CONTENTS

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

PROSE

TO REST AND TO CREATE

LA Knight // 4952 words

Shunned by all manner of indifferent employers, a struggling creative receives an interview for an otherworldly, once in a lifetime opportunity.

MEDITATIONS ON SUN-RA’S BASSISM

Yah Yah Scholfield // 4083 words

The laws of relativity hold no sway before the love of two sisters, a star mapper and city planner separated by light years and loneliness.

LUNGS

Lily Watson // 2585 words

At the mercy of an eclectic conductor, a brilliant but nervous young orchestra invites attention from divinity itself as the children push their limits.

MORNING

Diane Russell // 5972 words

Naeku, a young colonist on a barren planet, is forced to come to terms with her sister’s accidental death when her latest surface survey mission pairs Naeku with her sister’s clone.

WHERE THE SKY BECOMES MILK

Jamie McGhee // 6255 words

Buoyed by his grandparents’ dying wish, young Quim has only seven days to return a precious treasure back home despite a journey of unspeakable dangers. Content Warning: Graphic depictions of gun and military violence.

POETRY

ASTRAL

Aliyah Curry

HOME’S THRENODY

Olaitan Humble

NONFIC

WHAT TO THE BLACK MAN IS PATRIOTISM: Patriotism and the MCU’s Black Captain America

E. Chad Metz

July 2021

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Welcome to the 19th issue of FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.

Wishing you all things good headed into this hot summer. Speaking of, are you registered for FIYAHCON2021 yet? Community, inspiration, contacts, craft tips… this convention is bound to vault your writing to the next level. Don’t let tickets pass you by! A casual reminder that both FIYAH (this magazine) and FIYAHCON are finalists in the Best Semiprozine and Best Related Work categories—respectively—for this year’s Hugo Awards. Voting is currently open to WorldCon members, so we hope you get to check out our contributions to the voter packet.

We are also pleased to bring you our collaboration with the LeVar Burton Reads podcast! Submissions for LeVar’s first-ever writing contest will be open August 1st-August 31st with the theme of ORIGINS AND ENCOUNTERS. Check out more information on our website.

This issue explores the first of 2021’s themes: Sound and Color. These authors and poets each approached the prompt in riveting and unique ways and I can’t wait for you to feast on them all. We’re proud to showcase “To rest, and to Create” by LA Knight, “Where the Sky Becomes Milk” by Jamie McGhee, “Diane Russell’s “Morning” and “Lungs” by Lily Watson. FIYAH fam Yah Yah Scholfield rounds us out with, “Meditations on Sun-Ra’s Bassism.”

B. Sharise Moore’s poetry selection for this issue includes: “Astral” by Aliyah Curry, and “Home’s Threnody” by Olaitan Humble. Margeaux Weston’s first nonfiction offering is “What to the Black Man is Patriotism?: Patriotism and the MCUs Black Captain America,” by E. Chad Metz.

Sound and Color’s exceptional cover was created by Paul Kellam.

Thanks for rocking with us and I hope you enjoy the issue.

Peace,

DaVaun Sanders

Executive Editor

Executive Editor: DaVaun Sanders

Managing Editor: Eboni Dunbar

Poetry Editor: B. Sharise Moore

Non-Fiction Editor: Margeaux Weston

Web Editor: Chavonne Brown

Acquiring Editors: Kaleb Russell + Danny Lore +

Genine Tyson + Emmalia Harrington + Tonya R. Moore

Art Direction + Layout: L.D. Lewis

Cover Artwork by Paul Kellam

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

TO REST AND TO CREATE

By LA Knight // 4952 words

If you don’t disclose, you can’t ask for accommodation…

We understand things are difficult, but these accommodations just aren’t reasonable…

We’re sorry, you’re just not the right fit for this company…

There are so many ways to say the same thing. So many ways to lie so very sweetly and tell me that of course the company doesn’t mind hiring a disabled autistic person, of course they encourage a diverse work environment, of course they’re accessible.

If I close my eyes, the rain slides cool caresses down my neck like streaks of ultramarine chill and kisses my nose with little fizzes of celestine blue. I want to let it cover me in cobalt and forget the list of potential employers on my phone’s Notes app. I want to pretend I’m not stuck in this hell-world of mundane misery and not even a shred of magic.

But I missed the magic window, or rather the magic Door. I’m in my thirties. Chosen Ones are chosen a lot younger than that to go through the Doors, the magical portals that take a good chunk of the population to places unknown. There have been studies. Some speculate that as many as one in three people end up going through a Door, most of them before they’re even twenty. They go on to be saviors of worlds beyond this mundane one, or tyrants, or ordinary citizens but in places so far beyond the scope of our birthplace that it’s just as extraordinary as being the hero or the despot.

Sometimes they come back. Sometimes they’re kicked out. Sometimes they stay.

Sometimes they die.

But I missed the window, so instead of popping off through a portal to go save the magical world of my heart, I flinch from the shriek of car horns slamming down the street, the cacophony of water crashing on fiberglass rooftops.

The scream of the city bus’s brakes chases me away from the bus stop. I hunch and walk. I can’t walk long. My breath hitches, shallow and sharp in my throat. My pulse trips over itself like a clumsy dog, the disease stealing the oxygen right out of my blood.

But I don’t know what else to do but walk until my temples press tight as a patch of sunburn and my toes tingle with the faintest edges of numbness. Not enough air. The warning whimpers through my spasming solar plexus. I have to sit down soon, stop before I kiss pavement and taste blood I can’t afford to lose. Walk away from the advice, the lies, the two-faced backstabbing bullshit because I’m unreasonable.

In job interviews, they notice the eye contact first, always. I don’t stim beyond a lick of my tongue over back molars to help me remember the taste and feel of pastel crystal beads on strings of transparent plastic lace sparkling with glitter, the click of them against my teeth. That, allistics don’t pay attention to. They don’t understand the tightness around my mouth when I try not to wince every time a phone shrills. They don’t see the agony behind my gritted smile because the fluorescents sting like saltwater, like lemon juice, like acid.

No, it’s my eyes the interviewers notice as soon as I sit down on the other side of their shiny desk. My refusal to offer them unearned intimacy, the lack of consent for their invasion, my attempt to avoid another blowtorch melting one of my metaphorical spoons to slag. And it’s always downhill from there.

It doesn’t help that everything about me screams threat! to them: the dark curling clouds of my hair, looser than my sister’s but tighter than my brother’s, the way my fake smile shows teeth like bleached ivory against the golden brown of my skin, the broadness of my nose.

They don’t care about the way Mommy used to take hours to pick through my curls every wash day so she didn’t snag because I was so tenderheaded, or the money Dad paid out of railroad retirement and his military pension to give me nice teeth after oral stimming gave me an open bite, or how my friends love the way I scrunch up my nose like Samantha from Bewitched when I’m thinking out nefarious schemes for pizza. The people behind the desks just see nappy hair, dark skin, big nose. They see the blood-red checkmark squatting next to Are you disabled? and the words “autistic” and “chronically ill” carved into the line demanding I explain what the hell is wrong with me, why aren’t I normal.

And no, apparently they can’t let me cashier from a chair to avoid passing out and no, of course they can’t let me record team meetings on my voice-to-text recorder so I can keep accurate notes and what am I, some kind of baby snowflake Millennial? Of course I can’t wear ear protectors; this is a place of business, not a construction zone or a Nightwish concert.

Always no, no, no. No you can’t have this. No you can’t do this. No I won’t explain this to you, you little freak. Use actual words. Stop taking so long, just spit it out. No you can’t write it down, no you can’t use an app, just talk. Why are you getting so angry, anyway? Geez, you people. That explains why you couldn’t hack the Choosing.

Like they can just tell, by looking at me, every second of every day of my life until now and it’s a short, shitty write-up.

It’s a pandemic. I’m immunocompromised. I’m chronically ill. The world is trying to kill us all but it’s trying to kill me extra fast because I’m just special and lucky, I guess. And if I don’t get another fucking job, there won’t be anything in my stomach to hurl when I push my body too far. Going hungry will be the least of my problems. Where will I live? What about my cats?

Sickly green and purple sparkles dance along the edges of my vision and I trip over air and numb feet. Crap. Too far, too hard. Sit down. Have to sit down. I do, but my brain says, No, not enough. Have to lie down. Can’t sit. Not enough to stop pain, weakness, nausea. Find a flat place. Here. Sidewalk. No trash. Bag on the ground, under my shoulders. Chin tipped up, head back. My heart higher than my brain.

My body is made of television static. Can’t feel my hands, my feet, my face. Everything is dove-gray with bursts of aurora borealis. Tingles and gasping. Just breathe and it’ll pass. Huge gulping breaths. Breathe, pass. Breathe, pass.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

Gray. This will be over pretty soon and then I’ll get up and go home and cuddle my cats and see if my landlord hates me enough to refuse a few more days’ extension.

I close my eyes.

∙ ∙ ∙

The world is white.

It shouldn’t be, though. I was outside, in the rain, on the sidewalk, getting wet, trying not to faint. Everything should be stormy mistral-gray velvet overhead, and rain-slick slate-blue underneath, and the glowy pumpkin orange-gold of streetlights, and the yellow-green of the palo verde trees that line most of the major streets and vomit their gorgeous acid-yellow pollen everywhere.

I sit up on a soft white couch. Do a quick mental check: clothes on, glasses on, no pain, no numbness, and I don’t feel like my stomach wants to claw its way up my throat and spill on the floor. But my feet are cold; no shoes. Where are my shoes? Where’s my stuff?

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

My bag slumps on the floor in front of the couch by my black Vans. Instant relief. I know Vans are shit for arch support but I’ve had this pair for seven years, and I’ll wear them until they’re shreds. I’m glad to see them sitting scuffed and shedding threads where the canvas has scraped open. I don’t even try to stand before I snatch my shoes up and stuff them on my feet, double-knot my laces. The cold, cramping my toes through my socks, starts to fade as reassuring pressure squeezes around my feet. Some of the sensory panic eases. Now I can look around without needing to yank my hair or rock until I fall off the edge of the velvety couch.

The main carpet is voidling-black but the rug by the couch is bright, childlike blue. My wobbly legs drop me onto it when I try to stand up, and I just lie there for a long time, rubbing my cheek against it.

Fur? Velvet? Cookie Monster pelt? Who the hell cares? I can’t get up yet; still too weak from almost fainting. For now my choices are blacking out or the rug.

Everything quiets as the blue smooths over my cheek and I fall into it. My eyes flutter shut and I’m in a world of towering trees as thick as skyscrapers, bark the color of ocean on a night with only stars and St. Elmo’s fire, broad leaves as bright as lapis lazuli and furred with silver. Dried golden leaves underfoot shush so softly it doesn’t even hurt to hear it when I take a step. The light is cool and dusky violet and the air is sweet as winter melon and this place is beautiful, nothing hurts here, I want it, I want it—

My eyes snap open as a voice murmurs with impossible gentleness, “Very good. You found the second world without even having to search. You’re exactly what we’ve been looking for.”

Xe stands there, watching me without trying to catch my eye. Locs down xyr back like ropes of burnished copper sway gently when xe turns, making sure I know xe isn’t trying to get me to make eye contact. It’s a relief strong enough to gut-punch. I look at xyr mouth, wide and full as mine but dark as plum wine. Xe smiles, and it’s as gentle as xyr voice. Somehow, just by looking at the dangling silver chains tipped in crystallized stars glittering from xyr ears and the opal-and-void-shard labret through xyr lower lip, just by admiring the long swish of xyr silver gauchos and the generous curves of xyr belly and breasts and shoulders and arms, hugged by a shimmering midnight rainbow of silk from a world I’ve never seen, I know what xe is. Who xe is.

“Holy shit, this is a House of Choosing.”

A House of Choosing. The places between worlds where Chosen Ones go to find the Doors that lead them to the worlds where they belong. I’m supposed to be too old, too worn out, too tired for this. I am tired. Always tired. I was tired back when I was still young enough to be Chosen, too tired to cry or scream or do anything but curl up like a snail in my blanket-tent at home, and try not to shake apart after all my teachers refused to write me recommendation letters so I could take the first set of Choosing Tests. Before my blood got sick and before my brain learned words like depression and PTSD. Even before all that, I hadn’t been allowed to even try to get here and go through the full set of Tests.

But I’m here now.

Xe grins, a flash of teeth just a little too sharp and suddenly I can’t breathe. It’s not my oxygen-starved blood trying to choke me out again, not the screaming agony of a meltdown barreling down on my brain like a homicidal freight train.

It’s hope.

A pure, impossible pearl of it hanging in front of me like the pomegranate in front of a desperate Persephone, trying to escape every mundane crap thing about her old life. I’ve wanted to escape my birth world most of my life. The shrieking noise and agonizing smears of color and everything too bright and loud and painful. The repetition of not enough, loser, freak. I’ve wanted to just get away as long as I can remember and now I can, I can escape.

But…

But wanting to get away from somewhere is not the same as wanting to go somewhere else. When I was a kid, I didn’t think about that. I just wanted to get away, somewhere I could be accepted and happy. Now, though…

“I don’t want to Choose a world,” I blurt out.

Because I don’t. I don’t know what would happen, if I can be enough for another world. If my story would be tragic and terrible or deadly and delicious or happy and humble. There are too many variables and I’m not a computer, dammit. I hate not knowing what will happen and I don’t want to have to worry about things. I’m so tired of having to worry all the damn time about all the things that I don’t know, an entire world of things.

Maybe this is why people aren’t usually Chosen past twenty or so. We’re all too exhausted and anxiety-riddled? Too afraid of the other shoe readying to drop? Too terrified of everything going to absolute shit right when we start to feel secure?

But I need a job. If I can’t get work, I can’t pay rent. If I Choose another world, maybe I won’t have to pay rent.

Maybe I will have to pay rent because the world I go to is basically just as shit as this one. Or maybe I don’t have to pay rent, but in exchange I’m sacrificed to a Dark Lord and die a painful bloody death and then my cats starve.

Oh crap, my cats.

“My cats—”

“Don’t worry about your cats,” xe says. “They’re here. This is a House of Choosing, after all. They’ve been placed in your rooms, which await your approval. But we’re not looking for another world-walker. We’re looking for a world-maker.”

Um.

“A who-da-what, now?”

Xe sinks gracefully to the floor in a smooth tangle of pillowy brown limbs and billowing sleeves and pant-legs. Then xe does something nobody has ever done with me before — xe lies down on xyr back so that we’re on the same level. Xe folds xyr long-fingered hands together and rests them on the cushion of xyr stomach.

“We need someone who can make the Doors. Who can find the seeds of different worlds and bring them blooming to life, then carve the Door that leads there. You can do it. You felt a world just now, when you touched the rug.”

I study xem; xe isn’t looking at me, thank everything holy, but the arched ivory ceiling overhead. Xyr eyes have impossibly long fringes of black lashes like onyx lace that curl lightly against xyr brown cheek, and swirls of color like fire and twilight glow across xyr eyelids. I can almost see a place there, with a huge dusty-indigo sun perpetually tethered just at the horizon, and a colossal ringed planet the vivid orange-purple of nectarines hanging in a sky that gradates between the color of red clay and the soft gold of pollen, and strange obsidian butterflies the size of hawks and their wings — glinting with flecks of amethyst, and lilies sparking with celadon light against golden earth—

“That’s Hesperide,” xe says without looking at me. I blink and lose the ghost-images of the butterflies. “The world you just saw in my makeup. That’s my medium — makeup, thread, fabric. Fashion and everything it entails. Yours is something else, though, I think.”

“I don’t…” I have to say this carefully, but wording is hard. “I don’t know what you mean. My medium. Seeing worlds.” I don’t want to screw this up, but what would be worse is saying I know what I’m doing and then dying in a fiery explosion when I fuck up and bomb.

