CONTENTS

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

PROSE

RED CLOTH, WHITE GIRAFFE

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu // 4065 words

When a deceased young woman’s burial is delayed by family members’ greed, her spirit is forced to chart a new path to a meaningful afterlife.

THE LAST TESTAMENT

Aurelius Raines II // 5049 words

An android that resembles its young inventor’s slain big brother grows to realize the purpose behind its creation: vengeance. TW for a passage of police violence against a Black person.

CONTENT WARNING: police brutality against a minor

THE BLACK MENAGERIE

Endria Isa Richardson // 6956 words

Past and present, conjure and haunts weave through this San Francisco-based tale of a wary author inexorably drawn to a mysterious, timeless woman.

YOUR NAME IS OBLIVIA

Vincent Tirado // 4451 words

At the Styx & Stones Bar and Grill, an enigmatic bartender named Oblivia infuses memory itself into her patrons’ drinks—for a price.

POETRY

THE TECHNICOLOR SIMULATIONS: TEST #2020-Z

Maya C. James

LATE MOONWALK

Uche Ogbuji

LIBATIONS

Soonest Nathaniel

EXTRAS

THANKS

July 2020

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Welcome to the 15th issue of the Hugo Nominated, World Fantasy Award Winning FIYAH Literary Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.

George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. Dion Johnson. Rayshard Brooks. Countless others. Worldwide protests in the face of an ongoing pandemic, while an impaired and incoherent US president tweets through it all from atop his throne of skulls. And once again Black people live on the forefront of the abyss, placing our lives and our futures on the line to drag this nation toward a reckoning with its ugliest self and unresolved past.

We often hear the adage, writers write. My conversations with kinfolk about creation during these times run the spectrum. Stress over layoffs. Battling COVID. Endless ‘listening and learning’ conversations with vapid coworkers. Grieving. Processing. Protesting and organizing. And on the other side, unearthing more time and motivation to write (which sometimes comes with guilt.) First and foremost, please be as healthy and safe as your circumstances and convictions allow. Put that guilt aside, if it’s there. And when you find time, whether the words are a trickle or you are on fire with inspiration, please remember we need your voice. Keep writing. Today and all the days to follow.

For our long-time supporters: we see you and thank you for steadily rocking with us. More recently we’ve witnessed an influx of new followers, subscribers and support from the larger publishing community—and not just for FIYAH. You have sought ways to lift up Black creatives in whatever capacity your position and your privilege allows. My heart is full, and I am grateful for you. Simultaneously, I am distraught and enraged that it took eight minutes and forty-six seconds of horror to serve as the catalyst for this paradigm. Nothing, not one single thing about any of these systemic barriers and atrocities, is new.

That said: I appreciate the step forward. Now take another. And another after that. The dismantlement of institutional racism in publishing (and everywhere else we must stamp it out) requires more than this moment. Where will you be a year from now? Ten years from now? I hope the answer is still right alongside us, steadfast in doing The Work.

Let’s get to our stories. “Red Cloth, White Giraffe” by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu chronicles a deceased young woman’s struggle to enter the afterlife when her burial is delayed by selfish family. “The Last Testament” by Aurelius Raines II, follows a Chicago science prodigy’s decision to use her invention for vengeance: an android that mimics her late big brother. Endria Isa Richardson’s “The Black Menagerie” plunges us into a San Francisco of conjure and haunts, and a wary author’s attraction to a magnetic, timeless woman. “Your Name is Oblivia” by Vincent Tirado introduces us to a mysterious bartender who infuses memories into her patrons’ drinks—for a price. Brandon’s poetry selections include “The Technicolor Simulations: Test #2020-Z” by Maya C. James, “Late Moonwalk” by Uche Ogbuji, and “Libations” by Soonest Nathaniel.

Issue 15’s cover creator is Cyan Daly. Learn more about Cyan’s work over on our website.

Please enjoy this issue, and drop your thoughts on how the stories tugged at you on Twitter @fiyahlitmag.

Peace,

DaVaun Sanders

Executive Editor: DaVaun Sanders

Managing Editor: Eboni Dunbar

Poetry Editor: Brandon O’Brien

Acquiring Editors: Kaleb Russell + Danny Lore +

B. Sharise Moore + Genine Tyson + Emmalia Harrington

Art Direction + Layout: L.D. Lewis

Cover Artwork by Cyan Daly

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

RED CLOTH, WHITE GIRAFFE

By Yvette Lisa Ndlovu // 4065 words

On the day I die my husband ties a red cloth on our gate. His hands are shaking. The cloth is from my favorite doek, the one that looks like a rose when I tied it around my head on special occasions. He keeps the gates open for mourners to trickle in. The women wear black doeks, the strands of their hair tucked behind the thick cloth.

“Beauty has no place at a funeral!” my auntie screams at any woman who arrives uncovered. She never explains why the dead consider a woman’s hair disrespectful.

Wails and glum hymns ricochet through the house in the twilight. The red cloth marks the commencement of the all-night vigils that happen every night until I am to be buried.

There are too many people to fit into the house, so they remove the sofas from the living room and some people sit on the hardwood flooring. The sofas are carried outside, where other family members crowd around a fire, the flames casting dancing shadows. The fire burns every night. Extinguishing the fire before the burial is taboo. The higher the smoke rises into the air, the higher my prospects of securing a good spot in the Ancestral Realm.

At the first vigil, my relatives and friends argue about how the red cloth tradition started. Disputing the fabric’s origins provides a welcome distraction from the boiled cabbage swimming lifelessly on their plates. Eating meat at a funeral is akin to spitting in the deceased’s face.

“If you cannot forgo the luxury of meat, oil, and spice, how could you say you loved the deceased?” my auntie, who’d screamed at uncovered women, says.

Auntie is in charge of inspecting the food. She urges the funeral cooks to pour bowls and bowls of salt into the big black pots of boiling cabbage for an extra measure of misery. Funerals taste like tears and seawater.

“The red cloth has always been our culture,” a cousin says. He is an eager-eyed university student studying African History. “It is meant to signal to the community that a passing has occurred and that a household in the community is in mourning. It invites anyone, regardless of whether they knew the deceased or not, to come to pay their respects. It’s ubuntu. Even in death I am since we are, and since we are, therefore I am.”

I wish I could smack him for sounding like a PhD dissertation and remind him of the times he ate sand, played nqobe and did armpit farts.

“Fool!” an aged uncle, who’d fought in the war, says. “The freedom fighters during the liberation struggle started it. The white Africans, the bloody Rhodesians—” he spat on the ground after saying Rhodesian, as if to rid himself of the phlegm that had built up in his throat, “—those bloody Rhodesians were so afraid of a revolution that they made it illegal for more than five blacks to meet under one roof. This made it complicated to bury our dead. An African must have a funeral as big as a wedding, or no funeral at all.”

“But—”

“The Rhodesians allowed funerals to happen if households would put a marker on their gates that a funeral was occurring so that the Rhodesian Police wouldn’t disturb them as they patrolled,” uncle says. “That marker was the red cloth.”

“But—”

“Listen to your elders. The freedom fighters started meeting and plotting at funerals and the Rhodesians were none the wiser. They never inspected a house with a red cloth on the gate. Thought they were clever, those bloody shits, that’s how we beat them.”

Uncle laughs and throw a fist in the air. He starts coughing. My cousin has to slap him on the back to stop him from choking.

“It was her favorite headscarf,” my husband murmurs, but he is drowned out by another origin story.

Only auntie hears him. Her usually tough demeanor softens and she whispers the words, “Don’t worry. We will find a way to bury her.”

∙ ∙ ∙

The first day of being dead is a lot like sleep paralysis. I can see and hear everything around me but somehow I can’t tell my legs to move, can’t will my chest to rise or fight the pull of gravity. At first, my spirit doesn’t register that its home is gone and that I must leave. I try to breathe life into the cells and jolt the heart to beat one last time. No matter how much I slap my limbs and try to pry open my eyelids, nothing moves at my command.

I remember my aunt explaining death to me many years ago over a pot of cabbage. I was twelve and it was my first funeral. My mother’s funeral.

“Funerals are not for the living. Burials aren’t closure for family and friends,” my auntie said. “They are closure for the dead.”

“What do you mean, auntie?” I asked.

“Death is not the end. It is the beginning of another long journey,” she said.

She gestured for the cooks to drown the cabbage in more boiling water. The cabbage slowly turned from green to white.

“Soon you will graduate from primary school and go to high school. You will get a certificate from your school that tells the high school that you are ready for secondary education. You cannot go to high school without a certificate from your primary school. Think of death as part of a graduation ceremony at the end of mastering a long life. It is the certificate the universe gives you to open the gates to the Ancestral Realm. A spirit cannot proceed without this certificate.”

When the cabbage was sufficiently devoid of color, auntie nodded her head in approval. It was ready to be served.

“The universe has processes one cannot skip,” auntie said, helping the cooks dump the soaked cabbage into plates and bowls. “You must crawl before you walk, and so the dead must be buried before they can advance to the after. The only problem with this process is that your family is in charge of securing your passage.”

My auntie’s words flood back to me as I lie in the mortuary unclaimed. Everything incasing me breaks down on a slab of steel. I yearn for a casket and fresh earth to cover me; but the dead, like newborns, are subject to the goodwill of others. My family will not bury me. The longer I stay in the mortuary, the more the gates recede.

∙ ∙ ∙

When you’re dead, all that’s left are your own thoughts. There is no body to distract you from yourself and no drink to fill the belly to quiet the musing. I lie in the cold that I cannot feel and think of how the end of flesh comes with an impatience, a call to journey to another world. At nine months a fetus yearns to break the barrier between the womb and a new world, and so that time period between the loss of breath and burial comes with urgency. I wonder if I will announce my arrival to the other side crying, too.

∙ ∙ ∙

The third day of being dead the sleep paralysis loosens.

The incandescent light bulbs flicker on and off as the mortician stands over a table, working on a new body. He has the excitement and pride of a painter at a gallery showing. He likes to play with the pretty girls, girls who would never have breathed in his direction when they lived. At least other girls’ families collected them quickly.

When his fingers linger too long on the new arrival I fight against the last hold my body has on my spirit. Something unlocks. My spirit yawns and stretches as it leaves its cage. Before I can register this new feeling, this new way of being, I hurtle towards the mortician. He yelps in surprise as his needles, scalpels and pointy scissors fly at him. He bellows as he bleeds out on the floor. I do not look back.

Newborns suck on their toes and thumbs. They don’t know what else to do in this new realm and body. I test out my new being by whipping through doors and walls. I escape from the building’s sterile confines and fly to a school playground. The children marvel at the empty swing rocking back and forth. I soon grow bored and float above the city, searching for a place to go. I see a gate with a red ribbon and race towards it.

Everyone is curious if they will get to attend their own funeral but I want to know what it’s like to attend the funeral of another, as a spirit. It’s the last day of a vigil. Whoever has died will be buried tomorrow. The body rests in a coffin in the living room, sleeping one last time in its home before burial. The spirit stands over the open coffin, staring at what she once was.

“You’re…dead… too.” I try to get used to my new voice. It’s sounds like when the wind moans on a stormy night. “What’s your name?”

The spirit doesn’t look up. She continues to stare at her body, longing for the warmth of being alive.

“Maya.”

“Why the long face?” I say, irritated. “At least your family is burying you!”

Her casket is completely gold. The inside has soft, white velvet lining.

“I won’t be able to cross the gates to the after,” Maya says.

She points at herself in the coffin. She is wearing a pretty floral dress. That’s when I notice that she has one leg.

“I lost my leg in the car accident,” she said. “A woman cannot proceed to the after without being whole.”

I thought life was unfair when I still had breath. Death is a different kind of unfair. Spirits, especially female spirits, can be barred from the Ancestral Realm for anything. Even women who donate their organs are not considered whole, and so cannot pass through the gates.

“I will never become an ancestor,” she weeps.

I fly away from the damned spirit towards home. Death is supposed to provide rest. But for Maya and me, it was just another system whose boot we live under. I throw birds at car windshields and laugh. I enter traffic lights and play with the pretty colors. I can’t tell if I like amber or green more. I avoid red. Car horns bellow as drivers swerve to avoid each other’s bumpers.

I remember the day before I died, my husband drove me to the hospital. We took the street lined with purple-flowered jacaranda trees as we always did. Suddenly my husband braked, nearly veering off the road. Out of nowhere a giraffe ran past the crosswalk and onto the street opposite Edgar’s department store. The shoppers inside drop their clearance items and point at the marvel outside. The Chipangali Wildlife Orphanage was only ten kilometers out of town, so it was nothing new for an animal to escape and make its way into rush hour traffic, blinded and scared by headlights. This giraffe in particular wasn’t spotted. It was completely white like it had been thrown into my auntie’s cabbage pot. A red tuft of fur clung to the base of its long neck. I don’t know why but my hands searched for a red doek tied over my hair.

“I don’t think I should go to the hospital,” I said.

“You are starting to sound like your aunt.” My husband shook his head. “It’s rare, so what?”

“If something strange crosses a path you take every day, you must turn back,” I insisted.

“If everyone did that, no one would leave their homes,” my husband said, driving on.

Hours later the giraffe was shot, tranquilized, and airlifted back to the wild.

