TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 120, May 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: May 2020

SCIENCE FICTION

The Time Traveler’s Advice to the Lovelorn
Adam-Troy Castro

One Hundred Sentences About the City of the Future: A Jeremiad
Alex Irvine

Melting Like Metal
Ada Hoffmann

Rager in Space
Charlie Jane Anders

FANTASY

I Bury Myself
Carmen Maria Machado

The Fenghuang
Millie Ho

We Are Where the Nightmares Go
C. Robert Cargill

Destinations of Love
Alexander Weinstein

EXCERPTS

Creatures of Charm and Hunger
Molly Tanzer

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: May 2020
LaShawn M. Wanak

Media Review: May 2020
Jeremiah Tolbert and Matthew Tolbert

Interview: Stephen Graham Jones
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Adam-Troy Castro

Millie Ho

Ada Hoffman

Alexander Weinstein

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2020 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Galen Dara

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: May 2020

John Joseph Adams | 200 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 120th issue.

This month’s cover is from Galen Dara, illustrating a new science fiction short by Adam-Troy Castro. If you’ve ever wondered how a time traveler would see your personal problems, be sure to read Castro’s new “The Time Traveler’s Advice to the Lovelorn.” Ada Hoffmann has created a future where AIs are gods and angels are cyborgs in “Melting Like Metal.” We also have SF reprints by Alex Irvine (“One Hundred Sentences About the City of the Future”) and Charlie Jane Anders (“Rager in Space”).

Millie Ho spins a story of fire, rebirth, and love in her new fantasy short “The Fenghuang.” Alexander Weinstein also tackles issues of the heart in his new “Destinations of Love.” Our fantasy reprints are from Carmen Maria Machado (“I Bury Myself”) and C. Robert Cargill (“We Are Where the Nightmares Go”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our feature interview is with Stephen Graham Jones. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt from Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Charm and Hunger.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Press Start to Play, Loosed Upon the World, and The Apocalypse Triptych. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for WIRED’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. He also served as a judge for the 2015 National Book Award. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

The Time Traveler’s Advice to the Lovelorn

Adam-Troy Castro | 3637 words

Time is best described as the thing that must crawl by before even the most unlikely events finally get around to happening.

A lot of it had passed in the little village we now visit, drifting down its cobblestoned streets like loose papers carried away by the wind, before the most unlikely of all developments had finally occurred.

Samael, the junk collector, had fallen in love.

Nobody had ever expected this, in large part because Samael was as dull and unimaginative a man who had ever lived. Some thought him simple, as no attempts to provide him with an education had ever stuck; some thought him unfriendly, as he greeted any attempt at conversation with grunted monosyllables, hoarding what remained of a voice that years of near-silence had turned to rust. There were places in the village where he was also suspected of being cruel, and where children were warned to return their homes whenever he appeared, dragging his homemade cart from place to place in search of discarded things he could fix and resell for enough coins to feed him so he could do the exact same thing tomorrow. Between that, his hulking size, and the default scowl of a man whose teeth were not pleasant for others to look at, he was considered sinister and, at the bare minimum, unpleasant. No one in the village imagined that there could be the capacity for love anywhere in his soul. But the truth was, he was no monster: just a quiet man with scant need for other people, content with his daily routine and what little comfort that labor earned him . . . until he saw her.

Magda was the watchmaker’s daughter, a girl who had sometime over the course of one harsh winter when most people had stayed indoors and only ventured out reluctantly, and in heavy furs that made everybody look alike, advanced from sweet and appealing child to something taller and rounder in all the right places. In the years that followed she had only blossomed and was still in the process of blossoming the first time the junk collector spotted her. She was unaware of his reverence and had she learned of it, would not have responded to it except with kindness, for she was a sweet and generous soul of precisely the sort who understood that appearance was the least reliable of all the methods human beings use to measure one another.

This story could go on at great length smothering her physical description in superlatives, or in asserting how she brightened every room she entered; how kind she was, how prematurely wise, and so on. It could then become either a story in redemptive love, as she saw in him that which all her friends and neighbors had missed; or, for narrators of a certain bent, a horror story which hinged on Samael’s obsession becoming a dark one, as he was turned deadly by his feelings of rejection. However, it heads in neither of those two directions. Magda herself, who was every bit as wonderful as Samael believed and who was understandably the subject of wistful fantasies by many men other than the junk collector, went on to live a wholly blessed life in which the strange man with the cart was nothing but an occasional presence, noted but never remarked upon in her youth, before he disappeared forever.

But for Samael, still caught in those throes of longing, the dilemma remained a fresh one. He knew that he was not the kind of man who won beautiful young women, not with looks, not with charm, not with sheer animal magnetism, not with security, and not with sparkling repartee. He was also not the kind of man who would consider taking a young lady against her will. He was just profound enough to understand that this included not just the significant power of his arms, but also the potions available to any with the coin to spend, that could induce in those who ingested them the most helpless forms of love for whoever included a lock of their own hair in the mixture, even when they possessed no qualities worth loving. These may have been tempting prospects for those whose concept of love was closer to possession, but had certain side effects so easy to detect that anybody traveling with someone so ensorcelled ran the risk of arrest, while the unfortunate in their possession was forced to guzzle the readily available antidotes: not a factor in Samael’s disinclination, in any event, since what he wanted was for Magda to love him not just unreservedly, but of her own free will, with none of her magnificent spark diminished or set on paths she would not travel herself.