“You know about Doors, of course.”

I shrug. Everyone knows about Doors, so why ask me? Is this a trick? Another test? I study xem, all shadow and silk and twilight embers.

“I tried to take the initial Choosing tests in elementary school.” I don’t like saying it. The words crunch in my teeth like broken glass.

Only the initial tests cost money – a lot of money. Anyone can take them at any liminal location: libraries, gas stations, schools, military recruitment centers, beaches, art studios, cemetery gates, but payment is required if a kid doesn’t feel like waiting for a House of Choosing to just snatch them off the street and wants to try testing instead. The government will jam its sticky fingers in anything and everything just to make a buck and screw with people.

Passing the tests is a different matter. Only the Chosen can pass the tests that bring someone to a House of Choosing, and nobody but people who dwell in the Houses knows how all that works.

“And?”

I narrow my eyes. “My teachers wouldn’t write me the recommendation letters, and we couldn’t afford the fees without them.”

That was before the very recent reforms of the last few years, which are trying to make being Chosen easier on anyone who isn’t upper-middle class, white, and abled. Not because Congress actually gives a shit about the marginalized, but because conservatives realized they don’t actually want their little darlings gallivanting off to play hero in other dimensions. If Junior’s busy slaying dragons and winning princexes and learning who they really are without Mother and Father glaring over their shoulder and stuffing them into tiny boxes, who’ll take over the family megacorp? Think of the stock market.

Xe nods and says, “Ah. I thought so. Well, where do you think the worlds come from? Someone makes them, just as someone made our world, our universe, once.”

“And people just make worlds?” I’d never heard of that, but the worlds had to come from somewhere…

“Well,” xe says, “you’ll have to learn how, of course. How to make and finish the making. Most world-makers have a talent, but don’t know how to harness it fully. Monet didn’t just slap his hand in a bucket of finger-paint and invent impressionism.”

I think of the cool slime of finger-painting, the thick pressure of it under my fingernails like dirt and the itch of it drying as rust-brown as old blood in the creases of my fingers, and have to swallow twice to keep from throwing up. If I have to stick my bare hand into pools of paint, there’s no way in hell I can do this.

“Your medium probably isn’t paint, though,” xe continues, “judging from the look on your face. What do you like to do?”

I stare at xem. Xe still doesn’t look at me, which is the only reason I can swallow enough to ask, “Why do you care?”

“This is a job interview.”

Oh. Oh.

Holy shit.

“Since I’m the one interviewing you, I need to figure out what, uh … department you’d be best in. What accommodations you need. You’re autistic, aren’t you?” When I nod, xe adds, “Sensory input is an entirely different world to you, isn’t it? A thousand worlds. Sometimes they’re paradise, and other times they’re Hell. Aren’t they?”

I nod, surprised. Most allistic people don’t understand this. Belatedly, I remember to push my eyebrows up to show my surprise where xe can see it.

“Here’s the job: you find your medium, and you find your worlds, and you create the Doors you want to make. Just because you find a world doesn’t mean you have to open the way to it. And you create wonders and hope and stories for the world-walkers.”

Make what I want to make, the way I want to make it … for other people.

“What if I end up finding a world I want to go to? What if I decide I want to be a world-walker?” Can I even do that? If I’m cracking open all these worlds, I could absolutely find one that doesn’t scrape sensory claws across my gray matter or trigger panic-spiders in my skull, so…

Xe shrugs. “Then we fill out the paperwork and you do that. If there’s a world that’s perfect for you, or a dozen worlds you want to visit, you can. You can even continue to make Doors from your new world if you want. That would be HR’s problem, though.”

Huh. “How do I get paid?”

“If you choose to live outside of the House and need currency, we’ll provide a living wage that allows you to exist comfortably, whatever that is depending on what place on what world you decide to settle. It’s small enough thanks for an invaluable service.

“If you choose to live in the House, we provide room, board, work materials, and a stipend for any fun things you might want. We also barter information and skills for goods between ourselves if there’s something one of us wants. For example, Ms. Alice and Ms. Gertrude are excellent bakers and Mr. W in the penthouse suite makes wonderful clothing. You might want to see if they have anything you’d like to try … should you take the job.”

I turn my face more fully into the rug. The plush blueness caresses my cheek, a sapphire embrace that pushes away some of the biting confusion and lets me think. Wages, a place to live, my cats, food, even clothes.

“What about insurance?” I mumble.

“You mean medical, dental, that sort of thing?” Xe asks. I nod, then remember xe isn’t looking at me, but before I have to figure out how to verbalize something, xe says, “We provide insurance. When something is needed, we simply open a Door to a world with standardized universal healthcare and a charming lack of bigotry. They do exist, though they’re rare.”

Huh.

“What if I want to leave?”

“You mean quit? You’d have to put it in writing and give us a month’s notice, like any decent place. Similarly, we have to give you a month’s notice before termination.”

“Do I have to talk to people?” I can talk to people on good days, usually. But bad days, when I’m overstimmed and feel like every word is a chunk of granite bashing against my skull, I can’t handle conversation, or words, or noises.

Xe shrugs. “Only if you want to. We do need status updates every two weeks on worlds discovered and approximate number of Doors made, but you can submit those in writing or via recording or whatever way works best for you. We try to keep track of the different worlds, their names, what they’re like. Mx. Kathryn and Ms. Susanna in the Archives are in charge of that, you would answer to them. They have a very efficient catalogue system, and they believe in giving fair value for a job well-done.”

Makes sense. But…

I stroke the silky carpet fibers and chew my lower lip. My toes curl in my shoes, scrunching and unscrunching against the comforting press of worn canvas as I fight to swallow noises. I didn’t even know Doors got made, much less made by regular people. I didn’t know someone who isn’t destined to swing a sword through an Army of Evil Undead or fall down a Rabbit Hole could come to a House of Choosing. I didn’t know people could get plucked off the street and brought to a House at my age.

There’s a metric crap-ton I didn’t know before this … job interview, and a metric crap-ton I still don’t know. Like how to even do what xe is asking me to do. There’s a reason I don’t draw or whittle or embroider anymore, besides being broke; I’ve got jacked up hands that shake at all the worst times. How am I supposed to make an interdimensional portal?

But … everything has been so impossibly good, so accommodating in a way I’d never have imagined before this. So maybe…

If you don’t disclose, you can’t ask for accommodation…

My knuckles pop like Rice Krispy cereal in milk when I dig my fingers hard into the plush sapphire under me and I manage to gasp out, all in a rush, “What if I can’t figure out how to make a Door?”

Xe smiles. “I’m glad you asked. We offer paid training, and there are a thousand and one ways to make a Door. Would you like to try now, to see if you can figure out a way that works best for you?”

I shove my face into the thick fur of the rug to help soothe the sudden spike of my panic, the echoes of can’t do it, can’t do it, can’t do it.

“Okay.” It’s muffled, but xe understands.

“Look up at the ceiling.”

I turn my head enough that if I roll my eyes, I can see the white vault overhead. It’s blank, an empty expanse. It feels like it shouldn’t be, but I’m not sure why. It’s just annoying to me. Like a piece of grit stuck to the bottom of my sock.

“Now, try to find the place you saw before. The place you felt in the rug you’re lying on. Worlds are found in the smallest sensory details. The crack of ice in water, the flicker of silver-painted lashes, the waving tendrils of an anemone. Try to remember what you were feeling before.”

What I was feeling before? It’s not hard. I can still feel the rug under me. It’s still stroking cobalt fronds over my skin in tickling whispers. When I close my eyes I can see the silver-furred leaves and the giant skyscraper trunks, the dusky light as thick as syrup and the malachite sky spangled by aquamarine and indigo stars. The air tastes sweet and crisp and cool, I want to drink it, and the world is so quiet. There’s only the soft sigh of the wind, hollow and fluting and distant.

“Cast it onto the canvas.”

I shouldn’t know what that means. It doesn’t make sense, there is no canvas. But since I’m focusing on the way the leaves feel against my cheek, the glass-slick smoothness of the bark under my fingertips, I don’t even think about it, I just do it so xe will stop talking and let me focus on the perfume of the golden buds just beginning to crack open on one of the boughs. I flick out my hand like I’m tossing something into the garbage.

“Do it again.”

I lean against the smooth tree and feel the faint, fuzzy crackle like television static against my skin, like snuggling a balloon. I used to do that, I remember vaguely. When I was little, before my parents made me stop. I wanted to enjoy the light popping fuzz of it. I flick a hand again, but I’m focused on that velvety buzz and tingle.

“A good beginning, especially for a first attempt,” xe says.

My eyes snap open. The forest is gone. I’m back in the white room with the black floor and the blue rug and I can see, hovering a few inches off the ground against the alabaster backdrop of the ceiling, a ghostly image of a Door. Dark, glossy wood like the ocean on a moonless night, bound and chased in silver, carved with towering trees and many-petaled flowers. What in the absolute hell…?

“It’ll need to be firmed up before it can be opened, but I was right. You’re a world-maker. The sheer force behind your enjoyment of the world you find or create, your need to experience parts of it, allows you to make the Door.”

I don’t say anything. I just stare at the phantom Door. In it, I can see the trees, smell those golden flowers just beginning to open, taste the evening air. It’s beautiful, and…

And I did that. I made that. Me. And it didn’t even hurt.

“For me, it’s when I do makeup. Once I start painting my own face, I find a place in the colors, beyond the edges of the world,” xe says. “And I want to see more of it, touch all of it. So I do. And while I paint it on my face in swirls of powder and cream, I paint the Door, too.”

I smooth my fingers over the silky tufts of blue. The seed of an entire, brand new world, and I opened the way to it.

“For some of us, it’s color. For some, it’s food, or perfumes, or flowers, or music. We see the world in a grain of sand, a tuft of swan’s down, a blade of grass. I think for you … I think it can be anything you want, as long as it thrills your senses.”

I’ve gotten lost in sensation before. For minutes, even hours sometimes. I’ve lost hours just watching a fire dance, or feeling hot water rolling in glorious spills down my back in the shower, or listening to rain tinkling like silver chimes against the windows, or flapping my hands through mountains of snow-white sweet-scented foaming soap, or pressing my nose into the velvet petals of a rose in full scarlet bloom. I’ve found worlds in there before, places of safety and beauty and rest.

Places of rest. I am so tired all the time, and so sick of having to worry. I want to escape, to sink into a place of safety and beauty and rest. I want to give that to other people and help them escape, too.

I want to rest, and to create, and to be happy.

I look at xem.

“When can I start?”

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT LA KNIGHT

LA Knight is a biracial Black, queer, disabled, chronically ill, autistic author of fantasy and sci-fi. She’s a huge fan of portal fantasy, mythology, fairy tale & lit retellings, anime, and Broadway. This is their first work that openly and defiantly celebrates autistic joy, and the beauty of and beauty in autistic stimming. She is active on Twitter at @LA_Knight89, and their previous work has appeared in Combat Magazine, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Young Adult Reader, Tomorrow’s Cthulhu, and New Legends of Fantasy: Caster*Castle*Creature. She lives with her husband, two life-partners, and their cats in the Sonoran Desert.

MEDITATIONS ON SUN-RA’S BASSIM

By Yah Yah Scholfield // 4083 words

Adut,

Greetings from a planet called Ulysses! I’m writing you from a beach, purple sand between my toes and three red suns spread out like ellipses in the sky. Even with light years separating us, I can imagine your scowling face, your furrowed brow, as you open this letter, half-relieved, mostly annoyed with me for taking so long to write back. Apologies, sister-dear, I just haven’t had the time.

Get it? No, well, here, I’ll explain. The joke is that by being way, way out in space, away from human constructs such as days, hours, minutes, and seconds, there’s both no excuse and every excuse for me to be late in our little correspondence. If I say, “Oh, Dutty, there’s just no time!”, you can say, without missing a beat, “There’s no such thing as time where you’re going.” Cue rimshot, cue raucous laughter, take a bow, and curtains down.

Sorry, sorry, I’ll stop stalling. Shall I tell you about Ulysses? It’s warm like Antigua — a byproduct of three suns, I’m sure — and the beaches are a lot like the beaches at home, save for the absence of tourists and an overabundance of little, translucent crab-like creatures the locals have advised us to avoid. Ulysses is populated, some alien natives and some transports from Terra Two, but it’s missing that vacation-island feel. My captain-cum-professor tells me this planet is one of Neo-Colony’s biggest failures. They meant for it to be a retreat, pleasure cruise and party planet, but the natives couldn’t be pushed and the transplants refused to go home, so now it’s just what it is, another rock in a tier-three galaxy. Think Martinique without the French, St. Maarten without the Dutch, all green and hot and provincial.

I don’t blame folks for not wanting to leave. If I could, I’d stay here forever, going crisp beneath Data, Dia, and Dora (the suns have names! How sweet!) and growing fat on all the sublime varieties of fish and fruit Ulysses has to offer. But alas, alack! Today’s my final day of freedom before I go on my first solo mission. I’m sort of extremely scared about being out there on my own, but then I remember what everyone’s been telling me since I enrolled in Terra Two’s Space Force, what you’ve told me since I was just a snot-nosed kid — I’ve got a mind like a trap, and nobody else’s eyes see the universe like I see it.

Celestial cartography is a very fancy way of describing what I do. Star mapping is a better fit, if not a little bland, but you know I’ve never been one for grand titles. That was always more your game, trophies and ribbons and awards. Not that I’m jealous. Oh, no, never sissy-darling! You have your things and I have mine. Keep your Terran accolades, and I’ll keep my star stuff. It’ll last longer in the end. What’s the quote again, about all man-made things crumbling, returning to dust? In fifty years, we’ll be looking at maps of the heavens; in fifty years, your little models will be obsolete.

I kid, I kid … mostly. You’ll forgive me for being snippy. It’s only that in your last letter, you seemed less than enthused about me going on this trip. What’s the deal, big sis? I thought you were over the moon (ha.) about me doing this. Is the impenetrable Dutty nervous of being upstaged? Is she scared of being outdone by her baby sister? And please, don’t serve me the bull that you’re concerned for my safety. You know as well as I do that if you could throw me out into the cold of space without even a blanket to keep me warm, you’d do it in a heartbeat. You’d say something about independence, building a backbone.

This trip’s sure to give me some backbone. Me out in the vastness of space, looking at the stars and trying to figure out where they go. No one to tell me to pick my dirty clothes off the floor, no one to sneer at me about posture as I make my notes. And no one, I guess, to laugh at my corny jokes, make me eat when I forget. There’ll be decent connectivity out there, so when I’m really missing your dulcet tones telling me off, I can find some Terran sitcom and attach myself to any one of the snide older sisters.

Look what talking to you has done; made me nostalgic for times I never knew, made me miss places I haven’t left.

Just a few hours before we leave this place. I’ll leave you alone now — sister or no, I don’t want to waste my last precious moments of freedom bent over a letter like one of those dreary Terran authors you’re so fond of. Please find enclosed a peace offering, a sachet of Ulyssesian chocolates. They’re made of beetles, and I smile to myself thinking of you spitting that last square daintily into a napkin. You can admit it’s tasty, Adut. Nobody’s watching but me.

With love (and a good deal of mischief),

Constance

///

Adut,

Yes, yes, it’s been too long, hugs and kisses and all of that happy stuff. I’ve finally got your letters, thank God. There were three in total waiting for me at the Sally Ride Post Station, along with several care packages. Mea culpa, mea culpa, though a little of that culpa should be placed on space travel. I needn’t tell you how far the SRPS is from Ulysses — my four Terran years of silence should speak for themselves.