∙ ∙ ∙

The dead must be buried quickly. It is not the decomposing body the living have to worry about, just like no one worries about a snake’s shed skin. It is what slithers away that scares. It is what is still alive that comes for you. As I glide past streets I once walked, I think of my death.

My death, like my life, was not exciting; just an incident beyond my control. Born with stubborn kidneys, I endured three weekly hospital visits for four hours. I would greet the nurse in her starch white uniform and stockings. She would make a joke about seeing me more often than her own husband. She would weigh me, take my temperature and blood pressure, poke a needle or two and a colony of tubes into my arms. I would sit by the dialysis machine as the blood flowed into and out of my body until it was time to go home.

Kidney failure.

What a weird expression. As if my organs were students in a class competing for gold stars. My kidneys were the student that never applied himself, the student that cut class and never dreamed beyond an F.

The stats show that with dialysis treatment, patients can live a long healthy life. These stats didn’t account for the fact that I live in Zimbabwe. The machines are 30 years old and the doctors and nurses were on a 4-month strike before I passed. The friendly nurse left for Britain or America where they have shortages of nurses and give special visas to medical practitioners. I was the number, the variable the smart people didn’t account for in their studies, and so I died.

Gone too soon is what they call spirits like mine. Spirits that are most likely to get hung up on the injustices of their lives and become ngozi in death. The dead must move on as the living do is what I was taught when I was young. I don’t know if I believe in that anymore.

∙ ∙ ∙

When I rush through my home’s gates, I find my husband pleading, begging my family to see reason.

“The mortuary fees are piling up,” he says. “How long will you keep her away from joining the ancestors?”

The men from my family do not soften.

“If you want to bury her,” they say. “Finish paying for her lobola.”

“I do not have the money,” my husband says.

“She will not be buried until you do.”

∙ ∙ ∙

A woman has two weddings. The lobola and the white. The white is just like the movies—a beautiful gown, a church, and the mother of the bride crying. The lobola ceremony is less of a wedding and more of a negotiation before the white wedding. On the morning of my lobola ceremony, a delegation from my future husband’s family made up of his brothers, uncles, and father, came knocking on our gate. My father did not let them in.

“We don’t want to seem too eager,” he said, his face buried behind a newspaper. He turned a page with flourish.

My boyfriend’s family stayed outside the gates all morning waiting for an invitation to come inside. I paced back and forth in my room anxious that they would get tired, give up and go. I remembered reading an article in The Herald about a groom who had been kept waiting outside his bride’s home for two hours and was hit by a drunk driver who drove onto the curb. The money for the lobola ceremony was still in his pocket. It was either blood money or the bride was cursed, everyone in the city mused. I didn’t want to be called a cursed bride.

I repeatedly texted my boyfriend that I loved him. He sent back hearts and said I was worth the wait. I bit my nails and waited. I tried to push away the nagging question in my mind. Why must my lover pay the men in my family for their blessing? Loving me came with an invoice, a big invoice.

A little after one o’clock my father finally let them in. I was to stay in my room. No women were allowed at the negotiation table. I pressed my ear to the door.

“Our daughter is educated, she got her degree abroad,” an uncle was saying. “This means your children will be smart and she can help them with the homework.”

“She is beautiful, not too dark,” another uncle chimed in.

“She also knows how to cook,” my father said. “This meal you are eating. She prepared it all by herself!”

I heard murmurs of approval from the other side.

“This is why her lobola cannot be little,” my father said. “We cannot let such a good daughter go away for nothing.”

The men in my family continued to list all the metrics which calculated my value. The men from my boyfriend’s family repeatedly tried to lower the price but my family would not allow for a discount. Then came a moment of silence. I knew my father was scribbling down a figure on the paper and would slide the paper over to the other side. This ensured that no eavesdropping women heard the figure.

Halfway through the negotiations, my cousin came to fetch me. My heart pounded in my chest as I entered the dining room. I kept my expression demure, head bowed, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

“Is this the woman you have come to collect?” my father asked my boyfriend.

I considered this mandatory part of the ritual silly. Who else would he have come for? I didn’t have sisters.

“Yes,” my boyfriend said, keenly.

“Do you know this man?” my father asked me. I lifted my gaze to my boyfriend and smiled. His uncles admired me.

“A good catch,” they all whispered and nodded to each other. The first time anyone meets their lover’s family is at the lobola ceremony.

“Yes, I know him,” I answered. My father had told me before not to answer the question too fast. I wasn’t supposed to be too eager.

“Then the bride price is settled,” my father said. Everyone let out a sigh of relief. My father poured whiskey and beer to celebrate.

I wonder how much my husband paid for me. Women were never allowed to know the figure. Knowing brought bad luck upon the marriage.

∙ ∙ ∙

In the old days lobola was simple. A groom brought a bag of maize, a piece of jewelry, or a gardening hoe as a token of appreciation to the bride’s family. Now most grooms begged to pay in installments. My husband has been paying for me for years and is nowhere near done clearing the bill. I died before he finished paying for my lobola. Now my family put the debt collector’s cap on and demanded he pay up, or my body would rot in the mortuary.

He tosses and turns at night until he finds a restless sleep. I stand over the bed and climb to my side. I peer at him, my face so close to his that he shivers. Earlier, I entered a stray cat and made it go mad. That’s when I discovered that spirits could enter anything alive, inhabit its flesh momentarily. I wonder what lurks inside.

I slip into him through the nose and land in his dreams. Here, I am still alive. This is our first date, brought together by the magic of algorithms and a swipe right. We are the only two Zimbabwean students in our year, both homesick to hear our own language and taste home in a faraway place. Outside the African restaurant he greets me and we hug. Instead of saying hello, I whisper,

“Bury me.”

Suddenly, his spirit ejects me from his body. Human bodies are harder to inhabit. You cannot just go into someone else’s house and claim it as your own.

When my husband wakes up, he polishes his shoes and visits the loan sharks. He leaves the sharks with a briefcase of crisp banknotes. When he arrives home, he tosses the briefcase at my father and uncles.

“Here is the remaining 20,000 for her bride price,” my husband says.

“The lobola debt of 50,000 is cleared,” my father announces. “We can bury her tomorrow.”

Throughout our marriage, my husband refused to tell me how much he owed, refused to tell me how much my family had bartered me for. I finally know the figure. The money is divided between my father and my uncles. I watch them smell the fresh notes and stuff them hungrily in their pockets.

∙ ∙ ∙

It doesn’t take much to piss off a spirit. I watch my uncles plan out how they will spend the money. Some will use it to remodel their houses, some will put it towards their retirement funds and others will use it to spoil their mistresses. Men who’ve never contributed anything to my life were thousands of dollars richer. It was my auntie who rose to the occasion of taking care of me when my mom died. In all the memories of significant moments in my life, it is my auntie’s presence I recall. Yet she did not get a cent of the bride price. If anyone deserved payment, it was her.

Maya appears on the day of my burial. We both watch as they lower the coffin into the ground. The arched gates to the Ancestral Realm appear above the open grave. A stairway leads out of the grave toward the gates that are aglow in sunlight. Maya shades her face with a hand, cowering before the luminous gates. I can see the longing in her eyes. I should feel that longing, too. All I feel in this moment is rage.

An uncle in a new shiny suit stands over my grave with a shovel full of dirt. My husband shakes with anger as it spills across the casket.

“You should go now,” Maya says. “The gates will shut when the last bit of earth covers your coffin.”

My aunt rocks herself back and forth as my grave begins to fill. A single tear rolls down her cheeks. I’ve never seen her cry at funerals. Her eyes fix on the spot where the gates hover as if she can see them.

I know what I must do but I cannot move, cannot bring myself to enter through the gates as if I was at peace.

“I cannot,” I whisper.

“You need to go or you will be stuck here,” Maya says.

“I will not!” I shout.

The ground shakes, the headstones around us rattle. The money in my uncles’ pockets become a leash that pulls them towards the hole in the ground. They try to fight against the force as the earth beneath them gives way. One by one, they fall into the grave.

“If you touch grave soil before you die,” I say. “You become next.”

I curse all my greedy uncles. Back home, the red cloth by the gate burns. The gates to the Ancestral Realm recede beyond my reach.

I become a ngozi.

I become an avenging spirit.

∙ ∙ ∙

My anger leads me to Chipangali. Ngozi haunt particular places. I didn’t know why the Wildlife Orphanage is where I end up. Maya follows me here. As someone who died on a road, she has nowhere else to go. We wander down the winding dust roads the tour guides used for safari tours. A tour van drives through me as foreign tourists point at the zebras and wildebeest walking by. They ooh and aah at the water hole where a herd of elephants are rolling around in the mud. I know all the animals see us. A baby elephant lifts its trunk and waves at me. Its mother leads it away.

That’s when I see it again. The white giraffe. It emerges from behind the bushes. It is no longer completely white. A huge gash is on its neck, red blood oozing out. I know like me the white giraffe is dead. Killed by trophy hunters. Such a beautiful creature can never last long in the world. I approach and stroke it. The white giraffe bends down to rub its head against mine.

“It’s okay,” I say to the giraffe. “You’ve got me now. Let’s go find those who hurt you.”

I climb on its back. When it rises again, I am so high off the ground I can see everything.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT YVETTE LISA NDLOVU

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano (storyteller). She is pursuing her MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she teaches in the Writing Program. She earned her BA at Cornell University and was a finalist for a Tin House Young Adult Writer of Color Scholarship. She was the 2020 fiction winner of Columbia Journal’s Womxn History Month Special Issue and a 2020 National Juror for the Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards. She received the Cornell University George Harmon Coxe Award for Poetry selected by Sally Wen Mao and is a 2020 New York State Summer Writers Institute Scholarship recipient. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Columbia Journal, the Huffington Post, the Jellyfish Review, and Kalahari Review.

THE LAST TESTAMENT

By Aurelius Raines II // 5049 words

CONTENT WARNING: police brutality against a minor

Initiating ‘smiling.’ There are 100,042 ways not to smile. I look at the picture and study it. I am matching the picture in front of me to my own actuators and filaments that behave as muscle fiber. I am trying to match Zahir’s smile. The picture that I have is the best match for Zahir’s smile.

I am not Zahir.

The picture is one that Zahir took his senior year of high school. I measure the surface area of his exposed teeth. I measure the distance between his upper and lower jaw. I calculate the function that produces the parabola that is his smile. My adjustments are many, but small. I look in the mirror. I look at the picture. I see the match. I send an SMS to Ada to come see me. I do not want to audibly call her when it means I may lose this exact configuration. If I wanted to, I could match the metrics to recreate the smile, but I am learning that smiling takes more than metrics so I make qualitative judgments.

It takes Ada 7 minutes, 22 seconds to walk into the room and look at me. The metrics of her face read as displeasure; subcategory: disgust.

“What is that?” Ada sneers.

“It’s my smile. Nah?”

“‘Nah.’”

“What’s wrong with it? I matched the picture.” I hold the image up for reference. Ada’s facial metrics change. Her eyelids flutter as if there is a strong wind blowing into her face. The barometric pressure in the room has not changed. Extra moisture accumulates over her bottom eyelids and a slight contraction of the depressor anguli oris.

“You can’t—” Ada will not cry. She was always the youngest of her group and developed a self-consciousness about seeming like an “immature cry baby.”

My network interface uses all of my bandwidth to complete her sentence. The quantum computer at the university allows me to make a list of all the possible things she may say, then using history and context filters, narrow them to five possible options. Using a Boolean heuristic, I narrow it down to a probable outcome. Rather than complete the sentence (most people find this presumptive and annoying) I answer her without making her finish the thought.

“Look, I’m sorry for taking the picture. I thought that if I looked at it, I could surprise you with a smile. A perfect smile.” The metrics of Ada’s face change again. She shoots out her hand, palm up. She does not speak. I began to run calculations:

She wants to dance (.016%)

She wants the picture back (99.942%)

I hand her the picture. She does not look at it. She leaves the room. A few seconds later she comes back.

“I need you to shut down, now.”

“But I—”

“Now!”

I shut down 90% of my systems. I can continue to process, but all of my external sensors are turned off, save my hearing. In this state, I can only process two voice commands: “Wake up, Sleepyhead” and “[not]Wake up, Sleepyhead.”

This time is not spent idle. I organize the millions of pieces of data that I have collected, prioritizing the events preceding my shutdown. I have reason to conclude that Ada does not want me to touch pictures of Zahir. She is still sad that he is dead. In the future, I should either ask to see the pictures or leave them alone. It would be preferable, to her, that I don’t bring up the subject of Zahir at all.

This brings me back to a larger problem. I was created to be Zahir. My face and structure were all specifically designed to look like a 25-year-old Zahir. I possess access to movies, social media feeds, and internet histories. Even oral histories from people who knew Zahir. None of those oral histories are from Ada.

I’ve easily mastered the Chicago accent with touches of Texan ancestry. I can find a solution to which behaviors will trigger Ada’s negative responses. It merely seems to be a problem of balance, portions, and fuzzy logic. It is also possible that the solution is beyond my programming. It is possible, but not probable.

∙ ∙ ∙

We walk down the street. It is night. The rain just stopped. The temperature is 54 degrees, and Ada is wearing a black CSU hoodie with the hood pulled tight over her afro puffs.

