

Sometimes Daeed comes by her working in the garden, kneeling in a bed of flowers, or fixing a trellis, and stares. Watching her like a miser watches his hoard.

Essis says nothing. Has said nothing to him since the day he wrapped a golden chain around her wrists and carried her away from the only home she’d ever known.

Daeed speaks to her through the pull of the golden chain that connects them. A tug, and yank. Remember that I own you.

As if she could forget.

The garden grows, and so does the inventor’s ambition.

Essis kneels in a misty dell when pain unlike anything she has ever felt, reaches from her hands to wrap itself around her throat. It is a mind-rotting pain, like a blackened, shattered tooth.

When she wakes, lying in a bed of newly opened jasmine, she feels through the connection the echo of a name. A hatred that leaves a taste at the back of her mouth. She wipes vomit from her face with her dress of gold and digs her fingers deep into the cold earth.

∙ ∙ ∙

II. Continued: A Princess Makes a Promise

Ayo doesn’t manage to get away until well after moonrise. The manicured terraces are full of whispers and hastily muffled gasps. She darts between shadowed alcoves woven from manicured fruit trees and bubbling fountains with nothing but the moon lighting her way. The air is filled with perfume and her heart is in her mouth.

Past the flower-filled corners and desperate lovers, a wall cuts through the garden. If you followed its edge around, you would realize that it is a perfect circle. There is no door hidden beneath the weaving shadows of climbing vines heavy with passionfruit. The earth here is rich with fallen fruit and the scent of fermenting juice. No one collects the fruits that grow on the wall of the nameless garden.

Soon she comes to a mango tree old enough and tough enough to survive the construction of a wall taller than two men and as thick as a woman’s arm.

It is even darker under the tree. Still, Ayo carefully gathers her skirts so that not one bright scrap might betray her place. She has had much practice. Leaning down to a barred grate, she calls out in the sound of a night bird.

Skoo lee! Skoo lah!

Soon enough, she hears a response.

Skoo lah! Skoo lee!

“Sister, you’re early!” Tero’s voice is cheerful, as always. In spite of being so far down below. In spite of, well, everything.

“I couldn’t wait, love. It’s too soon to the next culling and I couldn’t wait until after.”

“What’s wrong?” He asks. “I can hear it in your voice. What has he done?”

What hasn’t he done? She thinks.

There was one thing. But monstrosity has its logical conclusions and her father has come to his. If she could step out of her flesh and this world, she would do it. But that would leave Tero alone.

She has been silent too long. Tero’s voice rumbles up from the darkness, weary and broken.

“You’re leaving,” he says, without accusation only what sounds like weariness.

“I have to!” She is crying, like a baby, and hating herself. Older sisters aren’t supposed to cry.

“I don’t want you to stay here. I don’t want you to stay here for me.”

“I thought I could do it,” she says between tears she desperately tries to strangle. But she can’t anymore.

He is right under the grate, but many feet below. Too far for their hands to reach, though they’ve tried many times. He is right there, and she misses him. He is alive, and she grieves for him.

I thought I could fix it.

“Ayo?” Tero calls up to her. “I love you. I would be nothing if you had not stayed with me.”

She remembers holding him, receiving his sleeping body from their mother’s arms. His fingers, strong even in sleep, wrapped around her thumb. She would do anything for him. A promise made on a breath. Forever. Forever.

Life has tested forever and found its edge.

If she’d been stronger...she pulls herself up sharply. In this moment, she is still freer than he is. She will not break any further in front of him.

“Did you finish the books I brought last time?” She asks, scrubbing the tears from her face with the backs of her hands.

A pause as he tries to follow her verbal retreat. There is a sigh, loud enough to reach all the way up to her.

“I... they were very good. The illustrations of the plants were helpful. Even better the candles you sent down as well.” He replies.

She’s lowered half of her own rooms down to him, over a dozen years.

Too little, her heart whispers.

As if she could have pulled him out! Couldn’t she? Could she?

The lock had come for them both, hers tightening ever slow slowly, but with just as cruel a turn.

You look just like your mother.

She must marry. Her father. Her father demands.

She will throw herself at fate’s thread first. Let Wyrd slice her to shreds before submitting.

“I will find a way to finish this, Tero. I promise. I swear.”

“I know.” He says.

Ayo slips a narrow package from her over-dress and lowers it down to him on a rope.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

She leaves as quietly as she came, with no one to see her pass. The gardens quiet and sleeping, its secret revels done.

Except.

Look up.

Up beyond the magic-raised wall, inside the heart of the locked garden, in the tower that looms above all. Someone does listen. Has always listened.

Did you think she was gone? Dead and buried where her son is entombed alive?

You should know better by now. She still has use, and the magister does not let anything go.

She listens.

To the haunted bellows of her imprisoned son. To the whispered fears of her daughter. To the sound of her own hollow breaths, as her captor creeps closer.

She has carved deep half-moon scars into the palms of her hands, waiting and listening. The shiver of her chains echoes with every breath.

Essis waits, as all gardeners do, for the dark earth to bear fruit.

∙ ∙ ∙

III. From her blood, three hounds sprang. One made of shadows, the second of moonlight, the third of fear. Singing, the war dogs follow the tracks of her tears.

Wooh sah! Woo sah!

The War Dogs parade through the streets of A-mali. Their joined step is thunder, their raised voices the call of god-hunters in pursuit.

Woo sah! Woo sah!

They wear many faces, none of them human. Snarling masks, white-toothed and red-tongued, cover their faces instead. Their armor, black overlapping scale, absorbs all light.

Woo sah! Woo sah!

An empire is a hungry thing. It must be fed, and fed on time. The war dogs push the boundaries of A-mali, ripping and tearing at the bodies of weaker places, weaker people, until their borders bleed out into the empire’s cup.

Woo sah! Woo sah!

Men and women and women behind masks. Push, the masks say. Forward. More. We must have it. Masks are a special kind of magic. One of the oldest kinds.

Woo sah! Woo sah!

The people of A-mali look away, shoulders hunched with the effort of appearing happy for their king. The magister’s enchanted army is Nyibosu’s favorite toy. An army built on the bones of sacrifices, the youths of vassal nations. A-mali hides its children, hoping they can be spared. Fearing they will not.

Woo sah! Woo sah!

The War Dogs parade past the temples of the gods. Here, the priests have shut their doors and their eyes.

Watch! Says one goddess, from her perch in the aether. Watch and bear witness, she orders. The end of the world demands it.