I’ve read the letters, of course. Congrats on the new kid; I hope to see lots and lots of pictures of them when I get home. I wouldn’t mind a picture or two now, just to have. An outdated photograph of your latest nibling is better than no photograph. I’m not sure what advice to give you about the city-planning. I see things from too far away to make much sense of all the legislature and restrictions you deal with. I’m better suited for out here where things just are. There are no rules about where this should go, or that, what belongs here or there. The universe decides when it dies and rebirths itself over and over. Just yesterday I saw a supernova’s blast creates hundreds of thousands of new stars. Once there was nothing, then there was everything.

Thanks, by the way, for the care packages. You’ve sent more soup and baked goods than I know what to do with, and maybe even too much for a five-year expedition. You’ve even included some of Mommy’s recipes, which was sweet, but I fear I won’t be able to do much cooking, my kitchen space being very, very small.

Ah, but you don’t know what my ship is like! I’m sending pictures now, though you’ll probably get them in a few months at the pace I’m going.

Caption of Photograph One: My bedroom. Excuse the mess, but not everyone can be as anal as you. There’s my bed, my couch, my desk-slash-dining table. The mirror gives me Terra news and weather (when the signal’s good), a calendar, and a day-to-day planner.

Caption of Photograph Two: The infamous kitchen … Note the tiny fridge, the hot plate, the boxes upon boxes of supplies I’ve dragged up from storage. We’ve had bedrooms bigger than this, Dutty. Do you remember the one in New Florida? It was barely a closet, but Mom and Dad stuffed us in there with a bunkbed, a lamp and a rug. I was seven and you were eleven. I hated sleeping alone so I’d crawl up to your bunk and wrap myself around you. It was cute until it wasn’t. Just one time fighting, one time with you pushing me a little too hard and me breaking my arm … I learned to sleep by myself.

Caption of Photograph Three: And here we are, at last, the cabin! Here’s where I do the bulk of my work, charting and discovering. It’s the neatest room on the ship, I think. I don’t know what it is, Dutty, but everything can be in disarray but this. This is my everything, the charts and maps, the miles and miles of stars and the constellations that connect them. Here’s Andromeda, here’s the Milky Way, here’s our very own Lazy Eye galaxy blinking and swirling slowly. I’ve covered the ceiling with those tacky glow-in-the-dark stars Mommy used to get me from the dollar store. At night, when I’m too full of energy to sleep, I draw up maps under a mobile of supernovae and gas giants.

One day, when I come home and things are different, I’ll show you these places up close, and you can show me all the cities you’ve planned, the streets and public parks, and we’ll be even again, two little girls, mapping out our worlds as we know them.

Late but still lovingly,

Constance

///

My dearest, darlingest sister,

Do you think Mom and Dad ever regretted leaving Terra Prime for Terra Two? It must’ve been scary, those final few years before it all collapsed, but I wonder sometimes if they didn’t miss it. You think I don’t remember our time on Terra Prime, but I do. I remember it being gray and smoggy, the weather always too hot or too cold. Everyday scientists appeared on the news, flushed and full of barely suppressed panic, saying it’s too late, it’s too late, everything is dying. There were hardly any trees or flowers in the last two years, and by the time Mom and Dad scraped up enough money to buy us tickets to Terra Two, the moon was out of whack and the sun was too close for comfort. Hurricanes, tornadoes, flood and fires — if the smog didn’t kill us, surely nature itself would.

I’m only asking you because they’re gone, and you’re all I have left. If they were still alive, I’d go directly to them, hold their hands and ask them what life was like when they were young. Was it green? Was it lush? Is it true that there were nights so clear you could see the galaxies with your naked eye? But, you’re all I’ve got, so answer me this, Adut — how do you miss something you’ve never had?

Every few days I land on a planet and I wonder if it’s anything like our parents’ first home. I’ve seen deserts full of life and color, jewel-toned oceans, places that are just rock and no air, and places that are green and bright and bubbling with water. The uninhabited places are just as lovely as the inhabited ones. There are times when I get so captivated with the things on the ground that I forget to look up.

Is that what it’s like for you? Do you figure that down there is just so wonderful, so lovely, that you can’t lift your head? I can see how. Last week I came to a place where the people were black and brown, their eyes and mouths like our own. My ears rang with the common tongue and native tongue mixed. It felt like Terra Prime, Mommy speaking Spanish and Daddy speaking Patois, the two of us speaking our homemade creole, English and our parents’ languages; blending until it was all just noise. Familiar noise, but still just sound.

I stayed on that planet longer than I should’ve. I’m supposed to give a day, maybe two, to a place, then move on, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. The houses of thatch and straw, the language, the people … how could I leave? It’s what I remembered of home; what I imagined home was like for our parents.

Needless to say, I miss them. I was only thirteen when they died, you just seventeen. We had no one else on Terra Two — at least, no one we could get to. The migration from one Earth to another made a new diaspora, spreading us this way and that. Without any relatives to take us in, you took it upon yourself to raise me. Must’ve been hard, raising me and grieving and still trying to make something of yourself. Enough time has passed for me to admit I was a little bit resentful of you. I didn’t want you to be my mother; I wanted you to be my sister, the girl who braided my hair and teased me about my crushes, who didn’t care that I didn’t finish my homework.

But you couldn’t afford to be my friend any more. We were alone in the world, and you drilled it into me that if I was to survive, I’d have to work, work, work. You wanted me to be practical, to learn a trade so I could always have money in my pocket. Me, though, I’ve never been satisfied with surviving. I wanted to live, Adut, and if I couldn’t live on Terra Two, I’d thrive among the stars. The day I left for the Space Force was the day I stepped out of you, stepped away. Once, you told me that if I wanted to make it in this world, I had to be steel, cold and calculating, straight lines with no deviations. But look at me, Adut. I’m made of stardust, and somehow, I’m still living.

Kind of your sister, kind of your daughter,

Constance

P.S. The strings that have held us together all these years are being pulled taut. Even now, I can’t tell if the strings are of Daddy’s bass or a garotte wrapped around my neck.

///

Dear Adut,

Was it bass that Daddy played or the cello? The difference between them is a bow. I just need to remember what he held when he played us Sun-Ra, a curved bow or the slender neck of a standup bass.

Are you getting my letters? It’s hard to tell nowadays, the space between us growing each day and the post stations becoming rarer. Every once in a while, I’ll get something through my ComPad, a photograph or a little note, but I’m never sure when it’s from. Time is getting strange. Today a letter from you wishing me a happy birthday, yesterday a series of pictures of my nephew from seven years ago.

How old is he now? Ten, eleven? Do you do for him what Mom and Dad did for us? What you did for me? Do you tuck him in at night and kiss his forehead, smooth your hand over his wooly hair? Tell me, Adut. Tell me that when he’s afraid of the dark, you turn on a projection of the stars, that you color his walls and ceiling with galaxies. Tell me you bring out Daddy’s old record player and play him Sun-Ra’s Bassism, that he knows of Alice Coltrane, and Earth, Wind and Fire. Tell me you hold him close to you as Maurice White sings the final notes of Fantasy, that you let him touch the metal of the record player so he can feel the vibrations.

You did that for me, once upon a time. I was too big to be cradled, but you hummed Bassism in my ear, held my face and called me your kid. For a moment, I forgave you for not being Mommy.

Adut, I’m lost. It’s strange to admit it, me being a literal mapmaker, but I have no clue where I am. The last post station was four, three light years back. I crossed some darkness a while ago that might’ve been a black hole or a wormhole, I don’t know. I don’t know, and that’s terrifying. I, who know so much about the universe, so much about the stars and the galaxies, do not know where I am, or where I’m going.

Outside, there’s nothing familiar. I’ve stumbled into a new galaxy, the spiral tight and full of asteroids, strange planets. I’m scared, but I’m trying to think of your voice, of you vocalizing along to Sun-Ra, of you singing Earth, Wind and Fire to try to get me to breathe, to smile. There’s light up above, blue and purple and undulating. I’m going to go to it, and when I get through, when I get home, I’ll tell you all about the journey there and back.

Pinky promise,

Constance

///

Adut,

Do you remember the winter we got snowed in? We were on our way home I think, you driving Dad’s busted up hooptie and me moping in the passenger seat. A freak snowstorm trapped us in the car, and snow packed us in on all sides. At first, we were warm, our almost-full tank of gas keeping us from freezing. You told me stories, you sang me songs. You promised me it was going to be alright, that all we had to do was sit tight and wait for help.

But then the gas was gone and the temperature had dropped even lower. The windows were frosted over; each breath hovered over our heads, white clouds. You moved us to the backseat and wrapped your arms around me, tucking my head under your chin and rubbing my shoulders. I couldn’t feel my fingers, my toes, but I felt your voice, the only warm thing in the car. You sang about Terra Prime, about love and sunshine, about white sands and Black skin, money and hope.

If you were afraid, you didn’t show it to me. You kept your voice level, kept your hands sure, even as they lost feeling. Still, you were just barely an adult. You must have feared, must have wanted Mommy to be there with us, to take over. But there was no more Mommy, no more Daddy, just Adut and Constance slowly freezing.

I remember being exhausted, and I remember you not letting me sleep. You pinched me, slapped me, yelled at me whenever I started to close my eyes. At the time, I hated you. What sort of substitute mother were you, hitting me like that? I fought you, kicked and pinched back, but you didn’t relent. Stay awake, you said. Don’t you dare close your eyes.

“If you go to sleep,” you said, shivering, teeth chattering audibly. “If you go to sleep, I’ll kill you. Understand me?”

Something about the coolness in your eyes, the way you gripped onto me so tight … If you told me to stay awake until the end of time, I would’ve done it, red-eyed and yawning.

In the end, we were saved by a rescue team on the lookout for people frozen in on the street. You cried when they broke the window, your tears little icicles hanging from your lashes. The rescue team took me from the car first, blue-lipped and with a blackened thumb. You wouldn’t let me go, even as the team explained that I needed to be warmed up as fast as possible, even as you were being helped from the car. Your stiff fingers dug into my flesh and left half-moon indentations.

You kept saying, Not Constance. Don’t take my Constance.

Your Constance — am I your Constance still, lost and afraid and desperately wanting to be back on Terra Two, back to regular? This new galaxy I’ve fallen into reminds me of the star maps of the Milky Way, though smaller and not so closely knit. Jupiter wearing Saturn’s rings like halos, and Saturn’s hexagon is looking more like sharp, concentric squares. Mars is blue, strangely enough, with big purple bruises all over it, like someone pressed their thumb into it over and over. Venus, Earth’s massive and evil twin, is shockingly pink, swirling with gemstone storms. Pluto is the size of Uranus, Makemake dwarfs Jupiter, and Neptune is barren, moonless and alone. I’ve yet to find Earth. I wonder if I’ll even recognize it, if it’ll be anything like Terra Prime.

Like I said, when I know and when I see you again, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you about Ursa Major and Minor, about the North Star, and Sirius. In turn, to make it fair, you’ll tell me about anything you want, and I’ll listen.

It’s been ages since I left, and ages since I knew where I was going. I’ve stopped measuring the space between us in years and in light years. It’s been too long. I love you.

Yours,

Constance

///

To my dearest Adut,

If you’re reading this letter, it means two things — interdimensional travel is possible, and the intergalactic postal system is surprisingly adept at handling letters that warp time and space.

Greetings from Earth! I won’t call it Terra Prime because no one calls it that nowadays. It’s just Earth, and it’s green and lush. There are trees that touch the heavens, air fresh and sweet, and water so cool, so refreshing, you’d think it was poured straight from Aquarius’s jug. There are storms here, and there are disasters, but we do not fear them. They are just the Earth shifting, the world breathing out and adjusting in its place. We are at peace. We are living.

Who is we? Well, my dear sister, we is you and me. We is us; Adut and Constance. I admit, I don’t know how it’s possible. Some rippling in time, a funny trick of a different dimension. There’s a you on this planet, but there’s no me. From the way Earth Adut talks about me, I think I’ve been gone for ages and ages. She thought I was dead, and I felt like a ghost standing on her front step, trying to make sense of her features, like yours but different somehow. The minute she saw me, she broke down in tears and took me into her arms. She called me her Constance; I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was somebody else’s Constance, a version of her baby sister with different genes, different experiences. Though our faces were the same, I was not hers. Still, I’ve missed you and your smell and the way you smile to fight against crying, so I put my head on her chest and wept.

We get along just fine, me and Earth Constance. She makes me dinner (“You’re too skinny! Jesus, did you even eat up there?!”) and plays me Sun-Ra on Daddy’s record player. She reminds me of memories I’ve never had, and I smile and nod like I do. I don’t want to break her heart, and as much as I wish it was my Adut who hums Space is the Place in my ear, I will be this Adut’s Constance if it means I can have my sister.

By the time you read this letter, I will be old and you will still be young. I will take my final breath while my nephew takes his first. By the time you read this letter, I’ll be young and you’ll be ancient. You’ll write letters daily, never knowing if I receive them or not. I do receive them, you should know. In the kitchen of this Constance’s house, I prepare Mom’s recipes, and I keep framed pictures of my nephew (his name is Jupiter here; is it the same where you are?) in my bedroom.

I’ve been thinking, Adut. Thinking about timelines, about all of the realities where we left Terra Prime and suffered for it; of all the realities where we stayed and thrived. In every single timeline, we are never changed. I am always your sister and your daughter; you are always my sister and my mother. You take my hand in yours, and in billions of dimensions, I hold it fast and squeeze it hard.

Don’t cry, and don’t say you aren’t crying because I know you. You’re sniffling now, tetchily wiping the tears from your cheeks, kissing your teeth like some fed-up auntie. Sober up, darling, there’s no time to waste. Get it? No time? Fine, I’ll explain the joke. You’ve got all the time in the world, in this world and the next, Adut. Ages and ages, decades and centuries and millenniums. In time, maybe tomorrow, maybe when Terra Two dies, maybe when the three stars over Ulysses finally expand and collapse into a billion new births — in time, I will walk up the path to your house, knock on your door, and I’ll say, “I know, I know, it’s been too long.”

Until then,

Constance

///

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT YAH YAH SCHOLFIELD

Yah Yah is a twenty year old Black girl from Atlanta, Georgia. Despite her ADHD and severe social anxiety, she got her GED in 2018 and started writing a short story collection with one of her best friends. She lives in Atlanta with her mom, dad and little brother, as well as her two cats, Chihiro and Sophie.

LUNGS

By Lily Watson // 2585 words

A stage made of cherry wood, illuminated by the skylight above it, open to invite the god to look inside. Hundreds of empty theater seats, folded up without the weight of a body. Birds in sherbet shades chirping in the rafters, too high up for the cleaners to shoo them away, in nests made of errant strands of children’s hair. They’re nourished by the music, ready to join in.

First violins, second violins, violas, cellos, a diminutive but mighty bass section. Two timpani, a triangle, a snare drum, three tambourines, the longest xylophone ever made, all without players until tomorrow night, when percussion joins strings.

Two children per stand, crammed into a space designed to fit a third as many players. Knees forced together, touching the knees of the stand partner. For violins, violas, and cellos, bows are placed on the lap behind the instrument, angled so that no bone-crafted tips are poking another orchestra member. Feet flat on the floor or crossed at the ankle. Backs painfully straight, made more so by the lateness of the conductor.

Some bite their nails, tap their toes on the polished floors, clench and unclench their fingers as they stare at the black music folders on each stand. The contents taunt them, inches away but – according to a letter written in the smallest print possible – they must not open them until the conductor arrives. Something about the “rawness of the music” being the most important element of calling. No one can imagine what kind of a god would be more attracted to out-of-tune, off-tempo music.