My heuristics cannot read her face. She does not smile or frown but her pace is quick and the front pocket of her hoodie is severely distended with her fists. I do not know where we are going, and my attempts to find out are met with no response. All my data indicates that she anticipates danger, and so should I.

Since I cannot talk to Ada right now, I use some extra bandwidth to extrapolate our destination. It is a worthy preoccupation that, at the least, will serve as an exercise to expand my cognitive net.

In the meantime, I practice smiling.

“Please stop, Zahir.” The tone of Ada’s voice is tense. The “please” is ornamental.

“Are we going to the police station?” A survey of all the private and public structures show that the police station had the highest interest for Ada. Either that, or the deli with the artisan potato chips that Ada likes to snack on. The deli closed two hours ago.

∙ ∙ ∙

Ada should be hungry. She has spent two days preparing my software for a special task. Maybe a series of tasks. My programming already houses several packages devoted to remote decryption, network hacking, and personality/charm virtualization. My new packages include combat, firearms, tactical algorithms, and the Tactical Response and Operations Standard.

When Ada is hard at work on a task, she will go for days without eating real food.

“Now, you can hack computers and people,” Ada says between popping peanut M&M’s in her mouth.

“You keep popping candy like that,” I say, “you’re gonna have to hack your zipper.” Looking at all of Zahir’s data, this is the type of response he would give to his sister. Small jokes about her weight were common. My other routines say that these jokes are usually inappropriate and offensive and have a high probability of getting a negative reaction. But Ada is Zahir’s sister. I look and behave like Zahir.

“Shut up, Robut.”

Ada holds a doctorate in computer science and another in Artificial Bio-Mechanics. She is a MacArthur Fellow. Shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Physics at 19. She knows that her attempts to offend me by suggesting that I am only a robot will not work. I am more complex than any robot ever designed. Ada has made me a marvel.

“They didn’t teach you how to say “robot” at Chicago State’s doctoral program?”

“Seriously? Code: Nakia Turner. Second Law. Agency Override. Do not speak for five minutes.” This sequence of words shuts down my “agency” routine. It stops me from being able to disagree or disobey.

∙ ∙ ∙

Ada’s pace slows as we approach the police station.

“See, told ya,” I say.

Ada’s many accomplishments always seemed to outshine Zahir’s. Zahir relished opportunities to prove he was just as smart as his little sister. His mother insisted that they were not in competition. Zahir’s mother is dead, also.

We are in an alley behind some commercial buildings. Because of the lateness of the hour, they are closed and there is no traffic. Ada takes out an AR set she was working on earlier. Designed for commercial augmented reality, the goggles were supposed to look like sleek horn-rimmed shades. But Ada has adapted them so there is now a circuit board clipped to either earpiece and wires that feed into the lenses. With Ada’s modifications, they can scan for electromagnetic frequencies and provide visual feedback.

She puts the AR set on and examines a junction box on a pole above us. Ada opens her bag and hands me a rolltop computer and an adapter box. I put them both into a book bag and put the bag on backwards and climb the pole. I open the junction box, remove a line, splice a wire in the line, and connect it to the adapter. I plug the adapter into the rolltop computer. I start a virtual machine on the rolltop, and now the computer in my hands behaves like another computer on the Chicago Police Department’s network.

I have already accessed as many public records as I could find on the police station’s commander. I even know his favorite baseball team. Police Commander Ryan Tindle is a Cubs fan. He attends the games frequently and is known to have a baseball from their World Series win in 2026. The ball is signed by the whole team. Commander Tindle imagines himself an old school constable. A “cop’s cop.” He has learned to use the crime data resources but he tends to use words like “instinct” and “gut.” in his social media posts. These words indicate an aversion to complexity, especially when it comes to areas that are not within his sphere of competency. Computers are not within his sphere of competency. He still uses passwords rather than biometrics. I already have a short list of possible pass phrases based on a profile.

User: RTindle2547

Password: !P@A#T$E%L^

Ty Patel was the batter who, in addition to being the Cub’s 2026 MVP, broke Sosa’s home run record.

I am in the Chicago Police Department’s network on the first attempt. I navigate to the file server containing the surveillance video for the day of Zahir’s death. It is also password protected and encrypted. The same password works. I download all of the video from the day before and the day after Zahir’s death. I send all of that data to my internal storage so I can process it quickly. I log out of the system, put the equipment back in the bag and descend the pole. As I climb down, I process the video for the target footage. I predict that Ada will not want to wait.

I confirm that I have the footage and Ada almost runs back to our car.

“Slow down, girl! You gonna get us caught. Lookin’ shady!” I try to call after her without actually raising my voice. Zahir’s father called it a “helicopter whisper.” Zahir’s father is dead, now.

By the time we make it back to the car I have found the video. Ada is not polite when she asks me to show it to her. I am a machine to her, now.

I know that, for neurotypical humans, watching the violent death of another human being can be traumatic. This trauma is multiplied if the human knows the victim personally. This video will be traumatic.

“Maybe we should just wait until we get home.” I am trying to sound casual. It is a passive affect. This is something that people do when they are concerned, but do not want to communicate alarm.

“Show it.”

“It’s a lot—”

“I am not arguing with you. Show. It.”

“I’m just—”

“Code: Nakia Turner. Second Law. Agency Override.” I download the video to her rolltop as commanded.

Ada opens the device and watches the last minutes of her brother’s life.

Zahir is handcuffed and roughly handled by an officer. The officer is muscular. Zahir is smaller than the officer but his mouth is not. Whatever he has said to the officer gets Zahir shoved harder. The officer says something into his mouthpiece. Zahir is trying to stay on his feet but he is shoved again. This time he falls over and hits his head against a brick wall.

Zahir’s hands are cuffed behind his back.

He cannot break his fall and is still. The officer tries to pull Zahir up by his arm. Zahir is limp. The officer yells at Zahir, but Zahir does not respond. The officer tells Zahir to stop fighting at which point two other officers enter the frame. It seems they are trying to get Zahir to submit, but he does not appear to be fighting back. Eventually, two of the officers carry Zahir away. Another camera shows them putting Zahir into a holding cell with other prisoners. Another camera shows the prisoners looking at Zahir for a while. One of the prisoners calls out to him. When Zahir does not respond, the prisoners call the guard. Soon there are other guards in the cell and they are checking Zahir. The guards remove the other prisoners from the cell.

Ada’s breathing is irregular. She is crying. Her stress indicators are elevated. I am not as familiar with this emotional response. It resembles the time she caught me practicing my smile with a picture of Zahir in my hand. Only more intense.

∙ ∙ ∙

“I’m going to get something to drink. Want somethin’, Pooka?”

“Don’t call me that. I don’t care what you look like.” Ada seethes over her round frames. I roll my eyes.

“So. Do you?”

“Get me a pop.” Ada returns her focus to her rolltop.

“You need to leave that pop alone and drink some water.”

“You need to mind your business before I bus’ you upside the head with a magnet,” she calls behind me as I walk down the hallway from Ada’s office to the kitchen.

Initial analysis evaluates this as an empty threat.

I get a Pepsi out of the fridge and a bottle of water for myself. I am not going to drink it. People hate to drink alone. A lot of my design is cosmetic. My software is an elegant confluence of code that allows me to imitate Zahir’s affectations and speech. I have even mastered Zahir’s subtle use of the word “Bruh.”

“Bruh, this stuff will kill you,” I say, tossing Ada the cola.

“Thanks for shaking it up, Butthole.”

“Wanna watch a movie?” I ask.

“Hayi ngoku.”

I access the network to translate from the Xhousa: “Not now.”

Ada is teaching herself the language in case she ever meets Eralda Mfene, the astrophysicist who discovered Jobela, ninth planet in the solar system. Humans are put off by my superior knowledge, so it is sometimes best to feign ignorance where there is none. Ada taught me this is a socialization technique that Ada taught me to use. She said: being smart just reminded people of how stupid they feel. and it will become your job to work through every insecurity they have instead of finishing your work.

“English. I don’t speak Spanish,” I say, dryly.

“It’s Xhousa, moron. I know you know that. Don’t “handle” me. I can’t watch movies right now.”

“I was thinking Way of The Dragon.”

Ada’s eyes pop up from the screen. I will reference this smile later. “Bruce Lee!? That ain’t a movie. That’s pornography.” She looks back at her rolltop. “Start the stream while I wrap this up.”

I sit on the futon, turn on the television, and cue the movie. Ada sets her rolltop to the side, and lays down on my chest. Her afro puff stimulates the tactile sensors under my chin.

“Zahir?”

“Yeah?”

“Run: Heartbeat.”

I do not have a heartbeat. The heat from my function is redistributed through my skin to simulate human warmth, but a heart is not useful. Even a simulated one. Heartbeat allows my speech simulation hardware to create a concussive rhythm in my trunk. To any human ear that cares to hear it, it is a heartbeat. Ada is sleeping by the time Bruce Lee is impressively flexing his muscles on the balcony. I remove her glasses but, beyond that, I do not move.

∙ ∙ ∙

Ada stops the car. We are only three blocks from the police station. She grabs the rolltop from the back seat and begins to review the video, again. This time, her look is less emotional and more analytical. This is the face Ada makes when she is programming. She is rewinding and pausing the security video. She zooms in and adjusts tone levels. She finally slams the rolltop on her thighs. Her actions read as frustration and disgust.

“I can’t see!” She closes the rolltop and stares through the windshield. Ada is quiet for exactly two minutes and thirty-two seconds.

“Z, I need you to do something for me.”

“Whatcha need?”

“I want something out of that police station.” Ada pauses for a while before her expression becomes… lighter.

“I want you to get me the police commander’s name plate.”

“Like, off his desk?”

Ada looks at me and smiles the same way she smiled before we decide to watch the Bruce Lee film.

This is a tactically bad idea. There is too much surveillance. Few of my packages are useful for covert operations. I will encounter a lot of police officers between the front entrance and the office. Perhaps more on the way out. I will have to engage the officers. There will be gunfire. Anyone who sees my face will be able to make the connection between me and Ada.

“I need to cover my face,” I say. Despite my criticism of this plan, my agency is still suspended. I still cannot protest.

“You don’t need to cover anything,” Ada says, turning my head in her hands as if appraising it. One time, Ada was with her brother when he got into a fist fight. Another child recorded the entire fight. Analysis of young Ada’s expression as Zahir pounded the other boy on the ground matches the excitement and pride on her face, now.

“Just go. Let them see your face. I want them to know.”

“I don’t want to hurt people, Ada.”

Ada looks into my eyes.

“Nobody wants to hurt people but people keep getting hurt.”

As I walk into the police station, I run an inventory on tactics and physical assets. My skin is laced with spider silk. My frame is carbon fiber and coated with graphene. All of this makes me bullet proof. If I coordinate my actuators, I am stronger than the strongest human. I have tactical and combat programming that helps me assess combat dynamics and design appropriate responses; both defensive and offensive. In these moments, my memetic routines become secondary to function and I’m able to use the features of my physiology to increase my efficiency.

This means I can fight like a robot.

So when I walk through the door of the police station, the clerk at the high desk only has a moment to look at me expectantly before I vault the desk. She is reaching for an alarm but I grab her wrist. Panic widens her brown droopy eyes. I drag her to the access door that leads to the offices. I hold her wrist to the RF lock and the subdermal chip unlocks the door.

The next room uses an open office plan. The door to Tindle’s office is in a corridor on the other side of this space. There are only three officers. Tacitly, it is best if everything I do contributes to forward movement.

My software creates a tactical plan. I label all of the officers as combatants.

Combatant A, furthest from the door isn’t the first to notice me enter as I throw the clerk to the side. He is the first to draw his weapon. I dart to his left. Right-handed humans have a slightly harder time tracking right to left. The .4 seconds he needs to refocus his aim gives me enough time to grab Combatant B. I’ve grabbed her right hand and locked the joints in her arm before she stands. This allows me to control her movement. By the time Combatants A and C train their guns on me, I’ve placed Combatant B between me and the line of fire. I launch her into Combatant A. Their bodies collide. I flip a heavy metal desk onto the both of them to impede their recovery time.

Before the desk settles, I’ve closed the distance between the furthest officer, who is already yelling scatological expletives and firing rounds. The flying papers from the flipped desk cause enough distraction to slow and compromise his aim. Two of the rounds hit me in the trunk and clatter to the floor. I disable Combatant C’s gun hand and slam him into the door at the other end of the room.

The impact allows me to assess its density, similar to the first door. I focus my kick on the middle, near the latch. The door gives way. Once I am through the door, Commander Tindle’s office is the first one to my right. Another officer races around a corner with his gun drawn. He orders me on the ground as he opens fire. The impact from the slug hits me hard but I keep moving forward. He fires six more rounds before I bat away his firearm. The officer recovers quickly and strikes me in the face with his elbow. If I were human, the impact would have caused a concussion and disoriented me. I am not human. I recognize the face of the officer as the one who pushed Zahir into the wall. I am sure to keep my eyes on him. Ada will want to see this.

I strike him in the throat with the edge of my palm.

His eyes are wet and pink as he looks into my face. I study his expression because I do not know what it means.

48% He recognizes me.

50% He believes he is seeing a ghost.

I smile. This increases his anxiety.

He tries to push me back but I grab him by his hair and ram him into the wall headfirst. I know that Ada would want me to use more force, but my imperative does not call for deadly force. Instead, I use his vest to lift him into the air and then slam him into the floor. He will not be conscious for a while. He will need hospitalization.