No, what he needed more than anything else was advice, from someone who would neither tell him he pursued an impossible dream, or laugh at him.

So he went to the time traveler.

• • • •

The time traveler had been an intermittent fixture of this region for centuries, first appearing as an old man when the village consisted of no more than a half dozen houses, then disappearing and reappearing every few years, sometimes older, sometimes younger, always bathed in a soft amber glow that made his full aspect comprehensible to those who lived their entire lives in only one age. Whenever he appeared, he was always adamant that he was no supernatural being, but a mere man learned in the ways of his own far-future time, enamored of this particular village for its mountain air, for its scenic vistas, and for the warmth of the people. “Please,” he said, more than once over the centuries, “consider me one of you.” And though this was not quite possible, given the miraculous technology in his possession, he had nevertheless succeeded in rendering himself a figure regarded with more affection than fear.

Sometimes, as in this century, he slowed himself down and lived as a nearly-frozen figure, sitting at a table in the inn that was reserved for his use, and taking years to complete a single eye-blink; speeding up and providing response only to those who asked him direct questions, which happened only rarely because this was a village that respected the privacy of others and only a few people presumed themselves burdened by issues that required the input of a time traveler. Once a decade or so, he would call for a refill on his drink, paying with a coin forged out of a metal so rare that just one was enough to leave the various generations of the innkeeper’s family among the wealthiest in the mountains.

He was thus available for Samael, who sat opposite, received the great man’s attention and explained the attendant problem.

The figure behind the amber glow spent a few minutes determining to his satisfaction what we have already established, that what Samael sought was not some handbook for obtaining the maiden against her will, and said, “You could try poetry.”

Samael regarded the prospect with something like horror. “I am no poet.”

“Understand, sir: It does not have to be a good poem, only a sincere one. Over the years, many ardent admirers launched dynasties with rhymes of painful scansion, using naught but the three most belabored eternals, June, moon, and spoon. In many cases, the object of affection recognized her aspirant’s pitiful writing skill and repressed her incredulous laughter out of reciprocated feeling. Others would not have recognized great poetry even if a thick volume of it were dropped on their heads from a fifth-story window. They responded only to the sentiment, however poorly described. Just offer the truth, and she will respond as her heart bids her.”

Following this advice with substantial difficulty, Samael could only protest, “But I am no good with words, at all. Maybe you can help me?”

“You seem to think that just because I possess technology grander than your own that I am capable of performing as indulgent Cyrano. Forgive me, my dear man: On paper, I am a dreadful clod. And you do not want a third party to write your love letters, in any event.

“Let me tell you something. Many years ago, as I reckon time, I was an idiot not much more advanced in matters of the heart than your own unpracticed self, and I fell helplessly, head-over-heels in love with a beautiful and charming young lady, a poet herself, in whose presence I could emit only incoherent stammers. She must have thought I was some kind of idiot, and she was not wrong in this, because it was what I became whenever she was near. Not burdened with my current experience, I traveled to 1599 and commissioned the greatest poet of all time, William Shakespeare himself, to produce a sonnet to her glory. I paid him a fortune in the coin of his realm, described the object of my adoration as best I could, and traveled to one evening a fortnight hence to collect what I’d commissioned. I assure you it looked great to me. And then I leaped forward four hundred years and handed it to her. Can you guess what happened?”

Samael had never in his life perceived anything involving sexual politics with perspicacity sufficient to guess what would happen next, in any proposed collection of variables. His shrug was as eloquent as he ever got.

“She read it,” the time traveler said, “and she hated me.”

“Why?”

“I had reckoned without the voice of the writer. Shakespeare was bawdy, sir. As a dramatist he delighted in finding ways to insert dirty jokes, naughty puns, and out-and-out pornography, wherever he could, to wake up those theatregoers whose attention spans were not quite up to multiple hours of free verse. He also enjoyed finding ways for his characters to subtly insult each other, when they were otherwise obliged to treat one another with deference and respect. So imagine if you will a man of those inclinations engaged by a wealthy patron, one who confessed himself incapable of sculpting the metaphors capable of winning a young lady’s heart. Imagine that he despised the very enterprise and wanted to warn the fair maiden off, and you will understand that he deeply amused himself producing lines that to this dullard’s eyes appeared complimentary but to her educated understanding of metaphor and Elizabethan slang portrayed her as a perfumed harlot who spent her days by the waterfront giving repeat-customer discounts to sailors. So she slapped me, called me disgusting, and flounced off, while I was left rubbing my jaw and saying, ‘Ow.’”