Last night, in the bunks, someone spread a rumor they were calling the God of Unlistenable Music. Someone else said they might be calling the God of Ass, which got many more laughs.

They arrive forty minutes behind schedule, ring of a hundred keys slapping against their leg as they sprint up the steps in a flurry of magenta teacher’s robes, left open to reveal striped pajamas. Tucked under their armpit is a black leather folder, stuffed to the brim with sheet music on thick paper.

“We’re making lungs today, people!” the conductor shouts, startling everyone by hopping up onto the rostrum with both feet and slamming the binder on a music stand tilted all the way back. “What are those assholes doing next door? Making a heart with drums. Pathetic.”

The orchestra giggles, the tension easing. It’s made up of one hundred and fifty eighth-graders arrived from every corner of the country by boat, airship, portal – or, for some unlucky cellists, horse – who have spent the last five years training for this very moment on this very stage. More, if they want a coveted spot in the first three rows, and have the coins for a private tutor. The work is nothing in the face of a chance to bring a god to life.

A nice one, they were told.

They wonder why that matters.

“It’s the most cliché thing I’ve ever heard of. Banging on drums all day without purpose, without spirit, coming out of the room exhausted, wondering why they don’t feel the tell-tale pressure of a new heart beginning.

“But can I tell you all a secret?” The conductor leans in with a tilt of their head. They wait, and so does the orchestra. “I don’t speak in rhetorical questions, children! Can I or can I not tell you a secret!?”

“Yes!”

“I heard that yes from thirty-seven of you. I counted. I need to hear a yes from one hundred and fifty of you. From each and every one of you.”

“Yes!”

“I counted one hundred and thirty-nine! The shyest of the children, now’s your time to rise! Now’s the time to look back on a moment when you spoke up, when you did something incredible with your voice. This isn’t a chance you’ll get often.”

Children from every section are sure they’re singling them out specifically, looking right into their eyes. Kids like the first bassist Tierney were encouraged by their conservative families not to speak unless spoken to. The violinist Dima was told that if they play the notes wrong, their children will be murdered by the god they’re trying to call. But all the children, no matter where they’re from, were told at the start of their musical education to obey the conductor, lest they anger the god in their inexperience.

“Now, can I tell you a secret?”

“Yes!” Everyone shouts, more than ten people screaming. The ones that struggled to talk collapse in their chairs, already spent though the day has barely begun. The conductor raises their arms in delight, palms to the ceiling.

“Fabulous! All right, children. First, we tune.” The concertmaster – first chair violinist – stands, tucking her violin under her chin. She plays an A, long and loud, the only sound in the theater. The second chair violinist slouches deep in her chair when her stand partner rises. This was meant to be her moment, with all the money spent on her private lessons. If only her tutor could see her now, turning pages for her stand partner like a servant. She’d never live it down.

When she sits down, she maintains the note. The orchestra joins in, pitching their instruments to hers. A thousand pitches at once, rising and falling as they try to land on the right one. After a few minutes, silence once more.

“Now the piece: Hammer and Throat,” says the conductor. Papers rustling over metal, so soft when done by one person, but so loud when done by hundreds at once.

“We’re starting with the adagietto, 7/11 time. A tricky one, don’t think I’m not aware. You think a god is going to enter this building in 4/4?”

More silence. The conductor’s raised brow makes them respond.

“No!”

“Ah!” The conductor shouts. “Trick question! Of course a god will come out for 4/4. You don’t need to be interesting to call a god. You don’t need to be clever. If anything, they’re less likely to come out for something too complex. And I know what you’re thinking: why are we playing a piece in such a complicated time signature if the god doesn’t even like it? The answer is you must first play music for yourself, so you can grow and learn as musicians. If you focus only on pleasing a god and never yourself, they can turn you inside out.

“That said, this piece really is in 7/11. It goes ONE two three fourONEtwothree four ONE two threefour one. Everyone got it?” Even the prodigy violinists in the first few rows – who spend hours each morning running through all forty-eight scales, who spend more money on their instruments than most people do on their homes, who boast about how little free time they have with how much they practice – look frightened. The bass players, accustomed to the six or so notes per sheet their instruments are usually allotted, balk at papers covered in double-stopped sixteenth notes.

“Yes!” they shout in unison.

The conductor shakes their head in disappointment. “No, you don’t. I can see it in your eyes. But we’ll start anyway. Sloooooooowly.”

Oh the lungs

Why start there?

And so they begin. They hit each other with their bows every down beat. The pages are impossible to turn by the inside player because of the space, and the heat. A few worry about their instruments warping in the humidity. Everyone is drenched, no one more than the conductor.

Their lives may as well be on the line for how fast their hearts beat. Sweat drips into eyes, a string snaps, someone scrambles as they drop their bow on the ground with how much their hands are shaking. A cloud moves over the sun, briefly blocking the light from the skylight, as if this god also controls the weather.

It’s no small thing, calling a god. They’ve been told this since they were given their first violins. But it’s impossible to truly understand the phrase until they’re on the stage.

What

Who are you

Who are those children

Don’t start with the lungs, they’re so painful

“Calling makes heat!” The conductor shouts over the music. “Don’t panic! This is a good sign! We’re getting closer.”

Who knows how that’s possible, since they sound awful? They’re so out of tune they may as well not have tuned in the beginning, back to when they would play the national anthem at school concerts, no one playing the same note at the same time. They’re in third grade again, just learning to hold their bow.

The conductor drops their hands to the stand in front of them. The children realize this at different rates, the sound of the butchered music coming to a stop in batches.

You children have never felt the divine absence of a lungless chest!

I’m begging

“Do you feel that, students?” The conductor, the children are all realizing, is manic in a major way. “Concertmaster,” the conductor says, turning to the first chair first violinist. “How do you feel?”

“Nervous,” says the concertmaster.

“Do you feel that you’re playing your best?”

“This is the worst I’ve played in a very long time. I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she says through clenched teeth.

“Great! Marvelous! Fantastic! That means everyone else feels the same thing. That means you’re playing like the very worst of the violins. Last chair second violin, you are determining the fate of the entire violin section, with your lack of practice and your overdue homework on your music stand.”

A few more giggles as they watch the last chair second violin look up in a panic. The book they’re reading drops to the floor with a slap.

“Last chair second violin, I don’t know how you got past the audition stage, but I’m glad you did. Everyone is at the mercy of the worst player in the orchestra. We must all lower ourselves to match that level. Again! Presto!”

I despise this song

My ex used to play me this song

Who sent you children to punish me

They all raise their arms once again, looking directly at the basses, who have the first notes in the piece. It’s still not going well. The conductor stops every five measures or so to tell them that they don’t feel it. But no one’s ever told them to feel it, the concept is unfathomable.

“Stop, stop, stop. Let me see your violin,” the conductor says to the concertmaster. “This is your bow, kids. You see? We’re taking this way back to basics. This is your bow, these are the hairs on your bow, this is the wood of your bow. Now, on the string your bow moves back and forth.” The conductor demonstrates by dragging the bow across the D string, the same, clear note again and again. It’s a simple note on an open string, yet it’s played with a clarity none of the others in the room will be able to match for tens of years.

“The bow moves up, and that’s the inhale. The bow moves out, that’s the exhale. And that’s why the orchestra is the lungs. A bow on a string makes music because the bow is to the violin as the lungs are to the body. Be conscious of that when you play.”

The conductor returns the violin. The concertmaster discreetly sniffs her chin rest, unable to contain her sneeze from the slap of spice.

“And don’t be afraid to succeed. I see the fear all over your face. Meeting a god isn’t a punishment, it’s a blessing. Remember that when you play. Now instruments up, and let’s start at the fermata.”

The fermata changes things, somehow. The conductor holds it for a minute, perhaps more. They’re on the edges of their seats, waiting for the note to end, homogenous in their anticipation. The birds join in, dipping up and down above the orchestra to make their song heard. The hall is too far south for the dusty grey birds that sing like the trained chorus children three rooms down. These birds have no technique, but they sure do have passion. No less than three of them poop on the conductor’s robes as they dive.

Oh, birds

Hello birds

Do you know my name?

What are yours?

“Yes!” the conductor shouts. “Yes! This is it!”

The harmony of the orchestra comes naturally, now. Bows still bump against people’s sides, knees are still too close for comfort, and the scrolls of violins and violas touch music stands. But soon, that becomes easy to ignore. Even the grossness of the discordant notes are essential to the performance.

Some are standing up, some squatting. They’re laying over each other as they play, finally becoming comfortable, maybe the most comfortable they’ve ever been. The first violins, with their syncopated melody and double-stopped notes, hunch down into their instruments, as if they’re protecting themselves. The cellos crouch, shaking their heads as they play so their hair bounces, imitating their favorite players. The basses lean deep over the curve of their instruments, the adrenaline dampening the ache of their fingers as they play on the bottom of the string, where the tension is highest. The circumference of the wire leaves thick indents in their fingers, the size of the instrument forcing them to slide up and down the neck with their arms until they’re sore. The normally subjugated violas rush, their fingers crowded on the frogs on their bows, noses scrunched in the concentration needed to read such quick notes for the first time, thrilled to be playing the melody in a piece, at long last. The second violins hold their instruments in their laps, strumming them like tiny lutes for their pizzicato notes.

Those are beautiful names

I think I might join you

The first people to notice the god is present are those in the middle of their sections, not the best but not the worst, since they have music coming at them in all directions. The air thickens. Bow strings begin snapping apart, dangling from the stick and moving with every motion. Everyone’s feeling very sleepy, and very fond of the birds in the rafters.

They’re nothing but grateful to be present in the room, just a tiny bit of a whole. Yes, of the orchestra at large, but also of this stage, of this world, of this universe. And it’s the churning of bodies, in and out, something that happens naturally with players of music. The instinct to move the body back and forth depending on tempo and speed is unavoidable, and creates a distinct image from above, of one single breathing body.

Oh, that’s quite nice

A tad beautiful

The feeling spreads through the room until the conductor is laughing and shouting. The inside stand partners flip pages quickly when they hit presto.

There’s a pressure, there, intense for a moment, boiling the room, and then a pop. The air is sucked from the room in a flash, several students stopping to gasp, most holding their breath. The air is released, slow but powerful, shuffling all the papers off the music stands and onto the floor, where they gather at the children’s feet.

The last note: a fermata. They hold it as long as they can, desperate to extend the most important moment of their lives so far.

Aaaaaaaaa

breathes the god in wonder

Thank you thank you thank you for coming

say the children in exaltation

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT LILY WATSON

Lily Watson is a writer based in Seattle. She recently graduated with a degree in Sociology from Wesleyan University, and she’s had pieces published in the Baffler and the Longleaf Review. She’s beautiful and smart. Everyone loves her. WEBSITE

MORNING

By Diane Russell // 5972 words

An echo is a time traveler fucking with the past, and a clone is an echo of a person, a mind fuck to everyone who’d known the original. That’s what I thought when they brought my sister back from the dead, and I had to look at that face, blank and new and familiar, aged to the point where she had died, yet free from the scars of our childhood. Two orphans who quarreled endlessly, who clung to each other with bitter love for want of any other. Too different from each other to be friends. Too needy to stay apart. The only thing we’d ever shared was song. We liked to sing.

The echo did not sing.

While the echo learned — through six weeks of auto trainers and receiving uploads — I was alone, a stranger to the other colonists. Amidst the constant chatter of the busy crew, I enjoyed my sullen singularity, an outsider. When they assigned the echo to the empty sleepsack beside mine, I volunteered for one shift after another out on the cracked surface of our wretched new world, just to get away from it. Our ancestors used to cut holes in their houses to let the dead pass through. They sealed those holes up after the funeral rites ended, so the dead could not find their way back. Ghosts could only return through doors they knew. But the colony gave the dead places to haunt, instead of ushering them on to other realms. I chose to haunt our new world, too.

My survival suit stank of sweat and urine, eau de boy without doubt. I would reek for days afterwards. Water was too precious to waste on bathing; radiation, too toxic to be used on flesh. Saniwipes wouldn’t dent the industrial strength stench. “Who wore this last?” I shouted. “It’s rank.”

The ad tech, Jonas, shrugged as he handed me a helmet. “As long as the seals are good, the suit is good.”

“Aren’t you supposed to make sure the last person sanitizes the suit when they’re done?”

Jonas shifted his heads-up away from his right eye to glare at me. “If you want a pristine suit, get here early and sanitize it yourself. Admin checks the suits for safety. That’s it.” He stomped away, grumbling about lazy teenagers, and how many shifts he had to cover.

I cursed him under my breath, and wiped the inside of the helmet with a saniwipe before hoisting it over my shaved head and my heads-up eyepiece, sealing myself into the stink with an angry snap and twist of the seals. If it had been Kidege’s training helmet, the perfume might overwhelm the musk of scared boy. She used to lavish her hair with fragrant oils, soft coils that conjured up dreads like spider silk cocoons. In my imagination, I could still smell her.

In dreams, I could still see that last bold grin as she lay back in the white cryo bed. “See ya on the new world, asshole!” Kidege shouted. Pulling down the lid herself like a vampire retiring to her casket.

Middle finger. Click.

When you die in cryo, the automated systems do not preserve your damaged body to bury. They render your water and reduce you to soil — proteins and minerals in a metal canister. You? What little it did not recycle? You become fertilizer.

The crew gave me the canister with her name and number on it, as a curt nod to tradition, recognition that they could not give me my sister back, even though they left the doors open for ghosts. They assigned me the clone to acclimate. Who else was there to teach the Echo to sing? I didn’t talk to the clone, but I carried the canister everywhere. I wondered if when I finally opened it, the inside would smell like castor oil and peppermint and sunflowers.

“Every day we go out,” Fortunatus grumbled. “Scratching and digging. Looking for what? They should never have stopped here when they realized there was no Greening. There were other exo candidates we could have tried.”

Ibrahim elbowed him to shut up. “Stop complaining. At least, we didn’t die in our sleep.” Then he froze, glancing at me, remembering. “Sorry, Naeku.”

“Huh?” I tapped my helmet, pretending not to have heard through the plastic.

Ibrahim checked the heads-up that came with his helmet and tongued the channel on his comms. I tried not to think of the tongues that slathered spittle in the head gear before us. My fresh wipe didn’t make it less disgusting. “Check, check. Can you hear me, Naeku?”

“Five by five,” I said. “What did you say?”

“Just that, at least, we get to go out. It’s so fucking crowded in the sacks.” The execs closed off some colonist living quarters to conserve power.

“Crowded? If we don’t find a suitable site to start food production, this colony goes belly up,” I snapped. We all knew, but only I was angry enough to say aloud, that the colony admin was testing the delicate balance between thawing enough people to function and thawing enough people to hit reproductive minimum.

I clomped over to the airlock, behind the rest of the ground crew as they lined up. We didn’t need mag boots in Sunnet’s gravity, but all our gear was cobbled from the old EVA suits.

Jonas shushed us so the team lead could recite the usual safety briefing for hitting dirt. The Olduvai filled out its survey teams with teenagers like us. We came pre-made, cheaper than clones. We knew next to nothing so our deaths wouldn’t deplete the ship’s technical know-how, but we were old enough to operate the equipment. All we had to do was march out to our assigned testing site alongside a rover, turn on the scanners and the samplers, watch them work, and trudge back. If the terrain became too precarious, we left the rovers, and hauled the equipment by hand and on foot. Too many samplers had been lost in the crevasses. Human bodies had millions of years of naturally evolved mobility and dexterity. We were little more than beasts of burden meant to drag the equipment out and back every day.

The boys shuffled about, bored, paying no attention to the lecture they had heard a hundred times, until the airlock opened and we were shoved towards the door by the impatient kids behind us.