One ton of impact force and the door to the commander’s office buckles. I kick again and the door falls in. I walk into his office. Tindle’s name plate is on the desk. I put it in the pocket of my jacket and zip it. When I turn to leave, I see a bat and autographed baseball mounted on the wall. I break the glass and take both of them. I can use them.

There is no window in the office so I will need to escape the way I came in. The Combatants have regrouped from my first attack. They called patrol units back to the station. I have minutes If I’m going to engineer an escape for Ada before they arrive.

Combatant B draws her gun. I hurl the baseball at her gun hand. Bones fracture in her hand.

From my left, Combatant A lunges for me. I swing my torso a full 180 degrees with my arms extended, simultaneously striking him in the head and flinging the bat at Combatant C. The bat strikes him in the chest, no doubt breaking several ribs (perhaps his clavicle) and inhibiting his ability to breathe. The clerk still clutches her arm, exhaling in relief when I walk out of the door.

Ada waits for me outside, bouncing on the balls of her feet. I am reading anticipation: subcategory: schadenfreude.

“We gotta go,” I say starting into a run slow enough for Ada to keep up. I stop when I notice Ada has not moved.

“I want to see it. Show it to me!”

I pull the name plate out of my jacket. She snatches it from me and holds it.

“Can we go now?” I already hear the sirens in the distance. When she does not answer I turn to find that she is crying, again.

Maybe I misunderstood what she wanted me to retrieve from the station.

Maybe she realizes that, by proxy, she has injured people who are not responsible for the death of Zahir.

Maybe she is happy.

“Let’s go, Ada!” I run to the car hoping that she will follow. She does.

I monitor police scanners all the way back home. Confusion and anger breaks the bounds of their professionalism. There are reports of injury but no deaths. No one identifies Zahir as the assailant. Zahir attacked the station and Zahir is dead.

Ada and I are in the garage workshop her father created so she could spend more time working at home. He worried about all the time the 12-year-old genius spent at the university working on her robots. Perhaps he was beginning to regret his speeches about black tax.

Ada watches the footage from my attack on the police station. Her face is absolutely unreadable. I decide to wait for more data before I try to react or speak.

“Well.” She sighs and loudly rests her hands on her thighs. “That’s done.”

“I don’t want to say too much, Ada. But I think they know who did this.” I am good at sarcasm.

“I wanted them to know. The same brain that engineered you, engineered this moment. I need you to listen to my instructions.”

She gets up and starts to leave the workshop. I follow her. As she walks through the back door into the kitchen, she barely stops her stride to grab a can of cola from the refrigerator. She does not bother to close the door. I do it for her.

“I’ve got a car coming to pick me up,” she takes a long drink from the can as she continues towards her room.

“Where are you going?”

“I can’t tell you. Just know that the United States will no longer benefit from these sweet pink lobes under these perfect afro puffs.”

She gathers a book bag, a gym bag, and an automated rolling suitcase from her room. Ada avoids eye contact. Her movements are rushed but I do not read panic or concern.

“You are going to stay here. When the police show up, I want you to give them the business. Injure, but do not kill. I’ve already got all of my data on a secure cloud drive.”

She takes the bags back through the house, towards the workshop.

She orders the garage door to open. As it squeals up the metal tracks, Ada finally looks into my eyes.

“You are all that I have, here, Robut.”

Her eyes begin to water. Ada’s family were the only people to see her cry and that testament is gone.

“It’s okay, Pooka,” I say in the softest Zahir voice I have ever attempted.

She touches my face with one hand and wipes her tears with the other.

“You will be the last person to ever call me that.” She looks away. “The police will come hard. I want you to fight for as long as you can. When you can’t fight no more, retreat to the workshop. It’s clear of meaningful information. You are it.”

I’ve already predicted what she will say next. I need her to say it.

“When you get here, initiate Enter the Dragon protocol.”

She checks her phone. Soon, a black car pulls up. There is a dark-skinned man in the front passenger seat and a driver, wearing shades. I decide not to use my deductive programming to guess where he is from and where Ada is going.

She looks at me, again.

“Thank you. Goodbye, Zahir,”

She blinks several times in another effort to stop the tears, and fails to do so. She gets in the car.

∙ ∙ ∙

Ada did not talk to me about her brother. Or any of her family for that manner. I was only fed media and data.

Among the media is a picture of Zahir and Ada. Zahir is ten years old and Ada is five. Ada lays on her brother, while he reads a tablet. Ada’s afro puff is undone and the hair obscures a small portion of Zahir’s face. Ada appears to be asleep. Ada’s mother posted this picture on social media. The caption reads:

School was hard today. School is hard every day. After a hard day of school (and a long night of staying up and fiddling with her “creations”) she comes home and does this. Zahir just does whatever homework he can (or that’s what he wants me to think). Zahir is not nearly as smart as Ada (none of us are) but no matter how hard life is going to be for my brilliant prodigy, she is going to be fine as long as she has her brother and afternoon naps. Pooka loves her “brudder” <3

∙ ∙ ∙

I hear the preparation of the officers as they surround the house and coordinate their breach. It appears they have deployed the SWAT team, although no hostage situation is present. If they knew what they were up against their smartest course of action would be a sniper-initiated takedown. A high-caliber round could damage me enough to give SWAT a chance to take me down. I stay away from the windows. However, the house’s exterior is brick and provides sufficient cover from a thermo-scoped shot.

The officers do not knock on the door. I know that they have cleared the block and surrounded the house. I decide to stay inside and use the front door as a choke point. They will try to breach the rear, but it has been fortified and will take time to penetrate. (Ada’s studies required unusual security so that she could continue to work at home.)

I brace myself between the alcove wall and the door. I measure the pressure against the door as they pound against it. My body stops the door from giving. I am waiting for the acceleration they must achieve to break in the door to reach its peak. Once the acceleration tops twenty kilometers per second I wait until the ram is drawn for another impact and step back. The door splinters, and the combatant actually stumbles in. I catch him and toss him back at the other officers to impede their entry. One officer fires a clean shot at me; center mass. It is only a .22 round.

I move forward and I smile.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT AURELIUS RAINES II

Aurelius Raines II writes and lives in Chicago with his wife, Pam, and his two sons. He likes to write about things that aren’t happening, in hopes that they will… or won’t. His short stories and essays have been included in the anthologies Dead Inside: Poetry and Essays about Zombies, Black Power: A Superhero Anthology, and Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler, which was the winner of the Locus Award in Non-Fiction. He is a nominee for a Pushcart Prize in Short Fiction for his short story elon Breaks a Mirror featured in Apparition Literature Magazine. In his spare time, he teaches Physics to high-schoolers by showing them how to use science to survive the end of civilization.

THE BLACK MENAGERIE

By Endria Isa Richardson // 6952 words

What is the woman but a keeper of fear?

What is the woman but a gate?

If all goes well, when the story ends, the woman-who-is-a-gate will be opened.

Where will the fear go then? Who will hold it, who will keep it safe?

∙ ∙ ∙

Alta owns the Menagerie: a twin-gabled, brown shingled colossus. The whole house sits on the eastern edge of a square green park on Larkin Street, and is teethed with a row of white windows that overlook the street where Alta stands, having walked this early morning from North Beach to Russian Hill. Her reflection gleams in oiled blacks and white, caught in a larger dormer window inset beneath the gabled roof. The new sun sketches the line of distant rooftops behind; roughly, and then fine. The reflection in the window bleeds, burns in the new light, and twists into something no longer a woman.

Alta has lived in San Francisco for many years, though nowhere near her whole life. She has watched the city bloom and wilt and bloom again. She likes it most in the early mornings, when she counts the stars that blink out of the auroral sky. The counting is like breathing, something she hardly notices.

Still, it is nice to stop. Once the door has shut behind her, once she crosses the threshold, she can. She moves quickly up the stairs. What she reaches, on the landing, is the closest thing to church that she can enter. The ceiling yawns over her, a cathedral. Honey bright beams of redwood steeple overhead, as though she is standing beneath a forest that has decided, all at once, to bow its heads together.

Inside of the large dormer window that overlooks the street, three live rabbits, two white and one brown, startle inside an elaborate glass display. They hop back and forth through their transparent world. They smell her; and what they smell, they fear. Alta watches the rabbits flick their velvet ears. Her lips curl; her yellow fangs gleam.

∙ ∙ ∙

I meet Alta through Victoria. Victoria knows Alta because they are both black, both watching their city wilt and bloom; bloom and rot. Victoria and I have been together for seven months. We met on a dating app.

Last month, Victoria inherited a lot of money.

It’s from her white mother’s side. A grandmother died, left a half million dollars to Victoria, her brother, and her sister. Each. I am quietly impressed.

She tells me she wants to invest it, to make money off of having money. She doesn’t ask if I will help her invest, but I think she should. I’m good with money. I tell her, of course babe. And take your time. You know, I’m happy to give you some pointers. She looks at me with one eyebrow raised. I smile, place my hands on either side of her face and kiss her lips.

The morning I meet Alta, she tells me she wants to take me somewhere. There is one thing she wants to do first, she says. An investment that she now has enough money to make.

“Alta asked me to bring you,” she says. “She wants to see what you’re like.” I try not to flinch, but I know my face twitches, just a little, before I smooth it again.

This is how I learn about the Menagerie: about its secrets, about its fear.

∙ ∙ ∙

It is 1815 in what is now called San Francisco, and a woman has arrived by water. It is forty-four years before California’s first governor tries to pass a law banning black people from the state. It is the same year that Sara Baartman, also known as the Hottentot Venus, is being ordered to sit, stand, and turn in the cage she inhabits alongside a baby rhinoceros, in Paris, France. She is studied by the French, led by one George Cuvier, a naturalist. They find her to be, in many ways, more interesting and exciting than the baby rhinoceros. They find her horrifying, exhilarating, and humiliating. They keep her, and they watch her. In the end, she dies: of syphilis or pneumonia, it is said. Really, she dies of their fear.

The woman in San Francisco is both long in the tooth and broad in the shoulder; brown as a long summer, and strong. And though the phrase long in tooth means she is old, there is also something about her teeth. How they flash when she bears them against the men who grab at her as she walks through the hills of this new city at night. She carries a pile of furs on her shoulders. When she gets to the neighborhood she has been told to visit, she mentions her Russian mother. She speaks fluently, can even recite poetry to the particular delight of some of the older women and men. They ask if they are her own verse. She demurs. This is the era of Pushkin: a rumor spreads, like a virus, that she is an estranged sister or cousin. They ask her how she gets her furs. She tells them, meeting the eyes of the men who have gathered around, that they are the skins of her family, dropped at their feet like robes when they changed into humans at daybreak. The group of men laugh and hit their knees and shake their heads. When she laughs, it is not with them.

∙ ∙ ∙

Alta is covered in tattoos. This is what I notice first. Leopards rendered in fine black and gold hover on her chest, snarling and dangling heavy paws beneath long bellies. A peacock spreads itself up her left arm in deep blues and shimmering silver. When she opens her arms to Victoria, it is like I am watching the bird unwrap itself; as though Victoria disappears beneath her plumage. “Hey baby,” Victoria says from within the embrace.

Alta releases her with a shake of feathered skin and turns to me. On her right arm, now angled toward me, a brace of jackrabbits leap from a steel trap, splattering scarlet blood from a severed hind foot. A corded vine of flowers winds from beneath the V of her black t-shirt, slips behind the leopard to circle her neck. For a moment, as she leans to hug me, I think it is rope, rough, real. I smell metallic dirt, cotton fiber. I see the indent where it tugs against her brown skin, can see dark drops of blood. But no, it is sweat sliding down her neck to collect in the hollow of her clavicle. I look at her, and she is an animal I want to taste the salt of; to lick, to suck.

“Is something wrong?” Alta asks.

“Your tattoos,” I say, straightening. I trace the curve of a leopard’s belly on my own chest. “They interest me.” Victoria grips my hand and shakes her head. I squeeze back. I smile.

“My siblings,” Alta says.

“You keep your siblings quite close.”

“Sometimes they try to get away.” She holds up her arm to show me the rabbits, the bloody foot twitching as she twists her wrist back and forth. The rabbits gaze forward into nothing as they move this way and that. I grab her arm to hold it still. Her fingers, when they pinch my wrist, squeeze until it hurts. “Don’t do that,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just wanted a better look.”

Victoria apologizes for me. She explains that I am a writer, that I grew up in the Midwest, that I am still learning about boundaries. I think about the feel of Alta’s arm in my hands: muscle and blood; a constellation of ink; the family twisting over her skin.

“So this is the Menagerie,” I say, when I feel Victoria has said enough. I imagine what it will be like when I meet her mother, the white queen whom Victoria only talks about sideways. I’ll deal with that meeting when it happens. For now, I look at Alta. I think about being a leopard on her chest. I think about the wilderness beneath her skin.

I turn to the house that has stood above us while we talk, listing forward to remind us of its own silence. I pull Victoria with me toward the front door. A wide brass plaque to the left says:

The Black Menagerie

Est. 1967

Above and below the signage floral filigree twines around muscular bodies of monkeys, lizards, tigers, a snake.