Woo sah! Woo sah!

On a shaded dais, the nobility of A-mali are gathered to cheer the army and through them, their king. Nyibosu wears a mask of his own, each fang picked out with jewels, the crazed eyes worked in precious jade. It matches the throne he sits upon, and the overrobe of his armor. Were he to sit in the harbor, the reflection of his glory would be a danger to shipping. If his eyes slip from the parade it is only for a moment, and only to glance possessively at the girl who sits in a smaller throne by his side.

Daeed watches his creation with pride. The phalanxes of his War Dogs raising thunder under clear skies. Each mask, from Nyibosu’s magnificent adornment to every infantryman’s simple grinning jackal visage, shows his power. His genius. Golden dogs laughing, teeth and tongue bared. Ready to eat the world.

Woo sah! Woo sah!

Cheek to jowl with the crowd of desperate sycophants, the magister of A-mali is almost obscured by the crush. Unless you catch, with a sidewinding glance, a flash of gold at his ear, glinting in time with the roar of the soldiers. Gold that is twin to that in the mask the king has worn for a dozen years. Gold like the softest of chains around a woman’s wrists.

Woo sah! Woo sah!

Threads of fate hum in the summer heat. Chains of destiny stretching and pulling until minds and bodies break.

Nyibosu, resplendently hollow, breaking nations for his pleasure.

Daeedalus, relishing the fruits of his long work, on the grasp of cracking the world like a ripe nut, to gain what he has desired for age upon age. To feast on the meat.

Shivering under the summer sun, a princess on the edge of annihilation.

∙ ∙ ∙

What the Clouds Saw

We go everywhere, you know, my brothers and me. There’s no place along the godwind we haven’t rolled through. And when you get around like we do, you see things. Things that remind you of what may have been temporarily lost in the cluttered back closets of your memory. There’s one which you’d find particularly interesting. You see, it’s about gold.

My eldest brother Mammatus once told me that what you call gold was first formed on this earth from the spilling of a godsblood in a war at the very beginning of creation. Cousin Pileaus snorted at that. Not that old Matus was wrong, says he. (Matus has a terrible temper and Pileaus may be a lot of things, but slow he is not.) Was a matter of specifics he said. It was one god’s blood in particular.

There are more gods, my sweet raindrop, than you small things have names for them. There are great gods of Time and Love and Imagination, and small gods of lost socks and crockery repair. Medium gods of young mothers and gardeners, and of course, demigods of varying divinity. (Gods are amorous, and whomst among you has not left an extra girl-child up on a cliff to see what godling might make a mother of her, and a fortune for her family?)

The god who shed his blood to make your greed flesh, did not have any intention of doing so. His name was Ilum, and when he first crawled from darkness’s womb and looked around creation, he wanted what he saw. His sight fell upon a goddess, knew her to be beautiful and precious, and wanted her like he wanted innumerable suns and countless earths. Because he was strong enough to take it.

He approached her, a barely quickened calf to a mother of galaxies, and said, “You should belong to me.”

“I belong to no one,” she replied in void-dust and unfurling novae. And she laughed.

In her laughter, he knew fear. It was the precipice of his self-image’s destruction, her amusement at him. And he fell, as all matter does, towards the singularity of his own petty existence.

He flailed towards her, an arc of abnegation and furious destruction. It should have posed no threat to her. One who’d slept at the feet of the fates, lulled by the whoosh and clack of the loom, the snick of the descending blade.

But moments, while small, are devastating in a pack. A people might survive a plague, only to be overcome by an invading force. Kingdoms might be lost, rotted out from their core, as their people are sold away. One soul, ten souls, ten million. A confluence of tragedies from which there is no recovery. And so here again.

There is one who loves this goddess of dark places where life begins. Loves her more than he loves the conflagration of suns that makes up his heart. Not want. Love.

(Look beloved. A chain. Unlike the others. Made to connect, not bind. Surely your people have taught you the difference?)

What happens in such a moment? When the rage of immortals collides and shatters moments into mere carrion. Eternities collide.

That is what gods are made up of you know. Endlessnesses. Impossible math. And soulstuff.

It’s why they don’t fit down here with us and our simple baby dimensions and one-way time.

But if broken, if exploding across existence in a spray of irrational numbers and dark matter, a god can quite easily fall down to earth.

As he fell, his blood flowed from the wound he sustained. It flowed as fire, and then as golden water that rained down upon the world and cooled.

His body fell into the deepest part of a northern ocean and remained there until, well rather recently. Being a god, mere death has not ended him. Being a shit, he has not changed.

He is the grasping hand. The closed gate. The closed border. He has never stopped wanting.

Your lives are stories, rewriting themselves in marrow and bone. Each generation a link in the chain. Pain begetting pain, greed begetting greed. Understand, beloved, that few of you ever escape or are given the chance to.

May the first blossoming fire of creation burn me, if I lie.

∙ ∙ ∙

III. Continued: A Magister Dreaming

“A disappointment. You killed your mother, boy, and we don’t even have anything to show for it.” The belt rises, its shape outlined by the fire. His grandfather, as weathered and twice as hard as the oncoming leather, looms over him. He waits for the crack of pain, shivering in the wake of the last strike.

Daeed wakes up gasping.

He still has the old nightmares. Decades between him and the old man, an ocean of power, and still he dreams of him.

He climbs out of bed, careful not to wake his sleeping wife and son. Icarus has been sick of late. They both need their rest. And he cannot do what needs to be done with them nearby. The god is waiting.

Slipping out of his rooms, he shrugs on a simple cotton robe and steps out onto the balcony that wraps around this wing of the palace. The coolness of the tiles under his bare feet and the breeze blowing from the sea dry the last of the sleep-sweat from his back.

There have been dreams every night. Dreams of death, dreams of his birth. Like all demigods, he can remember every moment after his first drawn breath. The light fading from his mother’s eyes. The wails of her sisters. The musty smell he would learn to know as wet wool. Born into a family of sheep herders on a desolate rock with no more chance at fortune than to hope a god would get a babe on their prettiest daughter.

Shaking the past from his shoulders, Daeed sits in a dark alcove of the palace, sheltered even from the weak light of a waxing moon. The god rises up from him as both aura and shadow. An immensity of darkness unfurling like wings inside of him.

You are restless.

“I am. It is just the work...it tires me.”

You are but part-god. Mortality is weakness.

Daeed winces.

“Once we have enough power, it will no longer be a problem.”