My name — Naeku — meant “Born in the Morning”, but I was born at the twilight of humanity on Earth. And I was angry. Everyone on the Olduvai was angry. Not just because Kidege had been one of hundreds who’d died in the Passage from faulty cryo beds.

A century before the UN Fleet departed from Earth, nursery ships scattered start-up biomes and biologicals across the target exoplanets — bacteria, diatoms, spores, lichens, grasses, and insects — seed ships to populate planets and moons. In the centuries it took for us to arrive, the Greening took root on the first three planets the colony ships passed, laying the foundations of a Terran ecosystem, readying these worlds for human life. The First claimed those, as they had the fastest ships, the best equipment, and the most genetic diversity.

The Olduvai arrived at the last potential world — Sunnet — after suffering one disaster after another. We were last, and being last came with additional risks. A longer voyage increased the chances of mishaps and system failures. And we had not beaten the odds. We’d lost so many. Telemetry proved that a seed ship had dropped its cargo on Sunnet centuries ago, so we expected to arrive on a fit colony site. But just as I had awakened to find a canister of dust and a hollow echo, we found our new world barren.

The Greening had failed.

Sunnet had a thin atmosphere, low gravity, ice packed poles but no liquid water, barely suitable for terraforming. But there was no turning back. The Olduvai’s exhausted fuel tanks could not generate escape velocity. Joining another colony was not an option. There would be no resupply from Earth. With sufficient biologicals, Sunnet’s dirt could become soil and support Terran-based life. If we found the right place to try.

Caves riddled the planet’s surface, hollow tubes from extinct volcanoes. Sinkholes swallowed the first attempts at settlement, costing the colony equipment and people we could ill afford to lose. So, they resorted to our trudging through the dull moonscape of an unborn planet.

“Naeku,” Jonas shouted. “Out of line.”

The boys made mooing sounds, hoping I was in trouble. I shot them a finger and stepped aside. “Yes?”

“Take 2.0 with you.” The echo stood beside Jonas in a survival suit, helmet tucked under its arm. Jonas looked at the boys dawdling at the airlock, hoping for a show. “Get out!” he barked at them. “Rover Five is yours.”

Fortunatus and Ibrahim scuttled away.

“No fucking way,” I said.

“Orders. You haven’t been training her.”

“I am not training that thing to replace my sister. It doesn’t even speak.”

“I speak,” The echo said, voice flat and inflectionless.

“Captain’s orders.” Jonas turned away, already moving to set up the next set of surface teams. “She’s paired with you on Rover Three.”

He left me glaring at the thing. It stared back. I did not cry. I would not cry. No one had time for my grief. No one cared. So, I raged. I did what any self-respecting teenager would do. I climbed through the airlock and stomped across the deck, using every filthy word I knew to describe what I thought about the captain, the ad tech, the crappy ship, the UN, and…

My sister and I should have slept another thousand years, adrift and away from the hurt we did each other, fighting over everything. Full family units were to be defrosted first. Unattached young females were meant for softer days once the colony was thriving — breeding stock, really. But when the latest crisis came and the ship needed warm bodies? We were worth less than the Rover I climbed into, a future luxury for days the colony might never see, so we were to be spent now.

I sat in the unshielded cockpit, more a passenger seat. The clone climbed in on the other side. The other rovers disappeared in the dust they stirred up, into the darkness of early dawn. “Rover Three?” I growled. “Operational?”

“Five by Five,” the rover whispered into my headset. I up’d the volume with a flick of my tongue.

“Proceed along target route.”

“Compliance.”

The darkness slowly receded like a wave, as dawn broke, which always felt strange. On the ship, I had no idea how light and dark moved. Lights on the ship were either on or off, bright and sterile or absent, every light the same number of lumens, the same intensity. And in space, the darkness was unrelenting. How did light move other than in straight lines, binary? It did not recede or creep or diffuse.

I listened to myself breathing in the helmet. After the steady ship sounds, air moving through vents, machines clicking with metronomic regularity, it took a moment to recognize the susurration around me as sound at all. Sound was time, tick tock or strictly human — voices, the clop of feet, the grinding of locks, the zip of food sacks being opened or closed, the sucking sound of toilets, air locks. My sound was irregular, unfamiliar, emotion making it hiccup and stutter, before finally falling into a calm metronome of its own, to be ignored. I was a machine, too. I kept time, too.

The clone did not speak to me. It knew better. It left me to my silence.

I scanned the horizon, watched our new sun creep up into the dusty sky, rocked and lulled by the rover as it bumped and rolled over the uneven surface. We covered familiar territory, already mapped and scanned, with speed, avoiding known problems — steep declines, crevasses and sinkholes. The grey dust became black volcanic ash, then harsher rock falls of ejecta from dead volcanoes. I didn’t know where we were going, didn’t care to review the mission specs available on my heads-up; I was backup equipment.

The harsh landscape shocked me with its austere beauty. We always thought of Sunnet as a blank canvas for humanity to draw on, but it had its own character, I guess. It didn’t really look like the moon, even though it was lifeless. It resembled the slopes of Kilauea from old sims, the guts of the planet poured out hot and black, hardened into mineral rich crust, then slowly eroding into gravel and dust. There was wind on Sunnet, gravity enough for atmosphere, but the chemical reactions of life had never kicked off. I sighed. The UN had not really tried to fuck us. Sunnet would have been a good place to live if the seed ship had done its job.

Hours in, and we were still rolling. I finally read the mission brief, and realized that we were on more than an overnighter. Shit. I should have known. Every day, the teams were going farther and farther out in a circular search pattern, approaching the rovers’ max distance. Run the batteries dry, then camp until the solar panels recharged and keep going. That’s why they stuck me with the fucking clone. They thought I would not be able to ignore the echo for days on end. But I was determined. And the echo had learned, from previous failed overtures, not to bother me. The clone sat in oppressive silence, sunshield down over the helmet’s faceplate, one hand clenched on the rover’s roll bar, a human-sized fuck you.

At sunset, the rover stopped. No one traversed the Sunnet surface in the dark. The samplers would set out in the morning while the rover recharged. If all went well, we would have nothing to do. We could sleep in the rover, but after sitting beside it all day, I wanted to put some distance between me and the echo. We had a tent, inflatables, and camp lights, but I was too lazy to fiddle with the tent, so I set up next to the rover in my suit, sipped at my food from the port in my helmet, and went to sleep lying atop an inflatable. I no longer noticed the pee smell, just tasted mashed potatoes and butter. At least that’s what the heads-up called the paste. The clone did the same on the other side, sunshield retracted, glancing at me from time to time, but staying silent. I don’t know what it ate for dinner. Kidege liked anything “green”, water-rich cellulose, bright chlorophyll full of captured light. I was curious, but didn’t ask.

An alarm woke me. Fuzzy from sleep, I snapped upright, checked the heads-up. Half the day was gone, and the sampling mission was underway, a search target selected, the sampler engaged, but reporting a fault.

“Rover?”

The alarm stopped. “Compliance.”

“What happened?”

“Sampler Unit Four fell into a crevasse. You are required to render aid.”

“Shit.” I looked around. “Where is the fucking clone?”

“Please clarify.”

“Where is … where is the other human?”

“Crewman Kidege Oluwa is attempting to salvage the sampler.”

I stood up. “That is not its name. Why did it go without me?”

“Crewman Kidege Oluwa attempted to wake you. You told Kidege Oluwa to fuck off. Though it was a breach of pairing protocols, only one human was necessary for the salvage. However, the sampler reports a mobility fault and Crewman Kidege Oluwa requires your immediate assistance to complete the mission.”

I climbed into the rover. “Map,” I snarled. The mission parameters defined me as nonessential equipment, but now that the sampler was in trouble, they needed me, huh? Immediately. The food paste from last night coated my teeth like a disgusting glue, and my mouth tasted as sour as my mood.

The rover displayed the location of the sampler and provided directions. “Autopilot to this location,” I ordered. I ate breakfast on the way, in the suit, adding to the rancid taste in my mouth, muttering the whole way. I considered calling the clone. If it had been any other teammate, I would have. The heads-up reported its health status as nominal so I didn’t bother.

Crusty black gravel covered the terrain of the new site, same as all the others. The rover parked and set its clamps, nailing itself to the flaky ground. I took a supply kit from the back and hooked tow lines from the rover’s winches onto the chest plate of my suit. I’d towed more than one piece of equipment out of a hole before, using the weight of the rover as a counterbalance. I could remote from the rover, but I wanted eyes on, not heads-up.

I traced the sampler tracks and the clone’s footsteps to an enormous crevasse, twenty meters wide at its narrowest point and fifty klicks long. It would require a separate expedition to go around it. I stood on the edge and peered over. The fool had driven an anchor into the ground and rappelled down to the sampler like a mountain climber. But it had fumbled the retrieval and didn’t have enough line to go deeper, so it was just dangling against the wall, supported by the belaying device. I didn’t see any problem with its gear. The echo seemed bored, waiting for me to show up, rather than climbing back out and heading back to our campsite. The sampler rested on a ledge below, its headlight smashed, two of its legs bent akimbo.

“You idiot,” I shouted. “You don’t ever go into a crevasse by yourself. That’s why they send us in pairs, fuckhead.”

The echo looked up at me. “Send down a tow line, already. And my name is Two, not fuckhead; fuckhead.”

My head snapped back. Damn. The thing had attitude. I almost smiled. I unclipped one tow line from my belt and lowered it, watching as the echo secured it to its suit and unhooked the original line. “Coil up that second rope so it doesn’t tangle!” I called.

“Stop shouting. You’re on comms,” the echo shouted back, sending wild feedback screeching into my ears. “I’m not deaf. Yet.” But it followed my instructions.

“I’m going to lower you to the sampler using both of the rover’s winches. One is more than enough to hold you, so when you get there, attach the other line to the sampler. Leave the first line attached to your suit. Got it?”

“I didn’t ask for a second line. I just need a longer one,” it huffed. “I can carry the damned sampler.”

“Do what I say,” I said coldly. “Or stay in the hole. Got it?” I could feel the echo glaring at me. “Attach the second line directly to the sampler. The ledge it’s on is solid. But if the sampler falls again, it’s gone for good. There’s no rope in this world long enough to get to the bottom of this crack. So you will secure the sampler. Do you hear me? Say five by five.”

After a moment, it clicked on comms and growled. “Five by five.”

It took twenty-five minutes for the echo to reach the sampler. By then, tempers cooled and I was bored with my little victory. It tasted bitter. It reminded me of all the times I had the same sort of pointless, head-butting battles with Kidege. Instead of nostalgia, all I felt was a deadened anger, the nerve endings of a burn before they started to heal and howl. I crouched near the edge, looked around, tilted my head back as far as the helmet would let me.

The pale, bulbous sun passed its zenith hours ago, larger than Sol, but farther away from Sunnet that Sol was from Earth. Its light seemed tepid, washed out, but maybe it was just me.

It should have been sweet. I should have been grateful. I was one of the lucky ones, right? I made it onto a colony ship, and thawed out with my brain intact. I looked into the distance. Beyond the crevasse, lay another, and another, like a frozen, black ocean, scarps and fissures as far as the eye could see. What was the point of sampling just one patch of this broken terrain? Why not just settle near one of the poles where at least the ice was solid under your feet and there might be geothermal energy to tap? I knew the answer. Because the colonists could scrape by at the polar caps at current population levels until we all died of old age, but there would be too few children, no chance of expansion, no future.

The echo gave a little squeak and I stopped the winches.

“What now?” I asked, feeling worn out and tired. “Do you have it?”

“There’s an opening down here. Like a cave. It’s below the ledge the sampler is sitting on.”

“This dirt hole is shitty with caves,” I snapped back. Then I relented. “Show me.”

The echo sent images to my heads-up. Another lava duct, deeper than most of the others I had explored, remorselessly dark and uninviting. “We can look at it tomorrow. Right now, we need to get you and the sampler out of the hole before dark.”

Hours later, I finally hauled the echo and the stupid machine out onto the surface. The echo nearly killed herself when it tangled the rope with the line lifting the sampler, so I ended up rappelling down. I was pissed off and stinking in the fucking suit by the time we were done, and the sampler had lost a couple of its damaged legs and was shot for the rest of the mission. The echo said nothing to me, not even a polite thank you. It didn’t even volunteer to send our status report back to the Olduvai, and take responsibility for the broken sampler. All we could do to avoid Jonas’s permanent shit list was finish the mission the next day.

This time, I set up the tent. No way was I going to stay in the suit another night. In the cramped air bubble, the clone and I communicated in grunts and gestures, begrudgingly. It smelled as bad as I did, despite use of an extraordinary number of saniwipes. When it took off its helmet, I remembered that it was bald like me. I turned my back to it and cried silently, missing the smell of Kidege’s hair.

In the morning, the clone and I did not speak at all. Something had broken loose, and all that remained was this brittle silence. The echo was prepped and ready to go when I awoke, but this time she waited until I ate and suited up. We decompressed and packed the tent, me pointing instructions, the echo complying. Our hands worked together in a strange sign language. I handed her a wrench. She put it away. She handed me a pack. I lashed it to the rover. In the night, a thin, grey dust had blown in and coated everything, draining the landscape of all color. Even the black gravel was white with it, as if a storm had come through while we slept.

I dictated a report, croaking as if I had not spoken in weeks. The plan was to finish the survey of yesterday’s site manually. I didn’t want to risk our only operational sampler in the hole that had been the first sampler’s doom. I watched the machine trotting off to do its work in the next site, its spindly spider legs scuttling away. I wanted to go alone, but the rover reminded me, unprompted, that a repeat of yesterday’s breach of the pairing protocols would result in disciplinary action. Fucking AI. I glanced at the echo. She nodded. We clipped our lines to the rover’s two winches. I took the remote and we clomped towards the crevasse again, dejected and kicking up dust.

It was a simple task — go down, collect data and samples, go back up. We lowered ourselves, side by side, stopping every now and again to take scan readings and chip at the walls. The crevasse narrowed as we descended, and the insipid sunlight faded. I turned on my helmet lights. The echo did the same. The cave was right where we’d left it, below the ledge the sampler had landed on, but on the opposite wall of the fissure, across the expanse.

We hung over unseen depths, the mouth of the cave gaping before us, comms on, listening to each other breathe. I reached out with my foot, trying to measure the distance to the lip of the lava tube. Scans said four meters. The crevasse was only four meters wide here. But the depth of the fall below us made it seem wider. I could swing, use momentum to throw myself into the cave. And that meant giving the line slack at the right moment, releasing the belay that kept me from falling and letting the rope thread through the carabiner. It meant letting go. It also meant that the clone would have to complete the same maneuver, at the same time. I had the winch controls for both lines. I could not leave her behind. It was both of us or neither of us. And she would have to trust me. And I, her. When the moment came, could I release the lines that tethered us to the surface, to the rover, to everything? Could we jump together?

It was an act of sheer stupidity.

The echo’s face glowed like a pale orange moon in the queasy light of our headlamps. Her lips pursed with excitement, a familiar mischief. “We could…” she started, then fell silent, her eyes losing their gleam when she caught my expression, knowing without a word that I did not trust her.

An enormous crack rattled the crevasse. Both tow lines jolted with sudden slack, a moment of weightlessness that ended in a violent jerk, yanking our bodies at the waist, leaving us flailing over the emptiness as gravel peppered our helmets and clattered into deep blackness. Far above us, the anchor holding the rover to the crunchy Sunnet dirt was giving way.

“Shit!” I kicked out, swinging my legs to build momentum. The echo did the same, picking up my rhythm, matching my speed. Back and forth, farther out over the abyss, closer and closer to the cave entrance. For a moment, we laughed like children, like idiots, terrified. I heard the distant scream of metal as the rover’s AI tried to haul us back up the fissure. I imagined the winch engines racing, burning out their motors as vibrations raced down the tow lines.