Samael required long minutes of cogitation to decode that speech, but eventually he said, “Maybe not poetry, then.”

“Trust me, Samael: You cannot get what you want from the woman without engaging with her on some level, and that is precisely what renders success in this enterprise, through any intermediary, unlikely. Your problem is your profound personality deficit. You possess nothing capable of fascinating her.”

“My looks, then,” Samael said. “You can do something about my looks.”

“Samael, I could take you to eras where flesh is whim and where anyone can have the form that best suits them, where a man who wants to fly can grow wings in an afternoon, flit about like an eagle, and then discard them in order to fit into his tuxedo at night. I can surely arrange to make you an Adonis, of any shade from infrared to ultra-violet; even transparency is a possibility. But you will still be yourself. Even if you dazzle her so completely that she invites you to share your bed, she will sooner or later realize that you possess the conversational skills of an oaf and that you lack the personality to inspire her heart and mind. And then there is the aging factor. In ten years, fifteen, however beautiful your altered appearance at the onset, the bloom will still be off your rose. She will look elsewhere, or wish she could.”

This all bore the ring of truth. Samael could only feel what all men feel whenever all the light goes out of their respective worlds: a terrible heaviness that he would no doubt carry for the rest of his life. And yet, persistent to the end, he managed to insist on his life’s sole dream.

“I will take those fifteen years if it means I can let her know I love her, can be loved by her in return, can make her happy and sleep by her side. It is all I want on this Earth.”

The time traveler regarded Samael in a silence that persisted for so very long that the junk collector wondered if he’d returned to dilated immobility, and ultimately said, “I can give you fifteen years.”

• • • •

Samael never would understand a single damn thing that happened to him during the subjective experience of time travel. There was a vehicle, of course, but aside from enclosing the time traveler and himself, it so completely failed his entire understanding of objecthood that he was left squinting at all the oddly intersecting lines that made the inside of his skull itch. There was a direction traveled, but it was not forward or backward, up or down, north or south or east or west, or even from a recognizable here to a definable there. There was some sensation of movement, but it seemed to affect different parts of his body at different speeds, and left him with the impression that he’d spent at least part of the time with his head pickled in a broth of his own liver. It involved an understanding of the universe that would have cured madmen and shattered the sanity of savants. He was wholly unprepared for it and he survived the experience with his soul intact only because

she

(not the actual person he had yet to win, but the idea of her)

remained painted on his heart’s tremulous canvas.

He was thoroughly infected with the disease that had made an uncounted battalion of ardent swains, over too many millennia to count, write poems to the glory of her, march off to pointless wars for the glory of her, carve masterpieces out of clay or granite or coral rock for the glory of her, trudge across deserts and cut off ears and shoot at Presidents and arrange for demeaning tattoos, all for the glory of her.

He endured his torso being spaghettified and whirled around his skull in fractal spirals that would have sent Euclid screaming into the night, without complaint, all for love of her.

Then the time traveler said, “Most first-timers are most uncomfortable during this next part,” and it got so much worse that everything that had come before was like a gentle ride on a haywagon during the harvest festival. And still Samael hung on, adamant, Magda’s glorious features glowing before him in sharpest candlelight, for this and ten times more would have been well worth the price, for the mere possibility of the glorious Magda looking upon him with adoration.

“We’re here,” the time traveler said.

Samael felt his ribcage regain a third dimension. It nevertheless took several seconds longer for him to persuade his eyelids to flutter, and so it was in absolute darkness that he managed a forlorn, “Where’s here?”

“This is a time some fourteen thousand years after the era you know, when Mankind has completely mastered the art of bodily modification. Here, every man and woman and every human being in the seven hundred genders now understood to occupy those two traditional extremes can daily modify their forms, to suit whatever their needs may be. This is an era where the philtrum and the uvula are recognized as the untapped reproductive organs that they have always been, an era where some human beings arrange to exist at the size of prions and others, individuals, exist on the map as snow-capped mountain ranges; an era with the capacity to transform you into the fully representative and truthful version of yourself capable of not just winning Magda, but also keeping her for your lifetime, while remaining fair to her own desires. What you see when you open your eyes, dear Samael, will be like nothing else you’ve ever known, but it will also be the place that realizes your most extravagant dreams.”

Samael opened his eyes, and yes, what he saw, through the time machine’s equivalent of a front window, was a metropolis that made no sense to him: a skyline of towering glass extending as far as his eyes could see, beneath a sky the color of orange marmalade. Through the transparent walls of all those towers he could see little black dots he understood to be the descendants of human beings going about their daily business, perhaps even working at their jobs; and yet of those who were closer, some had a wholly horrifying number of limbs or heads and some seemed to be, for lack of a better phrase, on fire. Those with angel wings flitted through the air and those who had elected to be liquid simply rolled across the landscape like living tsunami. And behind them all were figures who towered over the tallest buildings, their heads fuzzy in the distance at the altitudes where their crania scraped the limits of the atmosphere. The music behind it all sounded like all the violins in all the world playing different concertos all at once, and yet they melded, in ways that made the junk collector’s heart ache in most of the mere handful of ways it hadn’t ached before. But time travel had not destroyed him, because of his adoration of Magda, and the sight of this landscape—a vision that an educated man might have compared for sheer madness to a happier version of the landscapes of hell captured by Hieronymus Bosch—did not destroy him either, because Magda remained both overlay and underlay, anchoring him in what amounted to a sandwich of sanity. He gulped and said, “What do we do?”