Yes. They are nearly strong enough to be bled. You cannot understand eternity, but it has been longer than that, trapped here. In flesh.

He feels the pressure of a dark hand around his heart, a grip solid enough to stall the blood in his veins.

You must be strong.

He cannot answer, the pain closes his throat. But the god knows. He knows everything. There is neither nook nor cranny of his soul that is unoccupied by the power he opened to it.

We will rise.

The presence of the god leaves him, and Daeed falls over like a limp doll. Breathing is a hard job and he labors at it for several minutes until it becomes easier. He rolls over onto his back to stare at the sky, and the waterfall of stars where the priests say all life was begun. He touches his ear, the gold ring hanging from it hums like the air after a lightning strike. He can feel that energy still, the echo of it, inside him.

Blood to blood.

If he goes back to bed now, he will only wake his family with his restlessness. No, better not, he thinks rising on creaking limbs. Instead, he slips down a shadowed staircase and into the waiting gardens below.

The air is spiced with the nectar of night blooming flowers, and it is with a buoyant mood that Daeed winds through the darkened hedges to wilder overgrown lanes. In the distance a shape rises from the whispering leaves. A tower, bone white and unseeing, no windows to open it to the world. At its peak is a strange, unsettling statue. It is a man, his body captured as if in the middle of falling. He cannot see the face, but the magister can remember it clearly.

He can remember the first time he tasted god blood. A lost boy, staring out at the sea, hoping that something would take him away. Despairing of the dusty brutality of his life as a failed demigod with no magic. Wanting so much, when he saw a glimmer of light wedged between the waving fronds of a tidal pool. Lifting the golden plum from the water and hearing for the first time, the voice of a god. Bringing the salty ichor to his lips.

He will have it again. Finally, and what should have been his all along.

∙ ∙ ∙

IV. Time looked on his youngest sister. He found her playing in darknesses and the light between stars. “What are you making, sister?” He asked. “Something to love,” she said.

Sometimes, Ayo thought, the past felt more real than the present. Its colors fuller. Its tastes brighter. As if, when her mother was taken from her, half of Ayo’s soul went too. If she wanted to feel, really feel, she had to do so in her memory. And it was there she retreated when her spirit felt on the verge of disappearing altogether.

Days gone, days remembered, when ‘safe’ was a word that had meaning. Ayo lets herself dissolve into the memories of the girl she once was.

Ayo loved her mama. (Bel said everybody loved her and that was true. But Ayo loved her best and first.) Mama was special. She was like a piece of the night sky, stars and all come down to earth. And she could grow things. From dirt and rocks and seeds. Ayo told baby Tero that Mama could grow just about anything. Tero had just laughed. He was just a baby and didn’t understand things. And he was always laughing.

That got on her nerves sometimes. Not that she didn’t laugh too. But there was an awful lot to be serious about. And if you didn’t take things serious, didn’t worry over them, then what would happen to...everything?!

Mama worried. She could tell. Like when Bel would take her and Tero out of mama’s room and into her tiny cupboard for the night. When the big man was visiting.

“Skee lah! Skee loo! What do we do when the woo-wrie calls?” Mama asked.

“We hide!” Ayo yells with pride at knowing the right answer.

Ayo drifts through the shadows of a dead world. Memories of her mother, of the games they played, replay themselves in her mind.

∙ ∙ ∙

Pain rips through the whisper-thin walls of her daydream. Memory shreds and falls like a broken spiderweb, and Ayo is wrenched back into the present. There is a fire in full blossom under the skin of her cheek.

There was no mark, or bruise. But he said he couldn’t make the pain go away. Or maybe the magister simply wanted it to stay, to remind her that she’d tried to run and had been caught. Pain echoed across her arms and legs, the arch of her ribs. She’d run and the king did not take the attempted theft of his property lightly.

She’d stayed in bed for a full week after, until she could bear the color of the walls no more. Sleepwalked through deserted halls, swaddled in memories strong enough to calm the pain. But not forever. And where, she wondered, has she walked to? Outside?

She wears nothing but a simple black muslin shift and her feet were bare. But the grass of the gardens feels cold and sweet. She faces the white wall of her mother’s locked garden, and thinks it fitting. Ayo reaches out one shaking hand and rests it on the stone behind the waving vines with their heavy yellow fruit. And waits for the fire to come.

She’d first tried to breach the garden wall when she was a girl. Mama and Tero were gone and no one would say where. She was alone and scared and as soon as she could, ran out from under Bel’s careful watch and to the place where Mama had always been.

But there was a wall there. Tall and white and perfect. As if it had always been there, before Ayo, before mama, before the beginning of the world.

But that was a lie. And she hadn’t let it keep her away from getting back to mama. To Tero. They needed her.

What do we do when the big man calls?

Skee lah! Skee loo! Where can I find you?

She’d climbed. Small fingers finding cracks and handholds enough to propel her skinny frame up the stone wall. It was when she reached the top that the fire came. It burned her hands and crawled up her arms until she was hurting everywhere and screaming, screaming so loud that Bel found her and took her away.

Here she was again. She’s not sure why, or when her body decided for her, but she begins to climb the wall again. She is taller and heavier now, but no less determined, and she pulls herself up towards the top. This time there is no fire.

Ayo pulls herself up to the top of the wall, and shocked at her success, falls over the other side.

She lands on springy green moss, falling down a slope and rolling until she lands in a bed of something. Something green and fresh as the first glimpse of morning. There is more pain, but more worrying is the feeling that she is still falling. The sky above her, clear on the other side of the wall, is now gauzy with mist. The sun low enough to make her think that hours have passed.

It is twilight in this garden.

∙ ∙ ∙

Bel’s Story

Snuggle up to me, babylove, and I’ll tell you a story. Yes, you’ve been my very own sweet bit today. A story I’ve promised, and a story you shall have. Which one would you like to hear?

Oh that one again? Well, yes of course, if that’s what you want.

Once, long ago, there was a gardener. She was a quiet woman, speaking rarely, and only to very few, so let’s call her Silence.

She was a good woman, yes. I’ve told you that before, haven’t I girl? She was kind, and gentle, and fierce in the best kinds of ways.

Was she nice to me? Well this is a story from a place long ago and far away, but I suppose if I’d ever met this lady that she would have been very nice to me. That’s the way she was. She had sadness in her eyes, but her hands were gentle and her shoulders strong. It’s a special kind of strong, my love, to not just endure but to grow.