“On three,” I said. ”Unhook.”

We counted, eyes locked on each other in desperate communion. One. Two. And as our feet arced over the deep, I screamed, “Three!” and released the belay, the line whining through the carabiner, my lifeline racing away, up toward the surface and the faded light. And we fell. The dark exploded with pain then folded into silence.

∙ ∙ ∙

I listened, keeping still, trying to feel if any part of me was broken before using it. My cracked faceplate’s plastic clicked as if someone tapped it from the outside. The crack branched across my view like a spider’s web, each new path announcing releasing pressure, faster and faster. The smell of my own vomit clogged my nostrils, rotten potatoes and stomach acid. I tried to hold still but finally flopped over on my belly and spewed my rations onto the faceplate. The plastic exploded in a shower of gooey splinters. Fingers scrambling on the locks, I pulled the broken helmet off, dragging my heads-up off along with it, scratching my face, desperately reaching for the emergency O2 tank on the waist of the suit.

I held my breath, fingers scrambling. It was gone.

The canister with my sister’s ashes was there, damn it, but not my O2. I dug the heads-up out of the ruined helmet, pulled it over my head, yanked the mic and tapped the eyepiece. I used some air to speak a command. “Locate auxiliary oxygen.”

Nothing. Static.

I crawled around in the dark. Sharp gravel under my knees, painful. I searched, my lungs exploding, aching turning to agony. Until finally, I collapsed, and drew in a long, tortured breath, knowing that I was dead — dead, for there was nothing to breathe on Sunnet, the atmosphere too thin.

I sucked on air that tasted like bile and toothpaste and something indefinable. I took another breath, and another, and another before my brain caught up with my lungs and I realized that I was alive. The cold, moist air tasted unfamiliar; earthy. My fingers explored my own cheeks, feeling for signs of decompression, of exploding capillaries and bloody seepage. My fingers came away with sweat and saliva.

I sat up. “2.0?”

Silence.

Turned. Orienting myself. I had hit the floor of the cave and fallen through it. Another opening beckoned behind me, narrow and low to the ground. I crawled towards it, and bumped into the clone lying in my path, helmet intact. I tapped her chest plate and turned on the spots. The lights came on instantly. She stared back up at me, awake.

“Shit! I thought you were dead.”

She sat up with a groan. “So did I,” she replied. “I powered down my light to conserve battery. My left leg is broken. Are you done flopping around now?”

“I thought I was going to suffocate, you ass.”

“If you had checked your heads-up, instead of panicking, you would have seen the O2 read,” she replied. “I splinted my leg with spray foam, but I can’t walk. I was going deeper into the cave, but I waited for you to wake up.”

“My heads-up is fried.” I ached all over, as if my sore muscles had all decided to wake up at the same time. “So you were going in there with a broken leg?”

“I had to see.”

“See what?” Wan light wormed its way out of the hole we’d fallen through, and brightened the hole in the cave wall. Two used cans of suit repair lay discarded next to the echo’s open med-kit.

The clone took off her helmet, put it aside and gave it a pat like a pet. She looked at me with Kidege’s bright brown eyes. Smart ass, I thought, looking at the clunky cocoon of hardened foam encasing her leg with a strange twinge of pride. Of course, my sister’s clone would be resourceful and fierce.

I nodded with a smirk. “You waited to see if I’d survive before taking your helmet off.”

“I’m not stupid,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”

We crawled towards the light that beckoned at the cave’s narrow opening. In the gloom, a colony of mushrooms bubbled out of rocks like grey blobs of meat. And I knew. Mushrooms lived on dead stuff, feeding on decay. But to be dead, a thing had to first be alive.

I tried not to destroy them as we crawled through the tube towards the light. I tried not to breathe near them, either. Living did not mean safe. But I still smelled them, earthy and dank, and something that reminded me of the biologicals lab; herbaceous, dense and wet.

I pulled up to the lip of the opening and the light blinded me for a moment. Two pulled herself up beside me, tough bitch, not even crying when I knew that leg had to hurt. But I was too busy to comment. I was too filled with green, too amazed by green, too enraptured by…

Every day of my fifteen years had been grey and brown. Grey decks, taupe walls, brown skin, paler brown skin, the occasional blue eyes. We were raised like hydroponic plants in muddy water, bottled for the day we’d be decanted with our sludgy roots to dig into a new world, boring and the same, humans in unvarying variations of brown and beige. And the surface had been an unremitting black and grey, endless klicks of endless dunes and hills and rocks and cracks. But this? This was blinding. An explosion.

Green.

A million shades of green. Lime. Forest. Pale as an unripe lemon. Verdant. Veridian. Ferocious. Fat with water and glistening. Deep and dark and veined with black. Seaweed and kelp colors, as deep as the sea on Earth, green that was bronzed and gilded. Olive and emeralds, and acorns bleeding to brown.

We lay at the lip of the cavern, looking into this riot of life, blinded by the profusion of plants, looking down into a valley covered by ferns and palms and fallen trees dressed with vines and fungi, spreading up towards the canopy that filtered the sunlight. An insect buzzed by, iridescent wings scattering a tiny rainbow. And above it all, a ceiling of arches like the ribs of a dinosaur, a dragon big enough to swallow a world, the cracked crown of an enormous filigreed bubble that must have looked like just more fissures on the crazed surface of Sunnet.

I cried out. My face creased in a rictus of emotion. Joy. Pain. Reverence. Terror. I clutched Two’s hand and brought it to my chest.

We left the darkness behind and crawled out into the light. I helped her stand on her splinted leg. My mind emptied of everything except the smell of chlorophyll, and mint, and rot and … when she began to sing, I did not recognize Two’s song at first. Her voice, though familiar and born of Earth, no longer belonged to the past. She was not a time traveler trying to rewrite my history, or an echo despite the synchrony of notes, or a ghost creeping through an open window. Not here.

Her voice was part of this place, this life, rising and falling with perfect peace. It was hers, ours, a song Kidege and I had once sung, before the Earth finally began to die, and the techs selected us and the casket of the cryo beds closed, before the dreamless sleep of centuries in space, and the anger of loss. It was simply. Home.

“Malaika. Nakupenda malaika. Malaika. Nakupenda malaika,” Two sang.

And I joined her, wrapping my voice around hers, finding harmony effortlessly as sisters always do, without plan or script or notes on a page. “Ningekuoa mali we. Ningekuoa dada. Nashindwa na mali sina we. Ningekuoa malaika. Nashindwa na mali sina we. Ningekuoa malaika.”

We sang that song, then another and another. We sang until the light faded and night fell, and insects serenaded us back when our throats were raw and sore, with wings and legs, whistles and chirping choruses of splendid susurration. We sang until we heard the hover above us, the rescue team come to find their lost orphans. I turned to my sister, her large brown eyes and sensuous lips, cheeks like dark plums, eye lashes heavy and curling. Where there was once sass and sarcasm, there was now a gentleness, a compassion. I touched her cheek and felt the softness of her flesh, the slight fuzz of fine hair under my fingers the way I imagined a warm peach might feel.

“I am not her, Naeku,” she said, her voice a hoarse croak.

“I know,” I whispered. “But I miss her.”

“I know,” she replied. And Two held my hand while I cried. She held my hand when I took out the metal canister that I always carried, and poured the soil out into the green valley near the crashed remains of the seed ship.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT DIANE RUSSELL

Diane Russell calls herself a Jamerican nerd. Born on the island, a naturalized American citizen, and having lived in Nigeria, Tanzania, and Kenya, she was raised on West Indian curry, Star Trek and can cuss in multiple languages. Having spent years in Corporate America, this is Diane’s first foray as a professional writer, and she hopes to release her first novel - Monolith - in December, 2022.

WHERE THE SKY BECOMES MILK

By Jamie McGhee // 6255 words

The wind whistles between collapsing buildings. It skates along the streets, overturning rocks and bones, and cuts itself on shattered windows. It tunnels through the rubble of churches and mosques that were once gold, that are now white with dust and memory. The smell of the ocean rides on its back.

A heartbeat. The wind searches the city for a heartbeat.

Instead, there is a single footstep.

At the gates of the city, Quim braces himself, feeling dust push up hot and gritty between his naked toes, before braving a second step. The dust swallows the sound — and yet, far in the distance, he hears his own footstep echo back to him. Pah. He takes another step. The call. A pause, and then its echo. Pah-pah. The response.

“Oi? Quem ta aí?” he calls. No one replies. So he walks.

Quim limps down the empty main road, and he squeezes through the cramped side streets. He stops in front of one unmarked building and then another, their signs torn off, their bricks scrubbed white, and he presses his hands against the walls. No, they’re not made of brick, but bone. The pavement smolders beneath his feet. He stops at the cemetery: The graves are empty. Standing at the edge of one, he can peer down to the center of the earth. All he smells is the ocean.

He is too late.

“No.” His knees buckle. “No.”

This is the city, and yet it isn’t the city — it can’t be the city, Haipo, where he was born, a city cradled between the mountain and the sea like a forever-child. Where are the women selling roasted maize with the fire still inside? Where are the children cartwheeling to school, their hands black with ink and papercuts? Where are the orange cats prowling in the tangled shadows of the red pepper trees? Where are the painters turning the sky into milk?

“No,” Quim says again, and his breath comes in short, shallow gasps. He digs frantically through the rubble — something must still be alive. Anything. He shakes the broken glass off an empty picture frame and pours dust out of a buried shoe. If there were ever bodies, they have vanished. If there were ever names, they have been unmade. The wind stirs the bones around his feet, and he follows it, running, to the ocean.

At the ocean’s edge, he grips the stone parapet. Below, waves crash against the walls, turning scarlet in the dusk. The water reflects the sky, and the sky reflects the water: the only color remaining in the white rubble of Haipo. He reaches out to pull the setting sun back up into the sky and give himself more time, but it slips through his fingers, and the sky turns black. There are no second chances for the dead.

What does he do now? Quim sinks to the ground and drops his head into his hands. How long before he loses himself? How long before he becomes a feral child outside the city gates, while his soul fades back into the earth? How long before he forgets his own grandmother’s voice, his own grandfather’s warmth, his own name?

A voice behind him says, “Não te conheço de algum lugar?”

Quim freezes.

The voice says again, “Haven’t I seen you before? Where did you come from?”

If Quim still had a heart in his chest, it would have stopped. He swallows, tasting the sea salt in the wind, and cannot bring himself to turn around. He touches the grooved vial hanging around his neck and twists the cord tighter, feeling the glass smolder between his palm and thumb. It is the last thing keeping him tethered to this world. In his throat, his own voice sounds like a death rattle, but he manages to say, “Before I came to Haipo, I was on Mt. Mtoto.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Before he comes to Haipo, he is on Mt. Mtoto.

Haipo glitters in the distance, at the bottom of the mountain, and he can feel home already growing inside of him. He can already taste the corn and the paint and the cartwheels on his lips, feel the wind pushing off the sea and into his bones. Soon. Soon. Daylight is fading fast: It is nearly sunset on the seventh day, and time is running out.

Steadying himself on the slick footpath, Quim takes a step down the mountain. His foot catches in a hole. His other foot skids on a wet leaf — with a yelp he grabs a branch to keep himself from tumbling forward. A thousand-meter drop, straight down, his neck would snap. He gulps.

As much as he wants to sprint straight for the city gates, he forces himself to move slowly, to hold his balance in the center of his stomach, to keep his eyes trained on the road right in front of him. His feet sink into the cold, wet earth. Worms slither beneath his steps.

Water trickles nearby. He finds a spring, but it’s dried nearly to dust, so he reaches his cupped hands into the sky, and when he lowers them, they are filled with milk. Bits of cloud bob between his fingers. He sucks on one, soft and sweet.

The mountain eventually gives way to the foothills of the island, which in turn gives way to an emerald field of grass as high as his waist. The grass shifts out of his way as he walks. Each footstep becomes a drumbeat. Pah-pah, pah-pah. The grass bends when he needs it to bend, moves when he needs it to move, all with a rolling hush. The quiet here is so absolute that it bakes into his skin. Home. Soon Quim will be home.

Ra-ta-tat.

He freezes.

Someone’s footsteps scurry. Ra-ta-tat. Ra-ta-tat.

He steps. Pah-pah.

The other person follows. Ra-ta-tat.

“Hello?” he calls.

An army of feet. Ra-ta-tat. Ra-ta-tat. Ra-ta-tat.

His heart sinks cold into the bottom of his stomach, but he holds his ground. “Tem alguém aí? Come out!”

Ra-ta-tat. Ra-ta-tat. Ra-ta-tat. Louder. Closer. Feet pounding toward him. Ra-ta-tat.

“Rich boy!” someone shrieks.

Claws swipe at his ankles. Quim snaps through the grass and breaks into a run. Shrill laughter explodes from all sides, one, two, four voices:

“Where’re you going, rich boy?”

“Nothing left to give us?”

“Nos ajude! Help us!”

“Don’t let us starve!”

He runs faster. His feet push against the earth and the earth pushes back. He wipes sweat from his eyes and flees toward the city, pah-pah-pah-pah-pah, but the feet gain. Someone trips him. He crashes. Groaning in pain, he wipes his bleeding hands in the dirt and hoists himself to his feet. Just as little hands grab his ankles, he manages to start running again.

Through the tall grass around him, he glimpses dirty little faces. Children cackle, eyes glittering with black fire as they run through the grass, swiping their hands like claws at his arms, at his legs, at anything they can reach. Ra-ta-tat. Ra-ta-tat. Ra-ta-tat. It sounds like gunfire now. A knife shines. Five, six voices.

“Which part should we eat first?”

“Take his eyes!”

“Take his heart!”

He pants. He cries. He runs faster, feeling their hands and their metal and their teeth.

Haipo! Haipo is so close. Its gates rise. If he can just get inside, if he can just…

A hand grabs him. A knife slices his calf and the white-hot gash makes him howl in pain. A child pounces on his back and locks her arm against his throat. Her hair is mud. Her eyes are graves. Quim sees it in the child’s grey, paper-thin skin and in the white sores bursting around her mouth: She hasn’t eaten in days.

He flings the child’s wriggling body off, but two more children with cold hands and hot mouths crawl on top of him and bite. Quim pulls one off his arm, but they are stronger, angrier, hungrier than he is. They wrestle him to the ground.

“I can teach you how to get food!” says Quim. “So much food you’ll never go hungry again, I swear.”

“Ha!” says a girl.

A child’s eyes flash with pain and hunger. “They all make promises.”

“No, really!” says Quim.

The girl digs a piece of corroded metal into his neck. She says, “You’re lying. You want us to die.”

Each breath digs the knife deeper. “Come with me to Haipo.”

One boy laughs. Another cries. The girl tightens her knees on either side of Quim and presses the metal deeper as she pins him. “We can’t.”

He chokes. “Why not?”

“It’s not our home.”

“You’re…”

He can’t say it. They are what he could become, all shadows and sharp teeth, dirty and small and terrified and lost, bursting with sores and reeking of old flesh. The sun is sinking fast.

She shakes her head and twists the knife. “So what are you gonna give us, rich boy?”

“I’m not rich!”

“I’m not talking about money.” Her hand closes around the vial. “Why don’t I take this?”

“Don’t touch that! I need that!”

“Why don’t you share what’s inside?”

She tugs it — and with a feral cry, Quim shoves her off. She crashes to the ground headfirst, skids, and stops moving. A hush falls over the children.