The time traveler said, “I will take you to a certain clinic I know about, where more exotic requests can be accommodated. You will be improved, and rendered capable of winning Magda’s devotion. I will bring you back, and you will live happily ever after. I guarantee you this, Samael, and I want you to know that I am wholly sincere about this, because I have divined your soul and I do believe, to the depths of my own, that you are a good man, utterly deserving of these ambitions.”

The junk collector said, “Umm, thanks,” and then he wept, because he had never really known kindness or even the possibility that dreams could be realized by one such as him. After a moment, before allowing the time traveler to escort him into the streets he could not understand, he succumbed to the fear-impulse. “Will it hurt?”

“It’s love, Samael. Of course it will hurt. That’s much of the reason people want it.”

And Samael smiled, because even a shambling clod like himself could see the truth in this, and with no further hesitation, he let the time traveler lead him to his destiny, all for the love of her.

• • • •

And of the resolution to this story I can you that the time traveler brought him back to Magda, who fell in love with him in mere seconds; and that she took him to her bed and cherished him to the end of his days. His life was short, only the fifteen years that had been promised, but it was fifteen years of pure bliss. To most people of the town, the junk dealer Samael never returned, and was never missed, remarked upon only by those incapable of letting things like an unsolved disappearance just be.

• • • •

But before that:

The time traveler left the tavern that generations of villagers had come to know as his home, for the first time since some of the oldest people in town first blinked at the phenomenon known as light while squalling outside the wombs that had incubated them.

His stride, known so rarely in the past decades, was jovial. He was a good man, this time traveler. He had a genuine affection for people in general and in specific for the inhabitants of this one small village, whose village he had kept safe from the churning of world politics, from economic busts, from the tramp of conquering armies, and from all the other ills that beset less protected men. A more judgmental observer would say that he kept them as pets. In truth, he valued them as neighbors. He knew they were provincial but he found their conservative ways a fine curative to the surfeit that’s the lot of the traveler. He would have done anything for them, anything reasonable: and what he had done for Samael was not just reasonable, but wise.

He made his way to the home of the watchmaker and he knocked on the door: three short raps, neither angry nor threatening. And in a couple of seconds, the door was opened by a vision of extraordinary beauty, fresh-faced and sweet and with a smile capable of illuminating the world. The time traveler was far too old for her, millennia too old for her, but he felt as instantly in love with her, in that moment, as Samael had been: and he thought: This, at last, is a reason to love Mankind.

“Hello?” Magda said.

“Hello,” the time traveler said. “An admirer of yours has asked me to bring you a gift.”

He reached into his coat, which had many big and expansive pockets, and handed her a sleepy, eight-week-old beagle.

©2020 by Adam-Troy Castro. | Art © 2020 by Galen Dara.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). His latest release was the audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel And Other Stories (Skyboat Media), which features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” Adam lives in Florida with his wife Judi and a trio of chaotic paladin cats.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

One Hundred Sentences About the City of the Future: A Jeremiad

Alex Irvine | 3246 words

It rained yesterday, only in my precinct, far in excess of the scheduled and published amount, as a result of which some of my more delicate houseplants, which are flowering, were severely damaged.

The choices in the mayoral election are disappointing, far from the ideological panoply promised in early stages of the campaign.

Because of this, I am deciding whether or not I should file a formal Notice of Intent not to vote, and request that information regarding the civic and criminal consequences of such a filing be forwarded to me immediately.

Aware that the regulations concerning feedback to the Central Civic Authority limit my initial complaint to one hundred sentences, I am indulging in sentence structures more complex and digressive than would be my inclination otherwise.

It is my understanding that the daemon constructed to assess and rout complaints to the relevant authorities is equipped to understand any grammatically correct sentence.

If this is not the case, I request notification of this fact immediately.

As a gesture of good faith toward the one-hundred-sentence regulation, and a demonstration of my commitment to the civic goodwill, I will eschew the use of semicolons throughout this document.

My wife and children concur with my displeasure regarding the amount of rain that fell in our precinct yesterday, and are agitating for me to add a further complaint about municipal services, which has to do with the promised delivery of entertainment through our household channel.

We have rigorously fulfilled our own entertainment obligations under city statute, as you will note from a cursory examination of our feed statistics, which demonstrate that our channel is of above average popularity in the areas of sexual experimentation, cookery for children, and saxophone lessons.

My wife and I will continue to provide popular content in the area of sexual experimentation, and nothing in this complaint should be construed as a threat to withhold provision of said popular content.