And grow she did. In her garden. It wasn’t very big, and it wasn’t very small, but it was hers. Outside of it, there were monsters and traps and oh very many dark things. But there she felt safer. The monsters would sometimes leave her alone there.

She grew bowers of roses, and towers of winding vines, nests of sweetgrass and columbine. A world she made inside that garden, and me with her there too. I had a small spade, and a strong back, and would have followed her anywhere, the kindest sweetest lady there ever was. (Though this was a long time ago, and far away, I suppose I was there since you insist.)

I was there to see when she fell, in pain. When she cried, for what I don’t know, she could never say. But I stayed by her side in the garden.

∙ ∙ ∙

I was there the day she saw him. Though I must say that there was not a moment I thought him like me. Like us.

He bent, and the light of the rising sun winked off of the horns that grew from his head. Ivory and mother of pearl and pointed, wicked sharp, in a curve like a sickle, my love. The sun glinted off the pointed edge, as if speared on it. A glittering fish.

(This is where you ask, “What happened when she saw him?” And I will always say the same thing.)

She turned all sudden like a puppet on a string. That lady of the garden. She turned to him and I near stopped breathing. The look of them together. Like the sun and the moon meeting for the first time, or the sea’s first touch upon the shore.

And I will swear, may my ancestors turn their faces from my soul if I lie, I heard a sound I will never forget.

Didn’t know what it was at first. Was a few days later, I was by the smithy. My little trowel having bent against a root as hard as rock, when I heard it again.

The smith, raising her hammer up. Every line of her body outlined by the sun. And then bringing that steel hammer down like thunder on a black horizon.

Yes m’dear. That was the sound I’ll never forget. The hammer falling on chains.

What happened next? Oh silly fish, you know what happened. You tell me! Tell it good.

Ha, yes! They fell in love.

∙ ∙ ∙

VI. Continued: Over the wall

The garden is a wonderland. At first, Ayo worries that she has hit her head and is dreaming, broken against some rock. But it feels so familiar, this place. Her heart says that this is not a delusion, but a return.

There is a sound, like a whisper and a rustle and a chime. Globes of light surround her as she walks through arches covered with white and yellow blooms nodding in the dusky breeze. They dance around her, one coming close enough to view. It is a honeybee, large as a knuckle, fuzzy and golden. Its arc in the air is a whirr of distilled sunlight.

They follow her, or she follows them, through the garden. Its paths are mere suggestions now after so long, and she thinks they must have overlapped and curled back into each other when new. The architect of this place had not believed so much in borders.

Rose bowers flow into tiny glades of silver grass and tinkling glass dandelions. Small white spiders spin moon colored vines across a charcoal black lattice that arcs overhead to make a bright tunnel of spider silk plants. She reached out to touch a glassy fruit. Unable to be afraid.

A golden bee danced a tracery in the air, greeted in return by a delicate wave from a milky spider resting on a pale leaf.

The fruit was cool in her palm, and heavy with juice. Through the translucent rind it glows orange and purple to match the dusky sky.

But her guide tells her it is time to move on. Drawing a spiral in the air into a tighter and tighter circle. Yes, she follows behind, and she can feel it. Some thread pulling her along gently and irresistibly.

A pair of spiders pause in their work to wave goodbye. See you soon.

The path descends. A tight weaving of roots forms stairs downward.

This is the right way, her heart remembers.

Go further, the story tells her.

She does.

The stairs lead down into mist and the scent of plums. The wind picks up, rustling thousands of leaves, and the glen sounds as loud as the crashing tide. Forward. Fallen leaves and petals break under her feet. Twilight has fallen into night, but the bees light her way. Darting and luminous, they leave tracks of light behind them, runes burning in the air. Ayo knows she has reached the center of the garden, when there is no light from above except for a cascade of stars, and a sliver of moon.

From a wall of brambles, black roses exhale their perfume into the air. She reaches out to touch one, to get closer to that scent which is almost a taste. The thorn she does not see is long, and thin and sharp. It pierces the back of her hand with almost no pain at all. But still, she falls.

VI. Sit between my legs, beloved. Lay your head upon my knee. I will grease your scalp with the reflection of stars and tell you how the world began, and how it will end.

There is a special ache in places where things used to be. Essis feels this pain in her arms, where both of her babies once resided.

It has been so long. She’d lived eternities that were shorter than the years since she’d held her children. The memory of the last time she’d kissed their cheeks--inhaled the scent of baby, sunshine, and distilled love that wafted from their skin--was crystallized in her memory.

In the garden, her plans have almost come to ripeness. But like any tiller of soil, she knows that what emerges will do what it will. Creating life does not mean controlling the path it chooses to take.

One by one her hopes have twisted over and under themselves until they are a heavy knot at the center of her being.

At the beginning of her imprisonment, fury had powered her every breath. As a full understanding of her predicament unfolded, so had her plan to find her freedom.

But then, love.

Love complicates things. Wears gorges into the plains of the soul until its landscape no longer resembles the self we thought we knew.

What right did she have to bring children into her tragedy?

It was an impossible hope borne of an irrational love. She found herself unable to regret either.

Her prison has shrunk. Walled away in a tower, its only room locked beyond time. But even that cannot hold back what she has planted.

The mirror garden in the tower exists in perpetual noon. Light without nourishment, heat without respite. A cage built for her especially.

She laughs at it sometimes. (A dry laugh, echoing from a cavernous emptiness, but a laugh is a laugh in places and times such as she endures.) As if a cage designed by someone who hates the very essence of who you are, could understand you enough to keep you bound. You want a prison? Let someone who says they love you build it. There are no chains like the ones built by those who think they have your best interests at heart.

∙ ∙ ∙

So. A cage of merciless light. Casting the darkest and most delicious of shadows. Essis sits in the center of the phantom garden and waits as the shadows lengthen and twist. The dry husk world warps as a needle is pulled through it, bearing a threaded soul.

Essis holds her eldest child in her arms again and wipes the tears from her face. Like the echo of a memory, her body begins to rock. The weight of her daughter in her arms pulls on some taut and burning string, unraveling the barrier holding back her own tears.

They speak, mother and daughter, in words I will not and cannot share.

But. I will do my best to translate.

Imagine opening your chest and clawing out your heart. Turning it into a little mannequin, with feet and hands and mouth and eyes, and letting it run wild into the world. Imagine someone rips your screaming heart out of your arms.

Imagine your home. Bricks, wood, glass, and metal, the walls keeping you safe. The fabric that coddles you to sleep. The scent and smell of the food that nourishes you. Imagine that you wake up one day, and it is gone. Nothing left but the space where your home used to be.