As they fold themselves into a circle around her, Quim crawls backwards, slowly, until his shoulder bumps against something metal. He clutches at the wound on his neck, on his leg, and lets the blood seep into the earth as the world shifts itself back into place. There is heavy breathing. It’s his own.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

A song rises up from the children’s empty bellies and open mouths.

Lala, mtoto, lala

Anga linaanguka

Litakupa maziwa, lala

“I’m so sorry.”

Something brushes against his arm, and when he tries to stand, a cat pounces onto his stomach, pinning him down with a paw. There are empty sockets where its eyes should be, and yet he feels the prickling heat of its stare . “You’ve reached the gates, Quim,” it says.

“I…”

“Stop looking at them. Look at me.” It flicks its tail. “I know that I’ve seen you before.”

He rubs his aching head and swallows.

The cat says, “Where did you come from?”

Quim touches the vial around his neck. “Before I came to Mt. Mtoto, I was in Paka Forest.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Before he comes to Mt. Mtoto, he is in Paka Forest.

Everything looks the same. Everywhere he turns, he sees endless yellow and black tangles of forest. Generations ago, his people had been herders, so he thought he knew how to read the curves of the land. He does not. For days he walks in circles, tracking his own footprints back over his own footprints, hearing his steps echo through the same trees as yesterday.

Pah-pah. Pah-pah.

By now he knows how to eat by kneading clouds into rice. He knows how to drink by dipping his palms into the sky. But he does not know how to stop the strange sadness that is welling up within him, a heavy feeling that his walk will never end.

He lies on his back beside a stream. Ants crawl over his hands, looking at him as if they’ve seen him before, and by now he’s memorized the river’s song as it glides over the rocks:

Lala, mtoto, lala

Sleep, child, sleep

The sky is falling

It will bring you milk, sleep

He closes his eyes, drifting off into the dust and birdsong, filling his nose with the smells of warm soil and cool flowers and then hot breath—

Hot breath? Above him, yellow eyes blink. Quim snaps upright, and with a hissing screech the creature leaps off and dashes into the forest.

“Wait!” He runs after it, dodging between trees and snapping through branches just to get glimpses of its tail. It looks like one of the orange-dipped cats of Haipo. So the cat must know the way to the city. “Espera!”

The cat flashes between two trees; Quim sucks in his stomach and climbs through. It splashes through a river that soaks him in icy waves. He keeps running as he wipes the water out of his eyes. The cat leaps down from ledge to ledge — Quim’s ankle cracks, a burst of lightning through his leg, and he collapses and rolls. Stones cut into his face. His shoulder pops. He pulls himself back to his feet.

When the cat climbs up the side of the mountain, he limps after it, feeling his ankle swell with every pah-pah. Its tail flicks and disappears behind a tree. As sweat rivers into his mouth, he struggles to follow.

“You there!”

Ra-ta-tat. The sound of gunfire.

“I see one!” shouts a man’s voice. “A rebelde! A rebel!”

Quim grips the tree to stay upright. “I’m not a—”

Ra-ta-tat. Ra-ta-tat.

The cat appears again, darting between his legs, but he doesn’t have time to worry about it. He hunches beneath a tree. Ra-ta-tat. The bullets hit closer. He can’t see them, but the soldiers must be advancing. Where should he hide? Where? Where? The cut on his forehead drips blood into his eye. Maybe if he climbs—

Ra-ta-tat. No time. What if he makes a break for it? No, what if he just holds his hands up and surrenders? If he can convince them he’s not from around here, they will have to let him go. He clutches the vial around his neck.

The cat dashes between his legs again. Quim trips. He hits the ground and tries to get up, but the roots of a musheragi tree wrap themselves around his wrists, handcuffing him to the ground. They knot around his ankles. He struggles. Ra-ta-tat. What’s going on? He needs to run!

The soil shifts up to cover him. A live burial. He struggles, twisting and straining against the roots as the footsteps pound closer. Dirt forces itself into his lungs, expanding them painfully. He gasps for air — and realizes he can breathe.

He stops struggling, and feels the edges of his skin melting away into the edges of the warm soil. His feet, his hands, his body, dissolve, and yet he’s here, still feels like himself, but fuller somehow, one with the earth. This must be what it’s like to decompose. His fingers crumble. He breathes rainwater and old leaves. The tree holding him in place is a hundred and twelve years old. He doesn’t know how he knows that, but he knows.

Quim tries to remember the world outside the forest, but with every breath it fades. Soldiers, he has heard, were once village boys like him. They were good boys, they were sweet boys, but they were boys forced to watch their families starve as wealthy government men walled themselves off behind Haipo’s golden gates. And these good boys, these sweet boys, banded together. When they took power they promised to bring love and music back to the island.

But the boys have grown into violent men, and the violent men have grown scared. They are scared that villagers will rise up just as they have risen up. So now they raid their old villages, shooting every boy who could one day become a threat — shooting every boy who reminds them of themselves.

Ra-ta-tat. The gunfire belongs to a world a thousand miles away.

“Where did he go?”

“You’re sure he was here?”

“I swear!”

“You’d better hope we find him.”

“Eu o vi. He must be close.”

The footsteps and the gunfire retreat as one. Just as Quim settles into the soil and the soil into Quim, the tree untangles its roots from him. The ground shifts away. He coughs. He is a boy again, all fingers and toes and, with a strange acid on the roof of his mouth, disappointment.

The cat purrs. This time it walks, and Quim walks after him. Only after several minutes does he realize that the pain in his ankle has receded, that the cuts on his face have sewn themselves back up. What just happened?

The cat leads him to a dense, almost unearthly tangle of trees that look like God squeezed his hand into a fist and left the forest crumpled. The cat says, “To escape the forest, walk through here for two weeks. The earth will show you where to go.”

“I don’t have two weeks. I only have seven days.”

“Then run.”

“What am I searching for?” Quim asks.

Instead of answering, the cat folds itself at the feet of a young man sitting in front of the trees. The man is watching the world with watercolor eyes that run blue down his cheeks. The cat says, “This man is trapped here forever. He will never be whole again. He will never smile, and he can never go home.”

“Is he … dead?”

“Que? What does it mean to be dead?” says the cat, and Quim does not have an answer. “His body lives on somewhere outside of the forest. His spirit guards this area now, calling on the trees to protect the innocent.”

The cat stretches. “It is a shame that his body did not come to collect his soul in time. But his body was a coward. It was too scared to come for him.”

Quim swallows. He reaches for the man but recoils, afraid that what he touches will be hollow and cold. Who was this soul, and where was his village? Did he have grandparents like Quim did? Was his body really too scared to collect him, or had he simply run out of time?

“Where is your soul?” asks the cat.

“Haipo.”

“Ah, such a long journey ahead of you. What a shame.”

The young man meets Quim’s eyes. His uniform reeks with metallic, sticky-looking residue. Blood.

Quim doesn’t have a word for the sadness that has been growing inside of him. For the emptiness. For the irons around his feet as he trudges from village to village, from mountain to mountain. The slippery voices that surround him, telling him he’s going to fail. The ache in his stomach, the need for an ending. But as he looks into the young man’s desperate eyes, he feels that the man understands perfectly.

The man strains to pull himself into a standing position, but falls to his knees.

“He gets weaker every day,” says the cat.

The young man says, “Haven’t I seen you before?”

Quim wraps his arms around himself. He swallows, tasting soil.

The young man says, “I have, haven’t I? Where did you come from?”

Quim touches the vial around his neck. “Before I came to Paka Forest, I was in Uchoraji.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Before he comes to Paka Forest, he is in Uchoraji.

Quim’s body no longer fits him. His teeth rattle around in his mouth, clinking and banging against each other. His skin pulls tight around his skull but bags around the back of his knees, and he can feel his eyes drifting in two different directions, toward two different horizons. Blood rushes in his ears, but it stops sometimes, and he has to prick his palms to remind himself that he still has blood and tender flesh, even if he can’t find his heartbeat. As he walks, the vial twists around his neck like a noose.

The sun rises over Uchoraji’s borders as he enters; he had not realized it was dark. He knows this town — his grandfather often sent him here for sukari and mchele — but as the blood of strangers dries beneath his feet, he realizes he does not know this town.

By the post office, a man wails, clutching his daughter’s shattered body. Chills rise through Quim’s legs as the man reaches for him. Someone has torn down the door to the bakery: blood and bullet holes hold up the walls. The fabric store, with its glinting windows, has been smashed with bombs and bricks, exploded from the inside out, and burnt silks in scarlet and nectarine line the paths outside. When he stops to touch the fabric, just to remind himself what his grandmother’s dresses felt like, a dog snarls. Quim reels back — the dog’s breath is hot, like he’s been chewing burning coals.

Quim clutches his arms over his stomach and tries to ignore the terrible hunger. He drags his feet from broken store to broken store, searching for names and food in the rubble. He tries to focus on sounds to keep himself awake: Someone ringing the church bell, people calling out their children’s names. Quim sinks down against a doctor’s office that has been blown apart. No one is calling his name. It would be so easy to fall asleep…

He sees it. An apple.

Just looking at the red skin makes his mouth water. The apple dances against a background of a bone white sky, of lush red grass, and Quim crawls toward it. It smells so sweet, like turpentine, like leather hide, and as soon as he creeps close enough, he lunges.

A hand clamps around Quim’s wrist. “What are you doing?”

He surrenders. “Please. I’m so hungry.”

Quim meets a young man’s eyes. The man looks like a living corpse, all skull and shadows, not much larger than Quim but stuffed into clothes far too small for him. The man has watercolor eyes, dim and wet, and they run. He lets Quim go. “It’s just a painting.”

So it is. Quim touches the apple. It’s painted onto a piece of wood from one of many doors that have been ripped down or beds that have been hacked apart. When his fingers brush the red paint, he can taste the apple’s juice. “Please,” he says. “Não me deixa morrer de fome. Don’t let me starve.”

“I won’t let you starve,” says the man. “I can’t. I’ve killed too many people already.”

The man leans against the wall. He streaks his paintbrush down another piece of wood, once, twice, three times, in green. Grass. The grass looks familiar. “These aren’t my paints. These aren’t my clothes.”

“You found them.”

“I took them.” He paints yellow eyes and metal teeth. “I killed so many people up and down the coast, from Haipo to Askari, just because they looked like they came from a village. I didn’t care if they didn’t. I killed them anyway. They looked like you.”

The vial’s cord tightens around Quim’s neck again. He forgets how to breathe. The man is a soldier, was a soldier, and Quim wants to run, but he forces himself to stay calm. “You know Haipo.”

“I killed six children right outside its gates.”

“You know Haipo.”

“I kidnapped them from their villages, from Mbinguni and from Dhoruba, then I brought them all the way to the city before shooting bullets into their bellies. I wanted to make sure that their bodies would never make it home in time. Now they are trapped in this world, and so am I.”

“What’s the way to the city?” says Quim.

“I chose to abandon my soul when I died. Do you know why? It’s because I knew I wasn’t worthy of going home, of seeing my family.” He touches a shattered vial around his own neck. “Or perhaps I was just scared.” He looks up sharply as if waking from a dream. “Where did you say you were going?”

“I’m on my way home. To Haipo.”

The man pulls his legs into his chest like a child. “All the way across the island. Do you think you can make it?”

“I don’t know,” says Quim. “But my grandfather says I have to. Do you think I can?”

The man gives a sad smile. “All the way across the island,” he says again instead of answering, and sets the painting aside. “So you must be hungry.”

Quim nods. The man presses his hands to Quim’s cheeks and his nose to the streaks of sunlight in his hair, and he inhales. “You smell just like the children.” He releases him. “I’ll teach you how to get food. As long as you can see the sky, you’ll never go hungry again. This is how I survived after I threw away my uniform. I ran and I ate the sky.”

The man cups his hands and reaches them up, up toward the sky. He lowers his cupped hands and brings them to his lips. Then he presses them to Quim’s lips, and Quim swallows crisp, cold milk. His toes tingle. The milk smells like the sea, yet it isn’t salty. It’s the sweetest drink he’s ever tasted.

“Vem cá, climb on my shoulders.” The man lifts him up. “Pick a cloud. The smallest clouds are the juiciest.”

Quim plucks one from the sky. It tastes as sweet as sugar-dusted kaimati, as savory as red-dripping mutura, as firm as fresh-boiled potato. He presses a cloud to the man’s mouth as well, and they eat together.

“You have a long walk ahead of you if you’re going to Haipo on foot. The roads are all closed. You’ll have to go through Paka Forest.” The man’s eyes begin to run again. “And if you somehow happen to find my soul…”

“Yes?” says Quim.

The man hesitates. “Tell him—”

“You there! Rebelde!” Another soldier’s voice.

The man drops Quim and flees. Quim hits the ground with his hands up and swallows a mouthful of dust. A boot grinds into his back, and cold metal pushes into the base of his neck, a familiar ice. “Da onde tu é?”

“I’m from Haipo,” says Quim. “I’m not from the villages, I’m not a rebel, I’m from Haipo.”

“Then what are you doing this far north?”

“I’m on my way back to the city. Just let me go, please,” he says, and the boot grinds in further, pushing his nose into the metal smell of the earth, the faint stench of piss.

“That’s a long walk.”

“Please.” He gasps for air as the boot moves to his neck. “Let me go this time.”

“This time?”

The soldier kicks Quim onto his back and jams the gun into the center of his forehead. Quim manages to look past the gun and into the soldier’s eyes, deep and brown and terrified. The gun is trembling. He digs his boot in harder, and his voice comes out in ragged breaths. “Haven’t I — haven’t I seen you before?”

The soldier reeks of death. Death is etched into the scars on his face, and death guides the finger he hooks around the trigger. Quim doesn’t know whether the soldier is a soul without a body, or a body seeking its soul, or a living man who has killed so much he has forgotten he is alive.

Quim swallows, tasting gunpowder.

The soldier says, “Where did you come from? Fala! I said, where’d you come from?”

Quim touches the vial around his neck. The soldier points his gun at it. Quim keeps his eyes on the soldier’s. “Before I came to Uchoraji, I was in Askari.”

∙ ∙ ∙

Before he comes to Uchoraji, he is in Askari.

An officer grinds Quim’s face into the dirt of his grandmother’s lawn. All he smells is metal: metal in the blood running from the officer’s shoes. Metal in the air above the compound. Metal in the bullets blasting around him, metal in the grenades smashing concrete, metal in the machine gun pushed inside his open mouth. Metal in his breath as he pants. Metal in the blood lining his gums.

He works his gun around Quim’s mouth, dragging the hot metal from one cheek to the other, scraping it over his tongue. “Click, click, click,” says the officer. “One little click, and you’re done.”

“I am telling you, he will never be a threat.” His grandmother sobs, her tears crackling. “He’s not from here.”

“A threat. You mean a rebelde,” says the officer. “We know that you’re all planning and plotting — when we were young, we did the same. Tell us what you have planned, and we might not skin him.”

“Sir!” says the scarred soldier behind him. The soldier is holding his own gun, but he’s shaking. “Sir, maybe we should hear her out. I’m just saying. Maybe.”

The officer slams a boot into his grandmother’s back. Her wail echoes through the broken trees around them, through the shattered windows, through the burning kitchen. His grandfather reaches for her. “Shh, shh.”

“Don’t kill him, please,” his grandmother says. “He’s just a boy, and he’s so far from home. He has nothing to do with any rebels.”

“If he is from Haipo, then what’s he doing in a village?” says the officer.

She raises her head. “He lives here, but—”

“He lives here with you, so he’s a villager, and he will probably grow up to rebel.”

“He lives here, but he was born in Haipo. His heart is there. His soul is there.”

“Please,” says Quim.

“You’re scared he will grow up to become violent like you,” she says, “but he will never be like you—”

The shots. Metal cracking bone. Metal seeping into the earth. His grandfather lets out a terrible cry for his wife.