If I may devote one sentence of my hundred to humor, I will also note that my children will continue to cook for the educational/culinary benefit of the citizenry.

Saxophone lessons will also continue, although my oldest son wishes me to append a complaint about the mandated price of reeds, which were reclassified as a Controlled Commodity after the last election.

This reclassification will have a real and perceptible effect on our family’s election behavior during this cycle.

My oldest son, who has taken charge of the saxophone content on our family’s channel, becomes eligible for the franchise four days before the election.

If our only complaints were weather-related, we would not clutter municipal bandwidth and processing time; however, the added difficulties with delivery of entertainment and informational content over our family’s channel provoked us to this action.

I note the use of a semicolon in the previous sentence, and will therefore limit myself to a total of ninety-nine sentences.

Given our family’s concerns about the lack of ideological diversity on the ballot, the recent failures of municipal weather control are profoundly disturbing.

Mayoral candidates differ in no significant respect from the current leadership under which municipal weather control has failed and commodity prices have risen onerously.

For this reason, we request a waiver that will permit us to apply for a Notice of Intent not to cast a ballot in the upcoming election.

We are fully aware that municipal statute provides for such a request only in the event that the petitioner can demonstrate that choosing not to cast a vote in a specific instance is more in keeping with the principles of civic engagement than voting for a slate of candidates would be.

First, we are enjoined to make a brief argument addressing our wish not to engage in the Alternative Candidate Selection mechanism.

It is our family’s belief that the Alternative Candidate Selection mechanism is prima facie illegal given municipal emphasis on party enrollment and primary winnowing of the candidate pool.

If any citizen is allowed to write in any candidate despite the systems in place to produce candidates, of what value are those systems?

Knowing that the system in place does in fact, and has in the past, produced candidates who have performed great service for our conurbation, and further knowing that no candidate ever named through Alternative Candidate Selection has ever succeeded to office, we reject the idea that the Alternative Candidate Selection mechanism is a viable alternative to voting within the pool of party candidates.

We further wish to register, in the strongest possible terms, our disapproval of the common practice of soliciting Alternative Candidate Selection votes as a way for an individual to increase traffic and thereby municipal reimbursement and bandwidth subsidies.

We question the motives of those citizens who have let it be known that they would welcome Alternative Candidate Selection votes, and suggest to municipal authorities that those citizens are acting in a manner contrary to the established political procedures that enable the smooth functioning of our government.

Therefore, since Alternative Candidate Selection undermines the political structure that keeps our city functioning, we argue that it is not a viable alternative to a selection from one of the party tickets.

Further, since there is no meaningful difference among the party candidates, the elimination of Alternative Candidate Selection as a viable alternative means that in this election, there is no way for a vote to have the effect our family desires and needs from the electoral process.

This concludes our primary rationale for applying for a Notice of Intent not to cast a ballot in the upcoming municipal election.

We further provide a number of secondary rationales in support of the primary rationale.

Following a recent cast of our family’s popular Kidz in the Kitchen program, we were contacted by four different citizens who wished to appear on the program under the fictitious pretext of being family friends who were invited to dinner.

Each of these citizens suggested, with varying degrees of duplicity, that such an appearance would increase their chances of successfully conducting a political campaign through the process of Alternative Candidate Selection.

Three of the four suggested that if our family did not agree to the fictitious pretext of inviting them over for dinner, there could be political consequences in the future.

The fourth made no such threat, which our family takes as a demonstration of the finer qualities of some of our city’s prominent citizens.

We refused all four requests, desiring to keep Kidz in the Kitchen free of political taint, and since then we have suffered evident political harassment.

To wit: Kidz in the Kitchen has seen firewall attacks in several precincts, which our privately hired AI investigator determined were malicious attempts to prevent Kidz in the Kitchen from reaching the neighborhoods in which its viewership is highest and most committed.

At least one of those attacks was conducted along a frequency known to be leased by one of the potential “guests” of Kidz in the Kitchen for his day-to-day professional activities.

A second potential “guest” has taken the opportunity of his media platform to suggest that all public channels offering sexual experimentation programming should be banned or placed behind onerous security protocols to prevent the material contained within from reaching anyone who might find it objectionable on religious or moral grounds.

This suggestion is a clear contradiction of the city’s stated commitment to freedom of informational flow, and can only be interpreted as an attack on our family, since this potential “guest” never agitated against sexual experimentation programming before our family refused to commit to his fictional pretext for an appearance on Kidz in the Kitchen.

Our popular sexual experimentation programming has recently encountered difficulties due to decreased erotic drive, a problem I and my wife attribute directly to the stressful effects of being made the focus of politically motivated attacks.

Even our attempt to co-opt the problem through role-playing as if we were ourselves the potential “guests” and their spouses (a strategy recommended by the city’s Bureau of Sexual Health) failed due to our personal difficulties in finding the comedy inherent in being made the focus of politically motivated attacks.