Imagine, your heart restored, your home returned.

“Mama?” Ayo whispers into her mother’s chest. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Essis, goddess in chains, “Baby, you are a gift. More than we could’ve ever asked for.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Reunion

I was in the garden when I first saw him. Your auntie Bel has told you, yes? She saw him first. And later would tell me that she thought him handsome but knew he was not like her, mortal. No matter if he had blood and ate food the same as she.

Horns! No, it wasn’t that, love. There are mortals with horns, some with feathers, some with scales. (And by my blood, one day you will be free to travel this world and meet them all.)

But this is before you were a dream in my heart. His name was Cor but I would not know that for some time. Cor. Beloved.

Your brother, he has the same horns. Golden and curved like the edge of the sun. The horns that damned him to be a prisoner.

I don’t blame you. No one blames you baby. You were a child. My child, playing with her brother. You could have not known what would happen. No more than I could have predicted that it would happen that day. I who dared to have you when I was not supposed to have anything or anyone. Absolve this of yourself, daughter. I am your mother long-lost and just-found, but no matter what years have separated us I say let that burden down. It is not yours and I did not raise you to take up what belongs to another.

But yes, Cor. Shall we walk a bit darling? I find myself restless, and there is someone I would like you to meet.

We are so close to the possibility of an end to this story. Yes, this garden is just as real as the one you have left. I’m sorry that the thorn caused you any pain. Let me see your hand. I’ll kiss it better? There. That’s good. Ha! Your hands are just as big as mine. I remember when you were small enough to fit in just one hand. My baby.

Watch out for those thistles. I would not normally keep them in any garden of mine, but I must turn the bars of this cage any way I can. You know what I mean. I have watched you, babygirl. I have watched you fight.

Oh! I am so proud of you. Don’t cry baby, I’ll start again. And we don’t have much time.

Not now. Not ever.

We are nearly there. Yes, it is different here. There is no tower in this version of the garden, you see. The tower? How can I explain? Think of it as an arrow that pierces through two dimensions, keeping them together by creating a hole through both of them.

Brutal magic, child. Crude.

There are better ways. But they still require their own sacrifice. No, there won’t be a scar baby. I promise. It doesn’t hurt anymore does it? Good.

Good.

Here he is. With me. And not.

Yes, the statue on the tower you’ve seen for half your life. Not metal. Not a man. My love. He is the arrow that pierces this place and the world of your birth. His blood and pain that binds them together.

He gave me mangoes the second time he saw me. I scared him away the first time you see. Yes, really! He said I looked very fierce. And angry.

I was. I am.

But he came back with fruit as an apology. I told him to plant one and I would forgive him. You’ve sat under that tree. It grew well. He was good with his hands and gentle. Soft as the first glimmer of sun off the sea. Soft as a ripe guava. Twice as sweet.

Is your mother embarrassing you? Ha!

Someday maybe you will have your own guava-love. That’s why I birthed you. Because my love saw a hope for a future. And you are my promise to that future.

You are crying again. I’m sorry baby. I’ll fix it. I promise.

But before it comes to an end, I wanted you to know. Because I have felt every tear you have shed. I needed you to know that I brought you into this world because I loved you and wanted you. There was no pain in your making. We both wanted you, your father and I, no matter what we have suffered after.

Yes. Your father.

What do you mean? You thought…? Oh love!

Your father. Your only father is the man I love. He is here.

Say hello, Ayo.

∙ ∙ ∙

VI. Continued: Daughter and Mother

Ayo sits at her real father’s feet and holds her head in her hands. Her hair grows quickly but still she can feel the outline of her skull beneath the kinks. It is smooth as the globe in her father--in the king’s library.

Every time the knife crossed her scalp. They had known. And watched. And lied to her. Made her believe that the king was her father. That she would be his wife. Because cruelty was its own currency.

Her mother wraps her in her arms. She shakes and cries, and still her mother holds her.

“Baby, it’s time to end it. Don’t you think?”

Yes.

VI. The other gods asked, ‘What is this dark you wear?’ ‘It is the beginning of all things,” she said. ”And the end of them too.’

Tero has walked the maze for most of his life. It is alive as he is. A life made of the magic and the plants of the garden above pulled down in root and thorn to cage him in. He could hate it but does not. It was made just as he was and has no more say in its use than he does.

The tangled walls of fingerling thorns and serrated leaves need pruning as any hedge would. He doesn’t have a knife but the claws at the ends of his fingers, when not retracted, are sharp enough to cut. If the sap of the vines burns, that does not bother him. Does not the labyrinth provide pale blooms for his pleasure? Are there not corners that hide sweet fruit to nourish him? The labyrinth takes care of him as best it can. And if it keeps him in, does it not also keep others out?

Jasmine, clematis, and bitter melon. Asterion collects them all as he wends his way across the expanse of the labyrinth. Halfway through, in a particularly difficult intersection, he stops to remove the branches that have fallen into one of the streams that bisect the labyrinth’s sections.

He puts down the small basket that he carries, a long-ago gift from Ayo, and gently removes the dead wood from the waving river grass, spooking a few pale opal fish with his shadow. One brave pearl-sided fellow swims close to the dark curve of one of his extended claws in the water, shimmering along its length before gliding back to the comfort of the shadows and his brethren.

His work done, Asterion bends over one more time, cups water between his large hands, and drinks. The stingy light from above, filtered through stone and root, shines ochre on the rushing water and glimmers softly.

But there is no time to linger. In response to his passage, thorns hide their barbs, night jasmine blooms in the twilight that passes for day, and among fallen boughs trails and rings of fungi glow softly to light his path.

As he walks, he touches leaf and branch, thorn and gloom-loving flower. Whispering welcome and good morning to the creature that is this subterranean garden. He is grateful. Ayo says that even a plant decides how it will grow, no matter what the gardener intends.

When he finds the last item on his list, sweet mimosa growing in bright crack in the rock, he turns back towards home.

His first months in the labyrinth were a waking nightmare, but eventually he’d been able to set aside a part of it for himself alone. He’d built it with fragrant dried wood, held together with clay-rich mud and above that moss. It looked more grown than built.

It was tall enough for him to stand up inside, but barely. He’d shot up again recently according to the notches on the large mango root by his fire pit. He moved slowly inside, not wanting his horns to tangle in the vines that dangled from above.