“No!” Acid boils in Quim’s stomach. It comes out of his mouth. He tries to throw himself on top of her, but his grandfather grasps him by the wrist.

His grandfather squeezes tight. “Do you remember the parable of the ashen city?”

Quim sobs.

“Remember!” says his grandfather.

“I can’t.”

The officer swings his gun into his grandfather’s face. “Do you want to watch him die, or should he watch you die?”

His grandfather closes his eyes. He speaks in Kuhi, which Quim has only ever heard in prayers and parables, so he struggles to piece the words together. “Remember the story. When you die, you will get a new body without a heartbeat, but it can still feel hunger and pain. To find peace in the afterlife, you have to bring a piece of your original body back home to the place you were born. Your soul is waiting for you there.”

“Please don’t let me die. Please!”

“Look at me. If these soldiers kill you, they will burn your body like they’ve done all the others. When you wake up in your new skin, carry some of the ashes. Don’t let anyone take them from you. If you lose those ashes, you’ll be lost in this world forever, unable to find us again.”

“But what happens when I get there?”

“Enough of your superstitions!” The officer jams his gun into his grandfather’s temple. “Him or you? I’m letting you decide. I’m doing you a favor.”

“Scatter the ashes over the water, Quim. You have until sunset on the seventh day. You have to make it.”

“But I haven’t been to Haipo since I was born. How do I get to—”

The gunshots. The metal. The metal and the bone hitting the earth.

Ra-ta-tat. Another round for good measure.

Quim howls over his grandfather’s body.

The soldier says, “Please, sir. We should let this boy go.”

“Pra onde? Go where?” says the officer.

“Back to Haipo.”

“He’s not from Haipo. Haven’t you heard his accent?”

“He was born there, so he’s probably got family there — good people, not this trash. And he’s just a boy. They can still raise him the right way, Sir.”

“If we don’t kill him, other soldiers will. We might as well put him out of his misery now and save someone else the bullets.”

“Please.”

Quim presses his grandfather’s hand to his own cheek, silently begging the heartbeat not to fade. “Don’t leave me,” he whispers. “I’m so scared. I don’t know where to go.”

“Do you really think he can make it across the entire island on foot?”

“Can we at least let him try?”

The officer lowers his gun. Quim can still feel its smoke on his face, taste its powder, suffocate on its heat. A storm covers the officer’s face. Lightning flashes through his smile. “I’m telling you, he’s just going to die out there anyway.”

“If he really is from Haipo, he’ll find his way home. If not, someone else will get him. But we should give him a chance.”

The storm passes. The officer rests his gun over his shoulder. “Okay. We’ll let him try. You have seven seconds to get out of here, boy. If I can still see you, I’ll shoot you. If not, you can go. If you’re really from Haipo, you’ll make it. One.”

Quim scrambles to his feet.

“Two.”

He limps toward the trees.

“Three.”

He stumbles.

“Four.”

He catches himself.

“Five.”

He runs.

“Six.”

He races.

“Seven.”

He flies.

“I can still see you!”

Ra-ta-tat.

∙ ∙ ∙

After he is in Askari, he is in Uchoraji. After he is in Uchoraji, he is in Paka Forest. After he is in Paka Forest, he is on Mt. Mtoto. After he is on Mt. Mtoto, he is in Haipo. The cat without eyes leads him through the gates, disappearing once his feet touch the city soil.

This is the city, and yet it isn’t the city — it can’t be the city, Haipo, where he was born, a city cradled between the mountain and the sea like a forever-child. He thinks back on the stories he’s heard. Where are the buildings that are carved from sunlight? Where are the kithembe drummers who never stop playing?

He follows the wind to the ocean, where the water reflects the sky and the sky reflects the water: He reaches out to pull the setting sun back up into the sky, but it slips through his fingers. Night falls. The city darkens. He is too late.

A voice behind him says, “Não te conheço de algum lugar?”

Quim swallows, tasting salt.

The voice says again, “Haven’t I seen you before? Where did you come from?”

Quim touches the vial around his neck. In his throat, his own voice sounds like a death rattle, but he manages to speak.

When he finishes speaking, he turns around. The person he is looking at is himself.

But the boy that he sees is clean. His hands are not torn. He is not streaked with black earth. A white kanzu drapes past his ankles, and an embroidered kofia forms a half-moon on his head. But he still looks so sad, so impossibly sad, his eyes black and deep as tombs. This reflection of himself holds out his hand. “Are you ready?”

Quim nods. He and his reflection walk to the edge of the water. The air tastes less like salt and more like metal, and he tries not to shiver as, together, they unscrew the vial. Their hands overlap on top of it. They turn it slowly over the water.

Quim’s ashes drift down toward the ocean, thick and white, the same color as the city. They land on the water.

The wind skims across the surface, gathering up the ashes. It sings between collapsing buildings. It curls along the streets, blowing against rocks and bones, and slips through the glass in shattered windows. It tunnels through the rubble of churches and mosques that were once gold, that are turning gold again, that shimmer. The smell of the ocean rides on its back. And all the while, it is scattering the ashes over the city.

Quim realizes that he is now the only one holding the vial; his reflection has vanished. He looks down, expecting to find himself clean and in a white kanzu, but he still sees his dirty knees, his bleeding legs, his torn palms. The heavy sadness presses down on him again. Gripping his stomach, he feels suddenly hollow. Has he failed? After everything, has he failed? He will never be whole again.

For the first time in seven days, Quim lets himself cry. The tears swell like a tide in his chest, crash over him and drag him under. He just wants to hold his grandmother’s hand one more time before he is lost. “I’m sorry,” he says although no one is there to hear him.

The vial is no use to him now. He starts to fling it into the ocean — but catches himself. Even empty, it is his last tie to his old life. He rides his fingers over the grooves in the glass as if he’s tracing his way along a map. Askari, Uchoraji, Paka. Paka, Mtoto, Haipo. The tears slow to a stop. He closes his eyes and clutches it to his chest. No, he is not sorry. He has tried. Even though he failed, he tried, and he came far.

“Bem-vindo de volta,” whispers the wind.

He opens his eyes. Around him, sounds begin to rise from the city. Hands smack against stones as children cartwheel. Women cry out their prices for roasted maize. Cats hiss as they slink through the shadows. He smells the acidity of paint dripping from the sky. He tastes the smoke rising from the bakery and shields his eyes from the lights blinking on in houses. The thick, meaty taste of mutura already lines his lips.

“Bem-vindo de volta.” Now the words are coming from the city itself, speaking in his grandmother’s voice. Night is shattering, its pieces giving way to an open blue sky.

Quim presses both of his torn and bleeding palms to his chest. This time, he feels a heartbeat. In death, he is alive.

“Welcome home.”

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT JAMIE McGHEE

Jamie McGhee is a writer whose work explores how blackness is constructed, deconstructed and policed around the world. They are the author of the nonfiction book “You Mean It Or You Don’t: James Baldwin’s Radical Challenge,” as well as the graphic novel “Not Light, But Fire.” For their fiction, they were named a James Baldwin Fellow in Saint-Paul de Vence, France, and a Sacatar Fellow in Itaparica, Brazil. They are based in Germany. WEBSITE

ASTRAL

By Aliyah Curry

How did the skin of you taste/when

I fed you to you

million cherry seeds on your tongue burst in the quietest/

silence buzzing pink meat of you/in quiet vibration with

still slippery brown lips-

Won’t you ease the pink galaxy

sizzling with stars into me?

If color theory is/correct

pink with brown make

ears pop/accurate

pink and this sunburst create

surf and wind spray

this buoy/rocksteady

starship your body of

rocket steel/holding water meat

I give you my wings

for space

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT ALIYAH CURRY

Aliyah Curry is a queer Southern bred writer, focusing on Black female sexuality and mental health. When not writing poetry, she makes film, theater, and photographs, travels, and has dance parties with her niece. Her words can be found in Port City Review, Permission to Write, Cathexis Northwest Press, and most recently in her chapbook, The Angels Have Always Been Black, published with Bottlecap Press. Keep up with her and their daughters at https://theirdaughters.productions

HOME’S THRENODY

By Olaitan Humble

—after Sandra Gustin

when i was eight, i stole paintbrushes from a sorcerer’s cache & painted my father in the portrait of a figure i could not name. i raised the painting to the sky & muttered silent incantations i had read from a book in his lair. lightening struck in a dreadful crescendo then i woke up a grown man in a young body. father became a tatterdemalion tearing down home in successions accompanied with cacophonous wails. unseen creatures ululated with father’s temperament. this was when thobes of penitence tarried at our balcony. father was a hard man to please. before this, he often rebuked my physics teacher. a glass prism refracts light & my physics teacher calls it god. no statement had infuriated him like this very one. how a breath could leave a sentence and not return. consider a stone that has been lying in water for a very long time. the water couldn’t penetrate the stone. the stone couldn’t leave the water. father was just like that. hardened that he never guffawed at my presence. once, he said i deserved to die young because just like my teacher, i, too preferred to think that photons merited our worship. i was young but i needed not be told to fear fire. alas — curiosity excited me so much. it still does. i remember when the last moon cycle elapsed. father blessed my eyes with lapis lazuli — amaranthine bliss from the realm of optical illusions. we travelled to a transverse world of phantoms where queans were masterminds of nuptials. there was a place called home. fireflies illuminated its garden at night & milk flowed from its spring by day. paeans enlivened it but now, for the nth time, we are at the threshold of an event horizon.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT OLAITAN HUMBLE

Olaitan Humble is a writer, editor at The Lumiere Review and reader at Bandit Fiction. A finalist for NND Poetry Prize and a nominee for Pushcart Prize, he was shortlisted for Loft Books Poetry Prize. His writing appears or is forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly, Chiron Review, Hobart, Superstition Review, Luna Luna Magazine and Rigorous Magazine, among others. He is currently an undergraduate at the University of Lagos. Twitter: @olaitanhumble. WEBSITE

WHAT TO THE BLACK MAN IS PATRIOTISM: Patriotism and the MCU’s Black Captain America

By E. Chad Metz

Marvel Studios has branched out from the big screen to continuing their serialized stories on television through the Disney+ streaming service. Their first planned, but second released (thanks COVID), series was the highly anticipated The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (FAWS). Following up where Avengers: Endgame left off, the show tells the story of the weight and symbolism the Captain America shield brings to those who wield it. That much was obvious when the show was announced. What was not obvious was how the series showed that the symbol not only means different things to different people, but also questions the image of patriotism.

Carrying the shield and taking on the name “Captain America” comes with an inherent sense of patriotism. It is assumed that the wielder of the title is patriotic in the jingoistic sense of the word, but does that change when the person does not fit the “ideal” patriotic vision, i.e., if it is a Black man holding the shield? That is the specific question Sam Wilson/The Falcon (Anthony Mackie) is grappling with through the series. He is not the only one that questions the patriotism of a Black Captain America. The series introduces Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumby). Bradley was one of many test subjects used in the 50s when the military was trying to recreate the super soldier serum given to Steve Rogers. A member of the military, Bradley’s own government lied, experimented, tortured, and imprisoned him over the course of many years. It is reminiscent of practices by the U.S. military. Throughout history, Black soldiers were mistreated and disrespected, all while in the service of their country. So, while he never held the mantle of Captain America, he is directly tied to that lineage and is an important voice on what patriotism is for the series. These two Black men are bound by their relationship to the shield as well as their time in the military, but is that all that defines their patriotism in relation to Captain America?

Fans of the MCU have seen Sam Wilson fly as the Falcon since 2014’s Captain America: Winter Soldier. From his first scene, the audience was made aware of his military background; the military sweatshirt sparking the conversation with Rogers. The audience was led to believe that, like Rogers, Sam is a soldier. Steve actually believes Sam to be an Air Force pilot, finding out later what “para-rescue” was all about. Because of his military involvement and partnering with Captain America, the audience gets a blind sense of Sam’s patriotism. However, what we normally think of as patriotic, unwavering support for one’s country, would not apply to Sam. Captain America comes to him while he is on the run from the government, the legal representation of law in the country. The audience knows that the government is actually a secret terrorist organization but Sam never considers that he is on the wrong, non-patriotic, side. As he says in Winter Soldier, “Captain America needs my help, there’s no better reason to get back in.” Sam decides that if everything he believes about Captain America is true, he is on the right side. Helping people is a recurring theme with Sam. In the beginning he is running counseling services for Veteran’s Affairs office. His core conflict in FAWS is convincing the Flag-smashers that he understands their plight and wants to help. Sam’s heart is his strength, but holding that shield can come off as a selling out to the people he most wants to represent.

While the audience had six movies to become familiar with Sam, this series is the introduction to Isaiah Bradley. Originally introduced in the Marvel Comic series Truth: Red, White, & Black, Isaiah has become a part of Captain America lore. When the series introduces Isaiah, the traditional sense of patriotism seems long gone from the character, and it is understandable. In his opening scene Isaiah describes what he got for being a hero, “they put my ass in jail…for thirty years. People running tests, taking my blood.” All of this after the government used Isaiah to do undercover missions. He beat the Winter Soldier in 1951 and Bucky confirmed that Hydra feared Isaiah. The country he served did not deem him fit to become public, and they locked him away; a soldier so successful he not only defeated the Winter Soldier, he took his arm. His reward for jobs well done was a prison cell.

Having limited time with Isaiah to understand his patriotism, it is important to understand the historical basis for the character. The comic character was inspired by the Tuskegee Experiments. That inspiration carried over to the MCU counterpart. Both versions “volunteered” to take experimental versions of the super soldier formula that created Captain America because the exact formula was lost with the death of Dr. Erskine. Going by the story presented, MCU Isaiah fought during the Korean War. This is important because it can give the audience a reference to what Black men were thinking about when joining the military during that time. Why join a war, when there was a clear battle at home? The Korean War was one of the conflicts the United States used to draft people into the armed forces, but there were some Black families that saw the military as a means to financial security. This was bolstered by President Truman signing Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the armed forces. It is unclear which route MCU Isaiah took, but, leaning on the comic version, he probably saw the economic advantages and enlisted. What he got was mistreatment and betrayal from the people he signed up to protect.

When Sam and Isaiah meet for the first time, they are coming from those two very different places. Sam is a universe-saving hero given the choice to become a symbol, while Isaiah is a hermit after thirty years imprisonment and a fake death. Even with those differences, Sam, after wrapping his head around all the information he just received, questioned what his sacrifice meant. What, to the Black man, is patriotism? In his eyes, Isaiah is a patriot for the sacrifices he was forced to make for his country. Isaiah did sign up to serve and had everything taken from him for it. Not because of something he did, but what the country did to him. Isaiah’s story is part of the reason Sam decided to pick up the shield. Isaiah was hidden away because America would not accept a Black man as the icon of hope and freedom. He was better, faster, brighter…but Black. Freedom was— and to some people still is —only a white man’s right. To Sam, it was time for Captain America to embody the spirit of those who had never experienced freedom. Those who had never had a choice. America’s hero needed to be a Black man. As for Isaiah, it took Sam standing up with that shield, knowing people would not accept it, knowing that Isaiah himself did not think it could be done, for him to accept a Black man as the true symbol of America.

∙ ∙ ∙

ABOUT E. CHAD METZ

E. Chad Metz is an editor/writer currently in the suburbs of Houston, TX, by way of small-town Louisiana. Chad, as called by family and friends, enjoys working with Young Adult Fiction, with an emphasis on superheroes, black fantasy, and black coming of age.

When not working in the field, Chad can be found completing coursework for his Masters in Library Science, spending time with his family, stressing over the LSU football season, or obsessing over the failures of Warner Bros. bringing a good Superman movie to the screen.