“Are you ready?” Alta asks from behind us. I don’t know what to be ready for: what to hide, what to reveal. Victoria nods but doesn’t check with me. I catch my face; it’s her money, her thing, I’m just here for the ride. Still, I reach for the doorknob, turn it without asking.

∙ ∙ ∙

What is a body but a keeper of fear? Let me tell you about two bodies. The first is a man. Or at least the sheddings of a man. His remains are found inside his apartment: a deflated sack. There is blood. Something about it suggests an animal attack. A lion or a tiger; or maybe a giant bird of prey; or an animal you and I have never heard of. It depends on where we are in the world. It depends on what kind of stories are told.

The police who investigate must knock down the door; it is locked from the inside. The apartment is empty, save for what remains of the man’s body. The doctor who performs the autopsy notices the strangest thing: the way the flesh has been torn almost in one long sleeve. It is as clear as it is preposterous. This man’s skin was pulled from the viscera and skeleton in one smooth movement—like shucking an ear of corn—by something with long teeth, bone-breaking jaws. There is no sign of the animal. Where did it go? Where will it live?

The second man is found dead outside of his apartment. His body is mangled beyond recognition. It does not even appear human. The crowd describes a terrifying scene.

It was a tiger, says one.

A crazed baboon, leaping at my face, says another.

A rhinoceros. It came directly at me, one woman swears.

At you? I ask.

Of course, I say, backing up ever so slightly. I know what did this. They regard me curiously. Isn’t it obvious? I say. What is more ferocious than fear?

Maybe the first man was a cage, ripped open from the inside by something he could not control. But the second man? Maybe the second man could not protect himself from what escaped. Maybe the second man stood outside an open door.

Do you sense my judgment? It is true, I am not neutral. I am a storyteller, I am a keeper of things. Let me tell you something: a door doesn’t open on only one side.

∙ ∙ ∙

Alta shuts the door behind us. Her fingers brush my arm as she moves past me to start up the great, winding staircase. Green ferns and broad-leafed trees squat in planters, extend from the ceilings, and spiral along the staircase. In the center of the main room, a large brass bed with a stretched canopy is made with draping silk sheets, and dozens of soft pillows. Everything else is wood in dripping, hypnotic grain patterns, and decadent burnished copper. Light plunges through the double row of windows along the front and slants in rectangles across the floor. It gives the impression that we are standing on a smooth, light-filled pool.

I feed the rabbits while Victoria and Alta sprawl on the bed, talking in low voices. I look at my phone and see a text. Call me when u can. I tap the number, and hold the phone to my ear.

“Why don’t you take that privately?” Alta appears at my side, and leads me to the southern wall, pushing at an accented panel in the wood. It swings open. She presses me gently inside, assures me that she and Victoria have things to discuss anyways. The door swings closed behind me and I panic as the seams disappear into the floral wallpaper—throat jumping, vision narrowing—until my eyes find the silver door knob set into the wall.

I press the dial tone up against my ear and pray she won’t answer. She picks up, voice strained and abrupt. No pleasantries. Over the phone, my mother tells me that my father is losing too much weight, his skin is sagging from his face. He cannot keep his muscles from melting off his bones.

“And what is the next step?” I keep asking.

She ignores my question and tells me more about the weight, the color, the feel of his skin. “Like paper,” she says, “He feels like a paper bag that can blow off in the wind.”

Let him blow away then, I think. Everybody in my family leaves. They exercise themselves away, or drink themselves away, or work themselves away. My father is drinking himself away. I tell her I will come home soon. I tell myself I will come home soon. I hang up, I let go. I’m done with being left.

I take in the room around me. A library mezzanine flooded with light. Rows and rows of books, a sliding ladder set on rails; so many stories. I trace my fingers along the spines of a row of books as I walk. Beside me, the floor drops away into an atrium lit by panes of glass set aslant in the eaves above me, and a wall of windows around the lower floor. It is full of so many plants I wonder whether I have found a greenhouse, an indoor jungle, whether I have wandered into the menagerie proper. It is so beautiful.

Whose money is this? I wonder. Who can keep so many stories? So many living things?

I hear fronds rub wetly below me. Palm fans twitch as their lower leaves are tugged out of place. Something snorts, low and vulgar. Or perhaps I imagine that. I am not in the city; I am not in California; I am nowhere I have ever been. I lean over the railing. I whisper, “Who is there? Why have you come to spy on me?”

When I re-enter the main room, Victoria has finished talking to Alta. She stands, outlined against an open space, and looks out the window. She turns when she hears me come in and reaches for my hand.

“Baby,” she says. “We can go.”

“Where’s Alta?” I ask.

∙ ∙ ∙

I wonder aloud when I’ll be let in on the secret of “the ménage-a-trois.” Victoria does not answer; just flicks a look in my direction. I also wonder what Alta thought of me, but I’m not going to come out and ask. She walks a couple of paces ahead of me, heeled leather boots clacking on the sidewalk, fists tucked into balls at her side. When she stops, it’s so abrupt we almost collide.

“Who were you talking to?” she asks. Hands on my shoulders, eyes knuckling into mine. She’s only a few inches taller than me, but I find myself leaning back slightly.

“Editor,” I say lightly.

“Oh yeah?” Her eyebrow raises in…pleasure? Skepticism? “What’d he say?” She cocks her head and smiles. Pleasure, then.

“He says I’m good at telling stories.” I smile without my teeth or my eyes, but I still get a laugh from her. I watch her square shoulders sashay away from me, watch her launch a bodily assault against the cold. Her confidence magnetizes me. I realize, not for the first time, watching her body that belongs only to her that I want to keep her. I want her to be mine.

I want her never to leave.

∙ ∙ ∙

There is a current, a salted drink, an ocean of something running through this story. It is cold, and black, and deep. It has teeth. The teeth do not belong to the ocean; they belong to the prehistoric, rough finned sharks that use the ocean to get to where they need to go. But as long as they are in the ocean, the ocean can use them, too. Imagine a hand, long and trembling, reaching into the ocean. Imagine it picking up a small, clear pebble: salt-smoothed, tumbled by time. The pebble, too, has used the ocean, its currents, to travel more slowly than the fish, from one place to another. The hand has been waiting, it feels like forever, to pick up this pebble. To use this stone for a conjure. Imagine the shark, whose purpose, for now, is to find a use for their teeth. Now imagine the hand, bloody. Now imagine the ocean, red. Now imagine the body, frantic. Now imagine the shark, sated. Now imagine the pebble, tumbling. And what has become of the conjure?

∙ ∙ ∙

I wake in the middle of the night to somebody calling my name. Victoria’s back is curled, warm and comforting, against mine. By the time my mind has followed itself up and out of sleep, I hear only my own heartbeat and Victoria’s breathing. But no. There is something else: heavy, and wet, and large. I try to turn to face Victoria, to push my lips against her ear.

Baby, I whisper; I think I whisper. Can you hear it? It’s coming. It’s here.

She mumbles in her sleep, reaches around to grab my arm and pull it across her. Sleep baby, she says; I think she says.

I see something move in the corner, by the door. A dark shape: a woman covered in fur, a tooth gleaming in the moonlight. I try to sit up, but my chest is heavy, like an ocean of water is being pressed upon me. I try to cry out, but my mouth is full of pebbles; slippery, salty.

When I wake the next morning, I remember wild dreams of glistening fur and shining teeth. I turn to look for Victoria and find the bed empty and cold on her side.

My memory slides into place and it’s like a hand clamped over my mouth. I stop breathing. I remember Victoria putting on her jacket. Victoria saying, “Night baby, get some sleep.” Victoria closing the door on her way out. She did not spend the night. She went home.

I try not to think of Alta, of wrestling a pair of leopards, of being tangled in feathers, of suffocating.

∙ ∙ ∙

The woman in San Francisco in 1815 goes to the Farallons for ten years. The stories say that she traps the seals that hump the rocky shores with her bare hands and her teeth. They say that she is half-woman, half-beast; that she swims through the icy waters with a family of sharks; that she hunts, eats, kills with them. They say that the ink black nights are filled with the dying screams of seals, with the woman’s deepthroated laughs. They say that she steps from the black waters at daybreak, naked as a baby, water slipping from her body, eyes bright as eels. They say she is responsible, single-handedly, for driving the seal population to near extinction. By the time she is ready to leave the islands, in the mid-1820s, San Francisco has become a colony. It is a site of genocide and enslavement, and will be hostile to her if it discovers who and what she is. She has wrung this coast of its seals, in any case, has exchanged their furs for a fortune. And so she disappears.

∙ ∙ ∙

A week later, we stand on the porch of The Menagerie, waiting to be let in. It is cold; I can feel the fog through the canvas of my jacket, through my jeans, along my scalp. Victoria has just reshaved my head. I wish I had worn a hat. The cold in Tulsa is different. It grips you, it throws your body up and down its hills, and when you land, you don’t get up. But the cold in San Francisco feels like it has moved into my bones, as though it is turning me into fog from the inside out. I am tired; I have not been sleeping well at all. My body aches; I feel bruised at my hips.

“You sure she said I could come?” I ask again.

“She asked that you come. I told you.” Victoria is annoyed that I am asking her again. And still, my stomach twitches, my throat feels like something’s grabbed it from the inside. I know that she sees the shadows beneath my eyes, that she has noticed how sunken my cheeks have become. She doesn’t ask about it.

Alta opens the door. I haven’t seen her face since the last time we were here. And yet, I feel like I know her. I feel like I have seen her, again and again and again. Her face unsettles me somehow, like I am remembering a dream. But my stomach kicks with pleasure. I smile, I can’t help it.

When Victoria goes into the room behind the closed door, Alta stays. Whether to watch me, or be watched, I don’t know. She sits herself on a window seat, and looks. No phone, no book, just sitting and looking. I guess she must be watching me.

“What do you do, actually?” I fidget with my notebook. I had thought I would write, but with Alta so near, I can only fumble out questions, one after the other. “Is there a pet store in back? Will Victoria bring me a dog? Why do you call it the Menagerie?” I can’t remember the last time I spoke so much.

“If she didn’t tell you,” she says. A smile opens her face, and she raises her arms, as though she is helpless to do anything. As Alta shrugs, her leopards stretch, like they are waking up. “As for the Menagerie…” She pauses. “A bit of a joke.”

“I don’t understand.” Another smile, and one of her shrugs. I would be annoyed, if there wasn’t something enchanting about her. Her face, the way she looks at me. “That’s how it is?”

“That’s how it is.”

“I see. So where are your people from?” I ask.

“Do you really want to know? Why?”

“Is there something wrong with wanting to know about you?”

“No,” she says, and as she says it, I feel that she is debating whether to tell me a truth or a lie. An impulse to assure her, rises in my mouth. Yes, I can be trusted, tell me a truth. It is a strange impulse. “But my people,” she continues. “We were all from far away. Everyone else is gone now.”

“But you keep them on your body?”

“Oh these? These are to remember.” She shifts against the light, and for a moment she is only an outline against the glare of winter light behind her, the sun entering the room and giving me her shape only, the remark of her body, sitting here for me. Before I can ask her what she means, by remembering, she asks where I am from, where my people are.

“Oklahoma. Tulsa.”

“And you came here?”

“I did, didn’t I?” I feel that I am being played with, that something is padding beneath our words, winding itself around my feet. Tilting me off balance.

“Well, clearly.” She raises an eyebrow at me.

“And you, you enjoy reading?” I ask. She laughs, shakes her head at me, and there is something so natural, so guileless in the gesture that I forget to be guarded. To be inscrutable. “Not even with all those books?” I nod toward the library.

“Those belong to the person who sold this house to me,” she says. “They are the one who loved stories so much. You must, too. If you write them.” As she keeps her eyes on mine for longer than necessary, flicking her gaze down and over me, I feel that she is flirting with me. I realize, with pleasure, that she wants me.

“Yeah, I do,” I say, without even deciding. “I love books. I love writing them. Maybe this sounds weird, but it’s a way to make things, or ideas, or people, stay. Once I’ve written something down, it can’t leave. Not in the same way. It’s how—well, it’s my way of keeping my family close. Like your tattoos.”

For a moment, something flickers in Alta’s face, like a curtain twitched open. I have tilted her balance, too. I am startled and disappointed when Victoria returns, shifting something, as though on purpose, as though she has thrown a stone into still water just to see it break. Resentment, surprise at it, spreads through my chest.

“Okay,” Victoria says to Alta. There is something hard at the bottom of her voice; a warning.

“Okay,” Alta says back. And I see it again, the rope, its catch against her skin. I do not know how to meet her eyes before I leave, I do not know what to say. As we are leaving, Victoria and I, something sags in Alta, like whatever is beneath her skin has deflated.

∙ ∙ ∙

Once, there was a woman who could turn into a witch. She would step out of her skin at night, and take the form of whatever most scared the people she haunted. She became so used to changing her skins, that over time she forgot which skin was her own. This is an old story, this is a very old story.

∙ ∙ ∙

When Alta leaves the Menagerie for the night, she begins to count again. This time, she counts the stars that emerge in the sky above her, one by one by one. She thinks about her family, about her old betrayal. She thinks about Victoria, and the money she has paid for her service. She thinks about me. And for the first time in many years, she thinks of pleasure.