The small home was filled with everything his sister had been able to steal for him. Books on plants and magic; small knives he’d used to carve his bowl, cup, and spoon; a double headed axe; and his precious brushes, ink, and paper. He’d learned to make ink from the galls on the deep mango roots but Ayo’s was better.

He put his small basket on the stool he’d carved and set to work. He breathed gently on the lightstone and it woke, giving off a soft yellow light that filled the small room. Linen saved from an old shirt long since grown out of, sewn and filled with dried jasmine. Carefully he wrapped it with dried passionflower vine, threaded along it a delicate ring. Carved from bright mango wood streaked pink, black and gold, the ring was three rings interlocked.

He touched the wood his hands had rubbed to a shine over months. Carved along each: Mother, sister, brother.

So caught up in his work, he does notice the shadows in the room twist and stretch. The edges of the world harden, and it is only then that he turns. Too late for anything but a flash in his eye.

The pain rips him from consciousness.

∙ ∙ ∙

Daeed watches the boy’s body slump and then fall to the floor. Dancing away from the slash of his horns only just in time. No use testing what would happen if one of those blooded him.

No, it’s time to wrap up this little experiment once and for all. He motions to the two war dogs that have accompanied him to carry the body away. He looks around the crude hovel as they wrap it in muslin and carry it ponderously away. He picks up a book, something the prisoner has written himself, and riffles through the pages of notes until a drawing catches his eye. The boy has drawn the cross section of a breadfruit, labeling the parts of the plant carefully with a surprisingly legible hand.

A memory of the few pages he’d secreted away as a boy, hunching over them with stolen candles, runs through his mind. The look in his grandfather’s eyes as they had burned.

The book falls from his hand with a sneer. He steps out of the small dwelling, rubbing at imaginary dirt on his hands. One soldier remains, waiting for him.

“Burn it all,” he orders.

∙ ∙ ∙

A Foreign Country

The last time he saw the sun, he was running. He was laughing, tumbling through Mama’s rooms. She always said not to. She said never. But Ayo was chasing him around the tall white walls, and she was laughing too.

This moment replays infinitely. The two of them warm from the sun, drunk with play. The heartbeat before his childhood, and his world, come to an end.

Tero has lived in this extended moment over and over. He feels his child body move. Can’t stop. Spins, laughing, while inside crying and screaming.

Turn back!

But the past does not care about Tero. Not the boy of the labyrinth. The monster of the island. The Queen’s bastard.

His child self slips a little on the smooth tile floor, but he does not fall. Tero feels an arm grab his shoulder, tight and hard, a touch that means trouble. Behind him, Ayo is still laughing.

An adult has caught him, and the wrong one. Callused hands ruffle his hair as he tries to get away. Crying now, when seconds ago he was laughing.

See how quickly a life turns, on the edge of a needle, or on the point of two golden horns hidden amongst curls.

Baby Tero looks up into the face of the magister and sees in his eyes the prison where he will spend the rest of his life.

∙ ∙ ∙

Daeed watches as the soldiers place the boy on the platform he has designed. He is large but this was anticipated, and there is more than enough room on the large stone plinth. The shackles threaded into the chains have been made specially for this last sacrifice. None of the simple iron that bound the perfect tribute youths whose blood fed the binding of the labyrinth. Only special stone would be fitting for the bastard son of a god.

If some part of the inventor feels some sympathy for another mortal child of a god, its pathetic howl cannot overpower the whirlwind of his ambition. The boy will die today, and the power in his blood will allow Daeed to ascend to what he has always known should have been his birthright. His ichor will pour out into the grooves carved into the rock, pooling in arcane spirals of gold, down into the cup, which was also of his design.

He dismisses his attendants with a wave. There will be only one witness tonight.

Sitting in the shadows, the king called Nyibosu whispers to himself. His mutterings and broken laughter are those of a mind haunted, the blood and bone mansion of a revenant.

A shadow detaches from the wall and wraps itself around the giggling thick-necked king, once, twice, three times, and then pushes itself down his throat. His eyes fill with rose gold ichor as the shadow works grotesquely into his body. He shivers wildly until jerking to a halt. A god looks out from behind his eyes.

“It is time.”

Daeed nods, unwilling to admit how much the sight of Ilum wearing a man’s body turns his stomach. There is something wrong with the god’s manipulation of a human body. Something unclean. And if he dwells too long on that use and that perversion it may turn the final tumbler in the lock holding back all of the screams of his maimed conscience. So he does not look

“He’s ready. Any longer and he might become strong enough to reject you.”

Ilum growls, a dark wet rumbling from Nyibosu’s broken throat. “Then get on with it, son.”

A lifetime ago, Daeedalus the motherless and unloved, drank the blood of a god. A god delivered from the sea onto the damp battered rock he called home. A god who’d whispered the truth he’d yearned for since the first moment of understanding had formed in his mind.

I am your father, boy. You have waited for me, for so long. I can hear the years rattling in your bones. In the bruises under your eyes.

You--we are meant for more than this.

Daeed holds the heavy gold knife that he has used hundreds of times, on this same ground, with hundreds of other children. Their eyes pleading, or glassy, or angry. He has spilled the blood anyway. This will be the time, he screams at the whirling dark inside of him.

Drink.

The last time.

And rise, my son, to claim everything you’ve ever wanted.

The boy he has imprisoned for most of his life, remains unconscious. His eyes closed, almost sleeping peacefully. Daeed’s knife is heavy with old blood and old ambition. He raises it up, shaking.

What you deserve.

Daeed steps onto the road to godhood and slams the knife down.

VII. A star asks: “What holds the center of all things, the beginning of all stories?” Death, in response: “It is the weight of where we went wrong.”

Essis and her daughter are digging a hole. It has to be the right size. Big enough to birth a soul. Deep enough to keep the soul intact. They work hard, digging as fast as bare hands can dig otherworldly soil.

The birthing begins with a glimmer of pearl, a luminescent caul. Essis grabs it and pulls, Ayo joining her mother in the work. The two women pull, gently but with every ounce of strength they have. Freeing a head, shoulders, and then the final release of feet coming free.

For the second time, she clears sac and liquid from her son’s face and watches him open his eyes with a startled breath. Her hands cover the dripping wound above his heart, holding back its tide.

“Hello beloved,” she says to her perfect boy. Her son.

She clutches him to her and pulls her daughter in, too, smelling their heads as if they were still the babies she held in her arms, and not the end of a tragedy. Holding them tight but never tight enough, Essis tells her children the beginning of the story, and the end.