Because of this and other problems inherent in the political process, our family feels that we have a right to entertain the possibility of not participating in the upcoming election.

We are also considering filing claims for emotional distress and impingement on means of livelihood against both the potential “guests” and the municipal authorities, both biological and Distributed Network Origin, who have failed in their duties to protect citizens from abuse of the political process.

The nature of the abuses of the political process were outlined above.

We elect not to engage in mud-slinging over the third potential “guest” and our suspicions regarding his involvement in the price fluctuations of single and double reeds for woodwind instruments, which as noted above have onerously increased the burden on our oldest son and his popular saxophone tutorial programming.

However, despite this nod to civic decorum, we are fully committed to our allegations regarding the other two potential “guests” and their egregious manipulation of city infrastructure for political ends.

We therefore request, as outlined above, a full opinion from the municipal AI responsible for legal issues regarding the civic and political consequences of filing a Notice of Intent to not vote in the upcoming elections.

We feel this opinion is necessary because existing city documentation, as available on public servers, is inadequate and fails to take into account the actions of those human beings still remaining in municipal government and positions of influence within the business and financial communities, not to mention the information infrastructure.

As an aside, our family strongly feels that the time has absolutely come for the city’s Bureau of Information Architecture and Bandwidth to be turned over to an all-AI staff.

What better demonstration of the city’s avowed commitment to equal placement policies for Humans of Distributed Network Origin?

The previous is noted to be a question, but will be included in this letter’s count of sentences, which, as previously noted, will total ninety-nine due to the presence of a semicolon.

We as a family feel that it is important not to take advantage of either people or systems.

This sentiment extends to our approach to municipal government, in which DNO Humans perform as well or better than their biological counterparts, and are much less likely to run afoul of ethical problems and conflicts of interest.

We find it regrettable that none of the candidates pursuing the mayor’s office has seriously considered this step, which would enormously increase the efficiency and responsiveness of municipal government.

We find this failure one more data point in our hypothesis that there is no meaningful difference among the candidates, and, as pointed out above, regard this lack of difference as a valid reason for expressing our desire to apply for a full accounting of information regarding the consequences of filing a Notice of Intent.

Because we find our point adequately argued in the previous fifty-five sentences, we will devote the next forty-three (because of the semicolon) to a litany of suggestions for improvement of civic life and governance.

This is the greatest city in the history of human civilization, and it is the responsibility of the polis to seek ways in which it can be made even better.

We call for abolishment of the popular and ironic slang term “Dinos” as it is used to refer to Humans of Distributed Network Origin, on the grounds that its evocation of the pejorative epithet dinosaur is demeaning to their incorrigible individuality and nature as a parallel and equally valid stage in the development of humanity.

The term AI, short for artificial intelligence, though outdated and unreflective, is nevertheless free of such biases and has been found to be a preferable alternative.

For this reason, our family uses that term whenever the full nomenclature “Human of Distributed Network Origin” is found unwieldy.

As an alternative, when “AI” seems flippant, the compromise coinage “DNO Human” has been, and will continue to be, preferred.

This consensus was reached in consultation among all family members, with children accorded an equal vote due to their fuller investment in a future they will inhabit long after their parents’ lifespans, however enhanced by current and future developments, have concluded.

We wish the relevant authorities to recall that some years ago, our city began its transformation under a leadership mandate to become the City of the Future, and now that a form of this envisioned future has become our present, we must not lose sight of this mandate.

The City of the Future must tolerate none of the failings and shortcomings of cities and civilizations past.

What emerges from any committed analysis of ideas of the City of the Future is an impression that the City of the Future is never fully achieved, and forever only sought for.

This seeking is what defines the City of the Future.

The slate of candidates available to the polis in the current election has utterly failed to demonstrate a commitment to seeking, and instead evinces a meek investment in the status quo.

The unpredictable and poorly controlled incidence of rainfall in our precinct is one example of this.

A DNO Human would do a much better job of regulating municipal meteorology than does the current biological human leadership, which is running unchallenged to continue its tenure.

We call for a City-wide assessment of the ways in which DNO Humans would be more effective stewards of City resources, and an aggressive implementation of such policies where they are found to improve upon the existing state of municipal services.

We call for a thorough re-examination of the ways in which the City’s environmental, climatological, economic, information, and social policies contribute to the quest for the next becoming of the City of the Future.

This call has been circulated to all subscribers of our popular programs in children’s cookery, intermediate saxophone, and sexual experimentation.

The authority to which we are addressing this letter will in all likelihood receive similar communications from a number of our subscribers.

We wish to declare that despite our solicitation of expression of common views, at no time did we suggest that continued provision of our popular content would be dependent on our subscribers expressing such views or conveying them to the relevant City authorities.

We make this declaration in order to differentiate our activity from the brazen political gamesmanship engaged in by the three potential “guests” who wished to use our popular content to further their guerrilla political candidacies.