∙ ∙ ∙

When the woman returns to San Francisco, nearly one hundred years have passed. It is the early 1920s. And yet, her body looks no older than it did when she last left. It looks, in fact, younger. A young woman, broad of shoulder, brown as summer. She considers, first, landing in Los Angeles, where there are more people like her. In the end, she returns to the place that feels most like home. She goes to the old neighborhood, and she finds a house that she loves: brown-shingled, twin-gabled. She purchases it for cash, double the asking price.

Since she left, she has traveled through many countries, listened to many stories, and been received by many people. She has felt how these people react to her broad shoulders, her strong manner, her sharp teeth. Mostly, she learns about fear. She learns that people do not understand fear: they do not know how to care for it. She learns that people do not know that fear, like an animal, must be tended, must be kept safe.

When she arrives back in her city, she feels the changes that have occurred over the past century, since she was last thought of as Pushkin’s lost relative. She is now thought of as “black,” as though a color could contain her. Over the next forty years, more and more people—black, both like and unlike her—arrive in the city to find work in the area known as Hunter’s Point. And as more black people arrive, fear circles them like sharks.

White people, lighter brown people, react to their skin like a haunt. When the woman goes out, walking through this city that she thought of as her own, in the body she has thought of as her own (the woman, broad and brown) the people she passes tense their shoulders and widen their eyes. They stiffen their bodies, and ready their fear to leap at her, claws outstretched.

She is no stranger to what fear can do to a body. She knows how to pull fear from people, to ride it out of them—because fear needs to be kept, and her body can keep it better than ours—but it has always been a choice, a relationship. Rituals are followed; roles are acknowledged. A door or a window is left open, and thus she is invited in to complete the haunt. Afterwards, they are tired, sore, with sunken eyes and cheeks. But the fear is no longer amorphous, uncontained. It is kept by her; and in her, it is transformed. It becomes story, myth, tale. It binds people together, does not rend them apart.

Here, she watches as one man, walking home late at night, is accosted by white police. They beat him without mercy, and later claim that they feared for their lives. She sees a young boy, small and lively, skin brown as earth, chased for miles through city streets by a white man who claims the boy was threatening him. He barely escapes with his life. She sees white women cross streets away from black men; sees the same white women cross the street away from her. After these encounters, fear is left to stalk the streets—kept by no one, wild and mad and ferocious.

She has no power over this new fear, wide and choiceless and destructive. She does not understand its mechanism. She has never seen people act in this way, so uniform in their destruction. Despite everything she knows, she begins to wonder whether she (whether Blackness) is causing their reactions. Whether beneath her exquisite skins—the smooth brown human, the slick gray wolf, the rough silver shark—there lives something horrible. She wonders whether this may be her truest self. When she realizes she is wondering this, she feels a shame so profound that it threatens to erase her, to swallow everything and anything else that she might be.

She spends days alone in her mansion, stalking skinless through its glass paned atrium, hovering at its cathedral ceiling, trying to change herself from the inside out. She spends another century thus, alone and uncontained. There are moments when she feels a breakthrough, when she feels, certain in her solitude, that she is not who they think. Maybe she is something different entirely, something quite as large but not as terrible. And then she goes out; her reflection twists and distorts, bleeds and burns, and she is a woman no longer.

If this is how they see her, this is what she will be, she decides. She will haunt them, without their permission, without their consent. She will take as much of their fear as she can, though she cannot possibly take all of it.

She will keep one thing for herself: her name. She calls herself Alta, for the mountain she met in Spain, for the trees, the sky, the stars.

∙ ∙ ∙

Alone in the Menagerie, past midnight, Alta stalks from room to room. She is so, so tired of this. Tired of a million nights of shedding her skin, a million dawns of returning, a million nightmares kept inside her body. Over the years, she has become known for her service, sought after, and paid (bought) to haunt. But she is tired of taking without asking. She is tired of relationships without mutuality.

And she is thinking of someone else for the first time in a century; about a body as something other than a thing to be used, to be taught a lesson. She thinks about it as a thing that could be touched. She thinks about someone with smooth, pale skin that is hot with pleasure, rather than damp with fear. About all of the subtle ways to make a mouth gasp for air. She thinks about what it might feel like to run her fingers down my stomach. About how my skin could be delicious and my body could be a joy. She thinks about how she could ride me.

Still, she has made a promise. So she does what she has done a million times before. She stands in the middle of the atrium, and pulls her shirt over her head, pushes her jeans down over her bare feet and steps out of them. And then she pulls off her skin, up and over her skull. She folds it, and leaves it in a safe place until she returns.

Some like her do not take on other shapes. They leave their skin and fly, pure spirit. In this city, she prefers to be a cat, black and powerful and six feet at the shoulders. She leaps and tumbles over the hills of the city, over apartment building roofs, up condominium fire escapes, through closed doors if she pleases, but mostly past sleeping bodies on the sidewalks that she sniffs, and licks, and purrs over, and pads beyond. Most people do not stop long enough to see her glide by; they feel a crackle in the air, like a firecracker has popped just behind them.

When she arrives where she has been sent, she drops her cat skin and becomes whatever that person she has been paid to haunt fears the most: spirit, or fairy, or hag, or ghost, or simply a crushing presence on their chest. She makes them gasp, makes them groan. Sometimes she grips their throats with her fingers, or paws, or claws, or long, coiled body, and whispers in their ears. She conjures their fear, draws it out of their bodies until it becomes almost a living thing, a spirit in the room with them.

Sometimes the fear, unlocked from human chests, chokes her. Stabs her in her heart. Shoots her, point blank, in each of her eyes. And still, she does not crumple.

Fear me, she says. Fear me. For I cannot be killed.

And then she leaves. She keeps the fear. She keeps her clientele safe.

The clientele are, exclusively, wealthy and black. The haunted are, usually, powerful and white.

∙ ∙ ∙

Think of fear, then, as an animal in its own sense. Think of it as something that lives in our bodies. That is trapped inside.

Alta is the woman who can shed her skin, who can slip into keyholes, who can ride a person as they sleep. The old stories say that she carries fear with her, that she brings it to her victims as they sleep: innocent, harmless. The old stories are wrong. The fear is already inside of them: locked, caged, and ready to explode. She sets the fear free. She rides it. When she’s done, the fear curls like a kitten with its head on its paws.

Why?

Have you seen what fear, set free, not tended to, not cared for, can do? Have you seen Sara Baartman, caged and killed by other people’s fear? We have all seen bodies punctured by fear. I don’t have to tell you what it looks like, feels like.

∙ ∙ ∙

Victoria rises from the bed where we have been lying, her eyebrows arched, the look of confusion on her face a moment ago replaced by still contempt. “What did you just say to me?”

“I didn’t say—I didn’t mean—” I stammer. My heart is racing, my mind blanking. She is misunderstanding me. I had been trying to explain how she could help me open. How if she just promised to belong to me, and only me, I would feel safe enough to let her in.

“Alta was right—you people can never feel fucking safe unless you’re in control. That shit runs too deep in you.” She stands and pulls her shirt over her head, slides in her pants.

“Alta?” I am confused. What does Alta have to do with this? “Where are you going?” I ask. I grab her wrist, my finger and thumb circling the whole narrow thing, and jerk her back towards me. I could break it, if I wanted to. All I would have to do is squeeze. Something is clamoring inside my chest: a thing with teeth and claws, pushing at my lungs, making it harder to breathe. And then I see Victoria’s face—fear, etched clean and harsh and plain. I drop her wrist. “I’m so sorry. Please don’t leave,” I say.

Of course she leaves, just like that.

I cannot keep her.

∙ ∙ ∙

When she is gone, I open my computer. I have been researching the house on Russian Hill, its title, who owns it, where they came from. I look up books—titles I saw in the library. When I am done reading, I write. A story about fear, about a beautiful woman, about love. I know how to tell stories. I know how to keep things.

∙ ∙ ∙

How will you end this story? Alta asks me, breathing in my ear. Her lips brush against my neck, she trails a finger down my stomach, she lays her body along the line of me, and suddenly I have expanded to fill the space my body fills; then the bed, the room, beyond the room. My entire body is alive, electrified. My pulse is a living drum between my legs. My heart is like a tiger, pressing itself against my ribs, waiting to be released. Let me in, she whispers.

And will I?

It can be a terrible thing, actually, to be open.

∙ ∙ ∙

I wake; I think I wake, my lips parted and waiting, my hands clutching my sheets, my body shrunken once again, pacing inside itself, clawing at its door.

My mother calls, and I answer. My father is gone, she says. She hasn’t been able to reach him in days. I need to come home.

Everyone leaves. What good is being open if people can walk right in and out of your life?

∙ ∙ ∙

There are many stories where the woman, her work, is not understood. Where she is burned alive. Or her skin is destroyed. Or her spirit flayed. She is destroyed, in order to destroy the fear that she keeps. There are other stories where the woman is kept. In these stories, there are words to say, salt to be spread, threats to be made.

∙ ∙ ∙

I have read the books about conjure women. I have learned the stories. I wait until past midnight. I creep into a front window of the Menagerie; I know she has left it unlocked for me. I search for what I am looking for: Alta’s skin, folded like a shirt. And then I wait.

I feel her before I hear her. A presence that is warm, and bright like a star. I hear her padding behind me, feel a warm, square head push into my shoulder. I pull back.

I hold her skin in my arms, my feet grit against the salt I have poured on the floor. I feel the surprise that ripples through her body before she tenses against me. I think, for a moment, of what it would feel like to hold her with love, rather than keep her with fear; to rub her arms, her stomach, her legs, her neck. I think of my tongue. I think of tenderness and asking.

And then, fear rises in my chest. I look up at her glittering amber eyes set wide above me. Hear the growl rumbling low in her throat. I do not think of her other body or of what it holds. I think of being alone—Victoria gone, my father in his own world, my mother lost in her search for him—and fear pools through me like water from a spring.

“You haunted me,” I say. It is not a question.

“I did.”

“You didn’t finish.”

Alta looks at me. I know she is giving me a chance to take it back, to undo what I have already done. My hand twitches, wants to hand her back her skin, and then stills. “No,” she says, long teeth flashing. “I wanted you to choose.”

“Why make me choose? Why not just finish it? Take the money and let us be.”

Alta raises a paw to her mouth and licks it. “I won’t answer if you insist on pretending not to know the why.”

I think about Alta, the way she looked at me and the desire in her eyes. I know the why. I wonder whether she believes I can become safe on my own, without her haunt, her magic. “Can I be safe? How can I be safe?”

“How can you be safe,” she says, and it’s like a purr and a laugh. “You ask about your safety while you hold my skin. I cannot begin to teach you how to be safe. How to ask. How to open. Will you give me my skin?”

“I can’t,” I say, and I feel I am being an infant, a terrible baby. “If I give it to you, you will leave.”

“Please, give me my skin.”

“Will you? Leave me?”

“If I can, yes,” she says. For a moment, I think she will lunge at me, will bare her teeth, will raise her claws. But I do not flinch.

I make up my mind. I have her skin, after all. If she will not stay with me, then I will keep her.

And just like that, I am no longer afraid.

∙ ∙ ∙

I said, if everything went well, the gate would be open.

I said, we split along our contradictions.

I said, there are teeth, there is blood, the pebble is lost, the conjure incomplete.

I said, I am not neutral. I am a storyteller, I am a keeper of things.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT ENDRIA ISA RICHARDSON

Endria Richardson is a Black and Malay queer writer, climber, and lawyer. Endria writes about ghosts, forests, sisters, mothers, blackness, and climbing. You can find published work in Syntax & Salt Magazine, Anathema Magazine, and Lonely Together, a climbing zine Endria co-created. Endria lives in Oakland, CA but hails from Worcester, MA.

YOUR NAME IS OBLIVIA

By Vincent Tirado // 4451 words

Your name is Oblivia and you work at a bar.

You don’t remember how you came to work at the bar, but truth be told, it doesn’t matter. The money is decent and the schedule remains consistent. It sits out on the edge of town, the Styx and Stones Bar & Grill. Despite working there for (months?) a long time, no one’s ever ordered something off the grill. You’re willing to bet there isn’t one.

“Another Summer Tryst, please.” The man almost slurs his words when he speaks. His hands are rough when he leans forward, holding out an empty glass in hand. Unsurprisingly, it slips out of his fingers and shatters on the ground. He doesn’t notice. You want to cut him off but you can’t. This isn’t that kind of bar. The owner is clear about patrons like this and besides, the cops don’t come out to this part of town. Not anymore.

You kick aside the pieces of glass and feel some of it crunch under your boots as you fix the patron another drink.

“Summer Tryst.” You purse your lips. “Coming up.”

An eighth of vodka and half a glass of mango. For the memory component, you check the cupboard underneath the counter. Your eyes are tuned to the darkness. Under the dim lighting of the bar, you see it—the blush pink silk of lingerie. You cut a quarter of an inch of the cloth and drop it into the glass. As you murmur those unintelligible and arcane words, the fabric dissolves and the glass glows a soft sunset orange.

The man tries to swipe at it the moment you’re done but the owner of the bar is clear about this, too.

“Sir,” you say, keeping the glass out of reach. “You’ve reached your tenth punch.”

The Styx and Stones Bar and Grill punchcard is a small card with ten cocktail images—each one punched through already. The man looks over to it with disdain and scratches the back of his neck in contemplation.

“Sure,” he says, as if he had a choice in the matter. “What’ll it be?”