∙ ∙ ∙

Mother

We don’t have much time, children.

I am not as I was. To give me a body, this world had to break me. Incomprehensible to its specific math, I needed to be less. So I became more than I, became we.

And I did not even know. But I am getting mixed up. And this is important.

My first memory of life is of the green waves crashing against the black beaches of Salt. It was there that we were fished out of the sea foam. My sister and I. Moon dark and moon bright.

We grew strong and loved by the women we called mothers, and neither knew nor cared for the far islands beyond our mist-covered rock of moss and wind-bent trees. I was carefree. It was my sister who dreamt dark dreams and sat close to the fires of the grandmothers. Listening, always for something she could not name. Not even to me, who shared a first breath with her. I roamed the island, and loved it, the sand dark as my own hair, the mist cold like an icy veil over the gardens. Yes, the women of Salt were gardeners. Their fruits were secrets, poisons, cures, dreams, and forgotten doorways. The harvest of witches. And when I curled into bed with my sister, the other half of my soul, I held her against the dreams that seemed ready to carry her away. And I promised that they never would.

That is the first promise I broke.

My sister Circe woke one morning, when the sun had not yet thrown its first tendrils across the water and told me, “He is coming.”

I did not know who he was.

Not when the red sails gathered on the horizon, or the boats filled with iron-stinking men rowed ashore.

I did not know until after the air was nothing but screams and the smoke of ancient trees dying. When a man stepped from the fire and smoke, smiling as we hid where our mothers had locked us to keep safe. When he stepped over the blood of the women who raised us and grabbed my screaming sister from my arms. And raised a golden knife to her throat.

It was only when her blood spilled, gold as that knife, gold as the band around his throat, that memory returned to me from before this life. From before this body I wear now.

I remembered he who demanded me, like a fruit on a plate, or wine in a cup. I remembered his face when I laughed, and I remembered his power raised to kill me, and the calamity afterwards.

I remembered falling to earth with my love. Holding him until my soul split in two and I fell into the sea and lost him.

I remembered Ilum, who tried to destroy me because he could not own me. And I saw his madness behind the eyes of the man that twisted my sister’s blood into two golden ropes and bound my wrists with them, to be his slave and the source of his magic.

He brought me to this island, and to a man who wanted, and whose want would hold a space big enough to hold the ambition of a broken god. And he worked his plan, to lift the god back into the heavens and ascend with him.

I, bound, did what I could.

Why a garden? My sister’s blood, my other soul, told me it was the answer. Not easy. Not quick. But a way. It is the nature of creation to reach out, heedless of barrier, towards life. A seedling given enough time will break rock and wall and chain. In time. What had I but time? To build a weapon that my jailer would not understand until it was too late and pressing against his bare throat?

Who waits better than a god? Better than a planter of things? Oh, my sweet baby girl. You can make a weapon of your own soul if you have to.

My love, cast down to earth with me, found me in the garden I built. And I dared to have you, both of you. Our love demanded it, against all reason or rhyme.

I promised that nothing would ever happen to you. That is the second promise I broke.

But I have waited for you, my babies, in the garden I have built with my hands and soul and hope.

What binds can be broken. What is broken can be brought together again. We are nearly at the end now, children. Hear the sound of the lock turning. This promise will hold true.

∙ ∙ ∙

Tero feels the wound in his chest with every breath, like the knife is still there. But he is with his Ayo, and his mother, so maybe he is already dead? Would there even be pain in the life after? Although the gods that had ruled his life were just the sort to bring him to a heaven stained with his own blood.

But Mama is crying, and that isn’t right.

“I’m sorry son, that I brought you into this. So so sorry.”

But it is his fault! His fault for being caught. His fault for playing where Mama told him not to.

Tero struggles in their arms, trying to sit up. Trying desperately to speak around the expanding bubble of pain in his chest.

“My first hope was to free myself, and the man I loved, from this curse. And I have only brought you further into it.” She is kissing him, and he can smell her hair. Jasmine and every single memory he has of happiness are bound up in its darkness.

“You will have everything I can give you. Everything we have left to give. Now, listen.”

The last thing he sees as he falls back into his body is his mother, and behind her, a glowing form caught in a moment of supreme pain. His eyes are brown, and the horns rising from his wide brow are gold.

VIII. Death Like Dreaming

In the earthly garden the wind is high, whipping through the green and petal strewn paths. Between the growing shadows Ayo runs faster than the falling dusk, disturbing neither dust nor pool of light as she moves. She wears a halo of lightning-bright bees, carries a thorn dagger in her hand, and a single midnight black pouch at her waist.

She follows the directions her mother has given her. The chittering of bats, the current of dueling winds, choruses of bright-bellied frogs. Down the path, right by the crack in the wall, descend the hidden stairs to the tunnels below the palace.

Slipping past like a shadow over the moon, Ayo dances past sleepy-eyed servants and straight-backed soldiers. There are those who have given the sad princess help over her years of imprisonment. A quick smile, or a quietly turned back. She wishes them no ill. Only their warden, the slick rot at the heart of the empire.

If some do see her? If they turn at the wrong moment, ready to call out, or to raise their sharp-edged axe? There is a quick burst of pain before they fall to the ground, and the constellation of her halo is less one fiercely burning star. She does not turn as they fall, does not stop even if their last breath is to reach out to her. Ayo’s eyes are darker than the beginning of the universe, and filled with as much purpose.

The tunnels twist and descend. Ayo passes a bronze gate, leaving its guardians prone and unseeing, and steps into walls of tangled green and the scent of fermentation. This is the labyrinth where her brother was sent to die, but lived stubbornly, miraculously. Here too, cages. Behind them sit the sad princes sent by their nations to die, sacrifices to the mad king of A-mali. Ayo does not slow. But her fingers, tipped in spider venom and wrapped in luminous silk, brush against their locks. The doors to their cells open, and a night breeze whispers to their startled occupants, run. Ayo is already gone when they do.

Her path moves further and further into the maze. Corridors of thorns bar her way, but part in front of the shadow of the dagger she holds. The garden remembers.

The silk from her fingers unspools, flying in a line before her, guiding her to the heart of the labyrinth. Night peonies and blue frangipani nod in the wake of her passage. The memories of earth moving slowly but surely in recognition: this is the blood of our creator. Ayo turns, and the garden opens the way before her. Until she can see the circle of light in a clearing at the center of the labyrinth. She sees her brother, and the bronze knife raised for another blow.