Should the processing daemon at the Central Civic Authority be unable to distinguish between these two forms of political engagement, we request that the entirety of our petition be directed to a human, either biological or of Distributed Network Orgin, who will be able to assess it fairly and fully.

We are aware that the previous sentence will only be read in the event that its request has already been honored, which will probably mean that its motivating concern was misplaced, and it need not have been written.

It is our profound hope that the same is not true of the rest of our communication, which is born out of real and pressing concerns, and is meant to propose real and transformative solutions.

As I wrote the previous sentence, it began to rain again.

It was not scheduled to rain in our precinct again until Thursday.

We consider this further proof of the City’s failure under the leadership of humans of biological origin, and of the political system which they continue to dominate at the expense of potentially more effective and progressive leadership driven by DNO Humans.

My son declares his unwillingness to continue providing saxophone content until the meteorological situation is fully assessed and corrected.

I have not encouraged him in this decision, but as a father I am heartened at his investment in a political process that has failed him so utterly.

The leak in our kitchen roof has nothing to do with the origin of this complaint, although it is a well-known fact that the actions of the Central Civic Authority have contributed to the outrageous rates charged by licensed contractors in the areas of home repair and network administration.

As of this writing, our family will continue to provide Kidz in the Kitchen.

The continued provision of sexual experimentation content will to some extent depend on the emotional and psychological well-being of the principals in that content’s provision.

Said emotional and psychological well-being is in question at this moment, due to meteorological irregularities, which are known to affect human emotions, and a pervading sense that while our family performs its civic duties, the City is not performing its duties to us.

It will be clear, we hope, how this continued malfeasance on the part of City meteorological authorities strengthens our petition to explore any and all options with respect to civic engagement, including the pursuit of a Notice of Intent not to vote in upcoming elections.

In a spirit of good faith, we will, as a family, endeavor to convince our son that he should continue to provide saxophone content.

The final decision, however, will be his.

We have been in communication with a number of Humans of Distributed Network Origin, who are fully supportive of the sentiments expressed in previous sentences of this petition.

At their request, we have not included their identities, although we have secured their permission to characterize them as “representing a broad range of occupations, social strata, and roles within the informational architecture and civic ecology of the City.”

Their reticence to disclose their identities provides ample evidence of the degree to which DNO Humans feel marginalized in the life of the City despite their critical and necessary role in the function of nearly all civic authorities and bureaus.

Central Civic Authority ignores discontent such as that expressed in the preceding sentences at its peril.

This sentiment is not expressed as a threat, but as an acknowledgment of the deep feeling among the polis as a whole that the City of the Future has taken the passage of time as an excuse to pretend that the future is already here.

That is not the case, can never be the case, and must never be assumed to be the case.

It has stopped raining.

We are nevertheless committed to this course of action, and hope that Central Civic Authority or one of its representatives will contact us regarding our questions, both on the topics of the Notice of Intent and the status of the City considered more broadly.

We remain committed to the ideals of the City, and those of the future, and hope that this petition is taken in the spirit in which it was intended.

©2008 by Alex Irvine. Originally published in Postscripts. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Irvine’s original fiction includes Buyout, The Narrows, “Mystery Hill”, A Scattering of Jades, and several dozen short stories. He has also written graphic novels and comics (The Comic Book Story of Baseball, The Far Side of the Moon, Daredevil Noir), games, and a variety of licensed projects including the best-selling artifactual “metanovel” New York Collapse. A native of Ypsilanti, Michigan, he lives in South Portland, Maine. Find out more at alex-irvine.com or on Twitter @alexirvine.

Melting Like Metal

Ada Hoffmann | 6291 words

When the quantum supercomputing systems of the God called Nemesis registered the sighting of the heretic Candor Gray—already tried in absentia and slated for termination, and assigned the serial number of HA3-940QK322PF-P—Enga Afonbataw Konum of Nemesis was already waiting, as she’d waited during the last few dozen stupid assignments.

Enga was an angel of Nemesis, a no-longer-human cyborg built for a singular purpose: to hunt down and destroy the Gods’ enemies. To keep the galaxy safe, her teammate Elu would have said, but Enga knew better. She’d seen hundreds of heretics apprehended, from ravening cultists with genuine murder in their eyes to wide-eyed youngsters who’d unknowingly flouted the wrong regulation. They all screamed the same, in the angels’ custody; they all died the same. Enga might be a decorated veteran, with a towering stack of medals and commendations, but she had always known better than to call herself a hero.

It wasn’t a matter of morality. She had her task, and she was bound to it for eternity. No sense crying.

Angels looked mostly human on the outside. Just strong, healthy people with titanium plates glinting at their temples, an outward sign of the circuitry within. Angels’ most profound differences were on the inside. Enga was more heavily modified than most, but even she looked like the muscular, dark-skinned human she’d once been, save for those plates in her forehead and for her elaborate prosthetic arms, a forest of metal implements and weapons emerging from her strong organic shoulders.