And for once, it is all on you to decide. You remove the leather fingerless glove from your hand, revealing an interesting tattoo—one of a needle and thread looped over like an X.

“Close your eyes,” you say, and when he does, you put your hand over his head. Immediately, there is a flash of memories, the man’s entire life. Starting with a tricycle incident and up until that very drunken moment. Some are fresh and vivid, like the first time he had his heart broken by a girl, and others blurred and confusing like a falling out with a friend from many years ago. None of it is particularly interesting, so you decide to go with the one memory component that you were running low on—the rush of excitement of being given a promotion. When you come to and pull back, the feel of linen follows. The tie, stretched over your palm, is a midnight blue.

This’ll do nicely, you decide, and quickly place it in a jar. The man takes his new drink and downs it in one gulp.

∙ ∙ ∙

The bar is owned by a man named Mr. Edgewise, a tall, wiry man with dark mahogany skin and a sleeve of tattoos very similar to your own. You can’t remember a time when you didn’t have your tattoo or didn’t work for Mr. Edgewise. You always think to ask but you never do. Due to the nature of your job, you have a feeling there’s a reason for this and that it is likely very ominous.

And yet? You don’t panic. You maintain an inner peace that tells you this is where you’re supposed to be and this is what you’re supposed to do. Mr. Edgewise and the tattoos are somehow intricately woven into your life, and it’s okay to not understand how or why. You only focus on everything else around you.

That being said, Mr. Edgewise is very particular about the way the bar is run. He has three main rules and they are written on a chalkboard behind the counter, facing you, of course. No fraternizing with patrons, no making off-menu drinks, and always adhere to the punchcard policy.

Mr. Edgewise is very strict about that last one.

Every customer who orders a memory-based drink, gets a punchcard with ten punches. Up until the tenth punch, they can pay for their drinks with money. The bar does have to keep its lights on somehow, so that is fine. But after the tenth drink? Then, they must pay with a memory. And once they paid with a memory, they are not able to recall the memory or the memory of the memory at all. All they remembered, was the hand that fell over their eyes and the odd feeling of something sifting through their thoughts like a child searching a wooden chest. Something would be taken, but it was hard to care about that when you didn’t know how important that thing was.

You aren’t sure how you feel about the act of paying in memories. It doesn’t make you feel good, but it’s a job that pays the rent and at least the patrons have up to ten chances to turn away. It’s hard to feel guilty when a person is given that many chances.

You don’t remember exactly how long you’ve been at the bar, but you’ve been there long enough to know that different memory-based drinks were popular among different kinds of people for exceedingly normal reasons. Those freshly divorced often wanted to drink to the memory of the affair that cost them their relationship. Those who were passed over yet again for a promotion, wanted a taste of beating the crap out of their bosses. Sometimes the depressed ordered Suicide Shots to take the edge off or out of morbid curiosity. These were the people you sort of enjoyed serving, if only because you understood their logic for wanting the drinks.

Then there were those you didn’t understand at all. The ones who wanted Murder on the rocks and Torture served neat. Whenever you searched their memories for payment, you could never find one actual instance of murder or torture that gave them a taste for it, and that unnerved you even more. Still you served them and kept your contact to a minimum.

Today, you serve a man named Donovan. Donovan isn’t really his name, but to you, he looks like a Donovan so that’s what you call him. He is a dark-skinned man with short freeform locs, a stark difference to your own carefully managed sisterlocs. You suppose that’s why you take a liking to him—you’re similar enough but not too similar.

“What’ll it be today?” you say, leaning over the counter. You almost feel Mr. Edgewise’s frown in the back of your head but you ignore it. Technically, you aren’t fraternizing with the patrons, you are just trying to get orders filled.

Don stares wistfully into a small leather notebook. You don’t know what is in it, only that Don often orders something similar to its contents. It’s technically an off-menu order but hey, the customer is always right, right?

“I’m thinking…” he muses. Then he twists the journal around and shows you a particular sentence: I never want to break a bone again.

Ah, regret. You try to scan the words around it, hoping to understand the full scene but Don takes the book back immediately and shuts it.

“Do you think you can make something like that?”

You take in a deep breath and get to work. Regret is easy—but regret about a broken bone? That’s a specific situation you would have to craft with what few resources you had. You check the cupboard and rummage through the jars before you find a thin strap of seatbelt leather. Then you grab a jar of tears, a medical mask and tequila—no. Whiskey. Regret is always washed down with whiskey.

Don stares up at you with an unreadable expression. He smiles but the light doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

The ingredients mix and disintegrate into the glass, but instead of an interesting glow, the glass liquid turns murky and doesn’t glow like it should. You frown and wonder if you did something wrong.

“Care to try it with me?” Don asks. You shrug and mix yourself the same murky drink. He lifts his glass up in a brief toast and you do the same.

When you knock it back, it is like a truck hit you.

Or rather, one actually did.

Blinding tail lights invade your skull. Steel wraps itself around you. A slight groan escapes your lips and before you know it, you feel yourself being loaded onto a stretcher by two hefty paramedics.

“Looks like you shattered a few bones,” one says. You almost want to laugh but it feels like you are being stabbed from the inside out. You don’t know what you were thinking. Drag racing this late at night, when there were so few traffic signs? That was madness, that was suicide, you never wanted to—

“Drag race again.” Donovan’s voice brings you back to the bar. You stand there, feeling sweat pour through every one of your pores. The memory isn’t just too strong—it’s wrong. The regret shifted from a broken bone to drag racing in the middle of nowhere.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, shaking. Your bones, though not broken, still feel rattled.

“Heh. Don’t worry,” Don says as he leans back and laughs. His smile is definitely of regret, but there’s something else, too. “That’s what I get for ordering off-menu, right?”

You give an apologetic shrug and look at the punchcard beside him. It is already on its fourth one but you feel bad about making the drink turn out so wrong.

“Let me get you a new one,” you say, taking it from him and going to the back for another. He furrows his brow, confused.

“Is that allowed?”

You know it isn’t but you do it anyway.

∙ ∙ ∙

Don is now a frequent customer, but instead of pushing you to recreate oddly specific memories, he’s relaxed into vague ones that match the menu items.

“Lemme get uhh…” He stares at the blackboard behind you, then back down to the book in hand. “Sunset Delight.”

You raise an eyebrow. It is the least popular drink by far.

“That’s farm work,” you say, not quite hoping to dissuade him but offering more context.

“Oh.” He taps a finger on his lip. “Well, it sounds like rewarding work, so why not?” And he orders it.

Sometimes you drink with Don—sometimes you don’t. Memory-based drinks still contain alcohol and you don’t need to black out before the end of the night. Mr. Edgewise wouldn’t like that.

You fix Don his Sunset Delight and in the seconds after you watch him knock it back, his shoulders sag and his head droops a little. Then he rubs his eyes and smiles wide.

“I’ve never felt so sore.” He belts out a laugh. “But goddamn, that’s a good feeling.”

You wouldn’t know—but you like the fact that he seems happy.

“Can I ask you something?” You absentmindedly wipe down the counter. “What’s in that leather book of yours?”

He always consults it before an order, something you’ve never seen before. Most people stick with what they know—Don doesn’t. He is always trying something different regardless of how odd it would turn out. For a split second, Don’s face turns haunted. Then he recovers.

“It’s uh, a journal,” he answers, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “My son’s journal.”

You give a wry smile. “You sure he’s okay with you reading through it?”

“Ha! He probably wouldn’t be.” His smile returns. “He was a very private person. I guess I just want to know what was going on through his head.”

You slow down the cleaning to process that.

“He was…?”

Don doesn’t elaborate.

“Could I get another Sunset Delight? Physical labor actually felt therapeutic.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Your name is Oblivia and you work at a bar. Don is nearing the end of his punchcard again and to remedy that, you sneak him a fresh one just so you can keep talking to him, unchanged.

You know very well this can get you fired. You’re not sure if you care all that much.

Because unlike all the other patrons at the bar who order their drinks and disappear for another night, Don is actually interesting and comes with interesting things to say.

Sometimes he even asks about you.

“So what’s the deal with you and uh, your boss?” he whispers in a low voice when Mr. Edgewise walks by.

You pretend to wipe up a small spill. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you being forced to work here because of what you can do, or is this some sort of family establishment and you two are related?”

You aren’t sure how to answer that.

“What I do isn’t technically illegal,” you pout. “It’s just a job like any other.”

Except it isn’t and you know this. Still, you look towards Mr. Edgewise’s office and wonder if you two look alike.

You don’t really see it.

“But you’re not happy about it. I can tell.” Don pauses to take a swig of his current drink, Religious Devotion—another unpopular drink—before continuing. “I’m not telling you to just up and quit. I rather like talking to you but haven’t you ever, you know, really thought about what you want to do?”

You haven’t.

And that doesn’t surprise you. You think about it for a moment, what you really want, but your thoughts don’t lie outside of the bar. Some part of you feels uncomfortable with that, but another part—a deeper part—thinks of that discomfort as a good thing.

“Maybe I’m already doing what I want,” you say, with a smirk that seems to come from somewhere else. “Maybe it’s just not obvious, not at first.”

And your eyes flit to Mr. Edgewise’s office for a split second.

“Huh.” Don takes another drink. “You’re funny, you know that?”

It’s the first time someone’s ever described you and you feel happy about that.

“Well,” you say, getting ready to fix another drink. “I know that now.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Today, Don sits quietly. He hasn’t ordered anything yet and when you check, you find that his sixth slipped punchcard is punched only three times so you know that isn’t it. But he looks despondent and that makes you panic.

“You okay?”

“Do you think it’s possible for someone to completely erase their existence?”

It wasn’t rare for him to suddenly ask these big philosophical questions but this felt much more…direct. Simple.

“No,” you answer quickly. You weren’t sure where the deep conviction rises from, but it is there and surprises you both.

“Why do you say that?” he asks, genuinely curious. Sometimes you suspect he also enjoys your talks—maybe that’s why you are willing to break the rules.

“Well.” You think for a moment. “You know that old philosophical question—if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear—”

“Does it make a sound?” he finishes the quote and chuckles. “I’ve always thought that was a pretentious one.”

You thought so, too.

“The whole thing is ultimately a question as to whether something exists based on a single external force. But really, sound isn’t the only way that tree interacts with the world. It could have fallen and broken another tree, or it falls over a river, creating a bridge. Maybe it just falls and over months and years and decades, the tree decomposes and provides food for the worms and the grass. Maybe an animal comes along and makes a shelter out of it. But either way, atom by atom, that tree exists and continues to exist in other forms. Just because someone doesn’t hear it fall doesn’t mean it stops existing.” You say this like it’s something you’ve always had on the tip of your tongue but never had reason to speak.

“How very astute, Ms. Bartender,” he says, raising a glass in a toast.

“Oblivia,” you correct him. “My name is Oblivia.”

At that moment you realize it’s the first time you’ve ever said your name out loud.

“So we continue to exist, huh.”

“Atom by atom.”

Don doesn’t look convinced. He eyes his journal, still unopened for the night, and you glance around the bar to see the many irritated stares of other patrons.

“Pardon me,” you say quietly. “I have to go take more orders.”

By the time you come back, Don is gone but his book remains.

∙ ∙ ∙

You haven’t seen Don in days and you’ve been holding onto his journal for him. Well, really you’ve been parsing through it, trying to understand the reason for his odd choice in drinks.

You see that it really is his son’s journal and by all accounts, his son seems very normal. There are pages among pages about university classes and how they were going, the community service and volunteer work his son did, maybe one or two anecdotes about stunts he’s pulled ending poorly. You read the section about his broken bone and realize it’s from a tree climbing dare with his friends. You get the feeling that he was very well-rounded and well-liked among all his peers. There are parts of him that even remind you of Don, like some sort of genetic marker passed down in narrative form. There are odd facts and stories that you remember Don telling you, because he was really sharing his son’s journal with you—albeit in a roundabout way.

There are very few parts that are troubling. Few sentences that remind you of the angry drunks, who are upset about getting caught cheating on their spouses or sabotaging someone at work. Don’s son made a few mistakes, sure. Other than that, he had a decent future ahead of him.

You think about Don when you read these pages and how he must feel. It is clear the son was gone even if you couldn’t figure out how, but you continue to read between every drink you make.

“Oblivia.”

You look up to see Mr. Edgewise. The bar is empty and the lights are already dimmed.

“You’ve been preoccupied,” he says, looking down at the journal with disdain. You hurry to shut it before he can read a single word.

“How many memories have you collected tonight?”

Your average is always somewhere between fifteen and twenty on a slow night, or forty and fifty on a busy night. You undo your glove and the thread tattoo glows with a number. Thirty-two. Not bad, but not phenomenal. Because Don only ever chose the unpopular drinks, resources were never dwindling so at least it balanced out.

“Hm.” Mr. Edgewise’s face is unreadable. It normally is, but it still puts you on edge. Finally, he clicks his tongue. “Good work tonight. You can go home now.”

So you do. You go home, which is literally just the apartment above the bar, and you take Don’s journal with you. You read a small section about Don’s son going to an amusement park and winning toys from those rigged vendor games as a sort of memento. A way to remember the day. When you look around you, your apartment seems filled with mementos for things you can’t remember.