She is faster than the arm holding the knife, faster than the light glinting off the blade. Ayo’s thorn knife holds true and fast, as she aims it for a pinprick of gold in Daeed’s ear and cuts the glimmering umbilical in half. The two arcs of light spill to the ground, slick with blood, and the world explodes with sound.

∙ ∙ ∙

There was once a god who wanted. And a man who wanted. And another who wanted even more.

To hell with all of them.

When I was dying, my mother pulled my soul to hers and filled it with all she had of herself. And she told me one thing, thinking that she would die in my stead.

We were never meant to be chained.

∙ ∙ ∙

Something sweet slips between Tero’s lips. Sweet and tangy, and laced with the iron of his own blood.

“You’ve got to wake up, Tero. Right, now!”

He does as he is told. Because it is Ayo telling him, and he would pull down the moon for her. He eats what she gives him but when he opens his eyes, it is not the firelit circle of the sacrificial chamber but the ethereal garden of his mother’s prison outside of time.

Ayo lifts him to his feet. If they are real, if any of this is. He can still feel the pulsing drain of his wound, but it is receding farther as whatever Ayo has fed him moves through his veins.

“Come,” his sister says. And he does, holding her hand as he has wanted to do for years and years.

Their mother and father lie beneath the leaves of a mango tree. Eyes closed and unmoving.

“Help me, brother,” Ayo asks. He does not know what he can do. But he will do it. The light that runs through him now, he can do anything and everything.

He follows and does as she does, pressing slices of glowing rosy fruit from the pouch she carries into their mouths. A rogue bubble of hysterical grief reminds him not to tangle his horns with his father’s.

Essis opens her eyes and laughs. “You didn’t do as you were told. You were supposed to get away.”

Cor looks at the world for the first time in many years, then reaches out to his children. “They did better.”

His eyes burn whiter than the sun at noonday, and his voice is that of the tumbling rockslide. Tero thinks that he could die now, happily. He is with Ayo, and mama, and a father who holds him like the night holds the stars.

“Come children.” The mother and father say as one, and they walk out of the garden and onto the bloody floor of the sacrificial altar.

For Daeed, it has been a moment since the boy dying on the altar screamed against the knife. Less than a moment since his blood spat hot along his face and he felt the placenta of godly ichor that exalted him, ripped away into nothing. It is the space between that heartbeat and the next that Essis steps out of the aether and wraps her hand around his throat.

Returned to the world of blood and bone, Tero and Ayo watch their mother, restored and glorious, spin the thread of power between the magister and the collapsed body of the king onto her finger like silk onto a spindle.

Her power pulses through the labyrinth, crushing all but her family, and the few plants strong enough to bend instead of break. A crumpled wreck in a corner is all that remains of the mad king.

From Daeed’s twisted body, wracked with tremors and sobs, comes the voice of a ghost.

You can NOT! Ilum screams.

“I already have,” says Essis. Who pulls out from the air a pair of golden shears and cuts the cord of the god’s life with a snip! The ichor turning grey, fraying and unwinding.

Up into the air, into a darkness that is abyssal, bereft of light or heat or sound, the rags of Ilum’s soul are drawn up. And with it the screaming spirit of the lost boy who wanted to be a god.

Cor braids elemental fire around the unraveling souls and twists.

“GIVE BACK WHAT YOU HAVE TAKEN.”

∙ ∙ ∙

The dawn rises on an empty labyrinth, empty gardens, a quiet palace. The maids who rise to work find the corners filled with cobwebs and dust. Wooden doors rotted through, metal rusted and broken. Crawling through the rubble of disintegrating finery, they find the royal chambers empty, home only to nests of mice and colonies of industrious spiders.

A captain of the kitchen servants is sent to the long stone barracks of the war dogs. He finds nothing but ashes and old bones. In the empty cots, silence piled up like blankets..

∙ ∙ ∙

IX. Epilogue, or, a Promise

Dear Auntie,

We are sorry to have worried you. And we know how you love to worry! We are fine, and better than fine, but we could not stay.

Tero and Mama and Papa and I are gone away. (Yes, we have our papa back too and it is a long story, and you are as much a part of it as us!) There is nothing in A-mali for us but the memories of a cage. We will never set foot upon that land again.

But if they ask, auntie, tell them the truth. Everything I tell here is as I heard it, or saw it, or was told to me.

If I lie, may the stones break my bones, may the sun burn me, may the air boil in my lungs.

The only monster that lived here was he who sat on the throne. And he will never be back again either.

Be safe, auntie. We love you.

I have left three guavas for you with this story. They are yours. For when you are ready to see us again.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT MARIKA BAILEY

Marika Bailey was born in the Caribbean and raised in Brooklyn. She reps both with equal pride. A writer and illustrator, you can find her online on Twitter.

Not an ordinary dream

By Dike Okoro

Last night, I found myself

In a country of the ageless

We are history, we don’t

Want nobody’s history,

Read the street signs.

People walked barefoot;

Robots sold food and

Checked customers out.

At the checkout counter

I looked at the payment screen until

I realized my eyelids were

Birds without tongues.

When I awoke I felt

The urge to pray, but

Even prayer itself desired

A committed advocate,

Not one half-awake or

Selfish with the slogans

Of mass appeal – like

Charcoals burning in

Daylight were only

Quieted by water

So this is no ordinary

Dream, I said

Reclining in my chair,

Happy not to be answerable

To sleep’s drugging

And mischief.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT DIKE OKORO

Dike Okoro, a writer of poetry and fiction, is the author of three books of poems, In the Company of the Muse (CWP 2016), Dance of the Heart (African Books Collective 2007), and Weeping Shadows (Morris 2002), as well as editor of We Have Crossed Many Rivers: New Poetry from Africa (Malthouse 2013), Echoes from the Mountain: New and Selected Poems by Mazisi Kunene (Malthouse 2007), and Speaking for the Generation: Contemporary Short Stories from Africa (Africa World Press 2010). His poems have appeared/appear in Magnum Opus: An International Poetry Anthology in English (2019), Obama-Menthum: An Anthology of Transformational Poetry (2016), and Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora (2007). His poems, reviews, and interviews have also appeared in About Place Journal: The Future Imagined Differently, WLT: World Literature Today, Witness Magazine, Rigorous, Eclectica, Botsotso, Kotaz, The Caribbean Writer and elsewhere. Recipient of a 2017/18 Newberry Scholar-in-Residence award and shortlisted for the 2017 Cecile De Jongh Poetry Award, he teaches at Harris-Stowe State University.

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