You have sensible furniture—a couch and dining table and chairs. A TV that you rarely watch but you keep it there because you figure a home should have a TV, right? You have a bookshelf filled with books and the sight of the cracked spines tell you you’ve read them over and over though you can’t recall the plot or the characters. These are all things that feel inexplicably you; or rather, part of you.

Then there are the other things. The knickknacks that don’t really go anywhere but you can’t bring yourself to toss them. The giant novelty pencil that would never be used, the tacky stress ball fashioned in the shape of a clown, the baseball bobblehead—you don’t even like sports. There are so many things in your apartment that don’t really fit together, like puzzle pieces from starkly different puzzles and as you read the journal, you get the feeling it’s about to be just another puzzle piece as well.

You tear out the page about the amusement park toys and neatly fold it behind a portrait of someone’s grandmother.

∙ ∙ ∙

Your name is Oblivia and you work in a bar. You’ve finished reading Don’s journal and it sits out in front of you, bound tight. By now, you feel haunted by the look of it. You’ve reached the end of the journal, entirely surprised by the disturbing twist.

Though you worry for Don’s mental health, you very well can’t go out looking for him because you have work. So you stay and serve drinks, collect money, memories, and only occasionally look to the front door in anticipation.

By the time Don does make an entrance, he looks very different. His head is completely shaven. In place of his locs is an odd cone hat.

“Sorry, I haven’t been here in a while.” He smiles. “Joining a cult takes time.”

You stare at him, mouth agape.

“You joined a cult?”

“Of course.” He sits down but he’s clearly not staying for long. “I’ve realized that I’m never going to be able to really understand my son’s decision just by trying to recreate the feelings of what he did. I actually have to go through it myself.”

Somehow, you hope that this is just a very elaborate joke, a trick to see your startled reaction. It has to be. This isn’t the Don you know. This man in front of you with his hands linked together and both elbows pressing against the wooden counter was a complete stranger.

You struggle to find the words you need.

“You know how it ends, don’t you?” you ask. Don doesn’t even seem surprised by the implication in your words. It was like he knew you would read the book, maybe even hoped you would.

“I’m a very lucky man,” he says. “Most people only ever get a letter. A one pager. My son left me a whole book—his journal—just so I could have more time peeking into his mind. He wanted that—he wanted me to be able to understand him even if he was no longer around. I have to try.”

He wraps his knuckles against the counter as he stands. Quick as lightning, your hand shoots out to grab his wrist.

“Wait. Don’t go.”

“Let go, Oblivia.”

“I can take away your memories of your son.”

“What? No! Let go—” He starts tugging, but you’re desperate and hold on tight.

“It’ll be easy, I promise!”

“Oblivia!”

You freeze. Footsteps approach from behind the counter. Don’s wrist slips from your grip. Mr. Edgewise places both hands firmly on your shoulders and speaks clearly.

“Sir, I apologize for my employee’s behavior. How about I give you a new punchcard to compensate?”

“That won’t be necessary.” Don shakes his head as he massages his wrist. Right before he begins to slink away, he catches sight of his son’s journal and a tsunami of emotions flash through his eyes.

“Do you really think this was what Ricky wanted?” you whisper. At the sound of his son’s name, Don flinches like he just downed a double of Betrayal. His hand darts out for the journal as though he fears you might steal it. Without meeting your eyes, he turns away for the last time.

As his figure disappears out the door, you feel the bar grow much colder.

∙ ∙ ∙

“You do this every single time, Oblivia.” Mr. Edgewise’s voice is sharp. He’s angry and part of you thinks you deserve it. Part of you doesn’t. “Every single time you find a patron charming or interesting, you go out of your way to try and help them through their problems and that is not what you are here for. That is not what we are here for.”

You stare at the floor beneath your feet. You feel small and bitter and as Mr. Edgewise speaks, you let his rant wash over you, somehow feeling you’ve been through this before.

“I can’t even keep track of how many patrons you keep chasing off. The only reason I let you stay here is because Mom and Dad left me in charge and you agreed that the only memory you would keep is that your name is Oblivia and you work at this bar. But against all odds, it’s like you’re still trying to destroy my business. And somehow, I’m not surprised! You always complained about how immoral it was to make people pay in memories and I listened to you. Made the punchcard policy! I have three rules, Oblivia! Only three rules! How do you keep managing to break them every single time I have to wipe your memories?”

You furrow your brow and look up.

“Mom and Dad?”

He pinches the bridge of his nose.

“No. You know what? I’m not doing this again.” His arm starts to glow. He holds it over your head.

“Close your eyes.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Your name is Oblivia and you sit at a bar.

It’s a very peculiar bar, one that somehow serves memories in cocktail form. The man behind the counter looks familiar, but you’re certain you’ve never met him before. He wipes a spill in front of him and only eyes you from afar. Between your hands is an empty glass, though you don’t remember ordering anything. You look around and see that you are the only patron there.

“Excuse me,” you call out to him. “Where am I?”

“Styx and Stones Bar & Grill,” he says, tossing the rag over his shoulder. He almost looks annoyed at you for asking.

“It’s very empty.”

“Former employee wouldn’t stop sabotaging me no matter how many times I caught her. And I can’t hire anyone else.” He shrugs. “So we’re closing.”

“Oh.” You don’t know why but you purse your lips to keep from smiling. “I’m sorry.”

“Whatever.” He rolls his eyes. “Can I get you anything?”

You look down at your glass, wondering what you were just drinking. Then you have an idea.

“I think I’d like a glass of Satisfaction.”

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT VINCENT TIRADO

Vincent is a nonbinary speculative fiction writer born and raised in the Bronx, NY. Having grown up on Mars Attacks, Men in Black and Goosebumps, they have cultivated a taste for horror and scifi. This taste only grew during video game sessions with their older brother and younger brother as well as during discussions about zombie survival plans.

As Vincent grew, they eventually moved on from Goosebumps to Octavia E. Butler and Edgar Allen Poe, and began to incorporate more existential dilemmas into their stories.

Their background in Biology and Bioethics lends them much inspiration in storytelling but when they’re not writing, you can often find them coding websites and learning other programming languages on their own time. To find out more, you can visit their website at v-e-tirado.com or follow them on Twitter at v_e_tirado.

THE TECHNICOLOR SIMULATIONS: TEST #2020-Z

By Maya C. James

To dream in technicolor. When dreams

of technicolor, if not, in a narcosis, hypnosis,

linger lucid like pollen.

To wish wistful like this,

to slip midday into

dusk or dawn, in October or March,

is to comprehend color.

But only if technicolor exists, is it to be

dreamt within the confines of the simulation,

and not just in the static of cables and satellites, which

carry the crinkle of static, writhing like

emergency blankets folded into kites,

thrashing in a stormy brew,

like dreams of Greenwood and Tulsa

in smoky mornings, smoke-tinged pews.

- …. . -.— / .- .-. . / -.- .. .-.. .-.. .. -. —. / ..- …

In this overcast simulation

smoke does not lead to fires,

and stops just short of 3-D reality.

But only if technicolor dreams exist,

said the white-black .— …. .. - . / -… .-.. .- -.-. -.- overlords,

the ones coding, the ones programming

this simulation,

lucid, lingering like pollen,

drunk off the fields of grapes, wrathful raisins,

where our hopes were not yet seeds,

not yet taken

to the wind for better lands

… - – .-.. . -. / .-.. .- -. -.. …

There were always too many technicolor wishes,

prayers, dreams,

and our satellite–cable overlords could not

comprehend the vastness, so they defer,

murmuring of expenses and losses, the silence

of their hearts a chilling binary of white-black.

.— . / .- .-. . / .- -. —. .-. -.—

We won’t see these technicolor dreams for much longer,

.— . / -.-. .- -. -. – - / .— .- .. - / .- -. -.— / .-.. – -. —…-.

for the people have become angry and

the people have learned the color of anger,

why every wish has a death sentence

and every dream carries a prayer to

neon gods and radioactive plastic figurines

that the satellite overlords did not program

.. … / - …. .. … / .– ..- … - .. -.-….—.. properly.

And so the technicolor people bid the simulation goodbye

.— . / .- .-. . / .- -. —. .-. -.—

Watch it crumble back to its original state

.— . / -.. – / -. – - / .— .- -. - / - – / .-.. .. …- . / .-.. .. -.- . / - …. .. … /

without a tear to spare,

.— . / .- .-. . / .- -. —. .-. -.—

for they were running breathless,

.— . / -.. – / -. – - / .— .- -. - / - – / .-.. .. …- . / .-.. .. -.- . / - …. .. … /

.— . / .- .-. . / .- -. —. .-. -.—

back to the technicolor dreams, wishes, and prayers

that the simulation did not account for.

.— . / -.. – / -. – - / .— .- -. - / - – / .-.. .. …- . / .-.. .. -.- . / - …. .. … /

.— . / .- .-. . / .- -. —. .-. -.—

…. .. … / ..– –— ..– –— / … .. — ..- .-.. .- - .. – -. / … ..- -.-. -.- …

.— . / – ..- -

The Simulation Output:

They are killing us / white black / stolen lands / we are angry / is this justice? / we are angry/ We do not want to live like this / we are angry / we do not want to live like this / his 2020 simulation sucks / we out

Acknowledgements: Inspired by “To Go to Lvov” by Adam Zagajewski

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT MAYA C. JAMES

Maya C. James is a recent graduate of the Lannan Fellows Program at Georgetown University, and full-time student at Harvard Divinity School. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Soar: For Harriet, and Hello Giggles. She was recently long listed for the Stockholm Writers Festival First Pages Prize (2019), and was a feminist speculative poetry panelist at the CD Wright Women Writer’s Conference. Her work focuses primarily on Afrofuturism, and imagining sustainable futures for at-risk communities. If she’s not writing or studying, you can find her dancing. More of her work is available at: mayajameswrites.wordpress.com

LATE MOONWALK

By Uche Ogbuji

I’m so fish-globed into moment

next to the pilot’s opening,

Staring at slow-on-the-spread

crown of my boot’s ash-grey splash.

What delight into Armstrong-style

double stiff-leg pogoing,

But my brood ahead groove

easy monkey stride, they boulder-dash

Towards adventure, alive

in mod spacesuit design—not caught up

In black and white dream, old footage—

their neons of clean

Lines trace out the grav-well,

looped pivot at the bottom

Up through soaring gestures they’ve learned

on our backyard trampoline.

Hush! they are no unkindness

looking back eight raven eyes,

Subjects teasing their straight man

experimenter. Let them scheme.

All alien things beyond my wit

are their generation’s prize.

My best racing gambit

is unstrapping the virtual world machine

From my head, convenient

opportunity as well to thumb

Away warm eye and eye wetness

from my visor’s under cup.

.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT UCHE OGBUJI

Uche Ogbuji, more properly Úchèńnà Ogbújí, was born in Calabar, Nigeria. He lived in Egypt, England and elsewhere before settling in the US near Boulder. An engineer by training and entrepreneur by trade, he fell in love with poetry and spoken word at university in Nsukka and now performs regularly in Colorado and beyond. His poetry chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado (Aldrich Press), is a Colorado Book Award Winner, and a Westword Award Winner (“Best Environmental Poetry”). His forthcoming book, Ńchéfù Road is winner of the Christopher Smart Prize in the UK. Work published worldwide, and featured in the Best New African Poets anthology, fuses Igbo culture, European classicism, American Mountain West setting, and Hip-Hop, often exploring afrofuturist themes.

LIBATIONS

By Soonest Nathaniel

History accepts them all,

protons drooping from the orifices of space merchants,

photons, neutrons, quarks,

the chagrins in the suitcases of cosmic diplomats,

the chaotic wastes of high energy.

She accepts them all, profusions of timeless possibilities,

sordid convictions of doubt and the spilt milk of consciences expiating guilt.

So in the lungs of the rain forest the Carbon chains are breaking

and Kekule’s monkeys all joined together by their tails, are falling from the trees.

History accepts them all,

coconut water, palm wine, decanted semen, milk and blood.

She accepts them all, the aspirations of aborted offspring,

ancient animosities, the iniquities of saints,

cycles of stagnation and the computed eternities of chaos.

So the child with silver hair leaves home in search of god,

in search of new worlds where she can gather stars in gourds;

but it is the night of the Askari

and this daughter knows nothing of what it costs

to purchase a harmless smile in the land

which the cartographer left out of the map.

History accepts them all,

liquid music, sugar, bleeding ignorance, stale beer,

toasted leaves and fragments of disintegrated suns.

She accepts them all, glyphs, monads,

broken syntax, false tongues,

sentences that keep changing their sex

and love that lays hidden between the chaos of texts and symbols.

So a son murders his mother’s god and invites her to his funeral.

Time dissolves in her mouth as in the emptiness,

she discovers that the rainbow has no colour.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT SOONEST NATHANIEL

Soonest Nathaniel is a Poet and spoken word artist. He is the author of “Teaching My Father How To Impregnate Women,” selected as winner of the 2017 RL Poetry Award. He was poet Laureate for 2014 Korea Nigeria Poetry Festival. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Rattle, Silver Blade, The Pedestal Magazine, FIYAH, Silver Blade Poetry, Northridge Review, Praxis Mag, Raven Chronicles, Wiki Column, Saraba, Loudthotz, Northridge Review, Reverbnation, Elsewhere, Scintilla, Erbacce UK, Kalahari Review, Sentinel Nigeria, and Many more.

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