She waited, then, in her predeployment room aboard the Menagerie, with her senses turned down to their lowest permissible sensitivity and her teammates at her sides. It was a shining metal room, like so many on ships like theirs, elegantly bare at first glance. The walls held intricate artworks, silver filigrees too delicate to be intelligible to mortals. There were no screens, no blinking lights, none of the disembodied voices announcing commands that mortals imagined when they depicted God-built spaceships in vids. There was no need for it: all the relevant information went straight to the insides of the angels’ heads. The room did have several elegant ergonomic chairs, where angels could sit comfortably when they expected, at any moment, for those orders to arrive.

Waiting like this was Enga’s default state. She liked to fight, if you could call that sense of grim and painful relish liking, but she liked most of all to be still. Not a muscle moved in her organic body and face, nor a servo in her arms. She breathed in and out, controlled, poised. Information streamed along her retinas and through more private, inner mental displays, and she ignored it. She would have turned it off, and her auditory cortex too, if that was allowed: been nothing but a dark, silent stillness. But Akavi had insisted that, in case of some rare emergency in which text-sending failed, all of his team should be capable of responding to sound.

Into that stillness, on an inner mental display, came the alert.

Target HA3-940QK322PF-P sighted—transmitting coordinates.

There was always a frisson of authority with these messages, even though they were automated. Nemesis’ consciousness, absorbed in broad strategy, had likely not noticed their passing. Instead, they were generated by the nonsentient surveillance subroutines assigned to Gray’s case. But Nemesis was, in some sense, a computer, and She was intimately connected to every system that served Her. So divinity was a matter of degree.

Enga reset her visual cortex to default, wincing as the predeployment room’s full brightness cut her eyes. The filigrees on the walls were supposed to look like mythic animals, confusions of wings and eyes, but mostly they were a bunch of finicky details that hurt to look at. A portal gleamed in the front wall: a silvery archway slightly larger than a normal door, currently leading nowhere.

Elu Ahriemu of Nemesis, at Enga’s right, had been lounging on one of the chairs; he scrambled quickly to his feet. Elu looked like a gawkily pretty, barely-adult boy. His appearance only meant that he’d been recruited young, not that he still was. Elu had been doing this longer than she had.

Akavi Averis, Inquisitor of Nemesis, stood patiently at her other side. Akavi could look like whatever he wanted to, but he’d gone with a variation on his usual theme: tall, slightly masculine-of-center, elegant, and commanding. His current body was Arinnan, the same as his quarry, with rounded features and slightly paler than galactic-standard skin. Akavi was a Vaurian shapeshifter, and he had the same inward circuitry as the other angels, but he could hide it when necessary, letting the titanium plates sink beneath opaque skin. The plates were visible now, though: Akavi was using his rank openly today.

They’d been assigned to Candor Gray’s case for weeks. Akavi had disguised himself as something ordinary, and had located Candor and verified accounts of his heresy. A first attempt to lure him away for quiet disposal had failed, but by then, it didn’t matter. The angels knew where he lived, where he worked, and most of the places he frequented in between. They knew the transport corridors he’d probably take if he ran. It was a matter of staking things out and waiting. Akavi had estimated a fifty percent chance that Gray wouldn’t realize what had happened with the lure attempt, and would show up to work as normal, unworried; and now he had.

Akavi gestured to Elu and Enga before mentally transmitting Gray’s coordinates. The stretch of wall within the portal’s archway flickered. Now they could see through it into a plainer room, a utility building close to Gray’s location.

Enga could never suppress a flinch when using portals. They didn’t feel like anything, any more than walking through a corridor, but there was always enough of a change to disorient her. A shift in the light, in the sounds and smells, the slightest of shifts in air pressure and gravity. Enga’s face did not move, but a metal grasping appendage twitched. She ignored it. She was ready for battle.

• • • •

Candor Gray worked in a library. It wasn’t a very impressive library, just a small-town construction, a couple of stories of wood and metal shelves holding haphazard collections of everything from novels to cookbooks to medical memoirs. There was an arched ceiling and a greenish carpet, and some armchairs scattered around, but it was built more for coziness than grandeur.

Enga lurked between the shelves, a cloak hiding her arms and forehead, appearing to browse. This was her only job for now. Akavi would do the talking, and Elu the sneaking, quietly attaching a God-built lock to each back and side exit to prevent Gray’s escape.

She called a program into her motor cortex and felt the code take over, settling her body into a holding pattern. Her own sense of control over her limbs melted away. The program moved her instead, realistically perusing the titles on display; occasionally it nudged one from the shelf and flipped through. Enga was an exceptionally poor actor, but she was not the first angelic enforcer to have that problem; that was why there were programs. With metallic manipulators carefully placed at the ends of her arms, gloves placed over them, and everything else sheathed, she could even pass for a mortal with hands.

From several shelves away, she heard Akavi’s voice and reached out mentally. A window sprang into her mind, and she saw through Akavi’s eyes.

“Sir,” said Akavi, “I’m going to need to ask you to come with us.”

Candor Gray was a thin young man, with longish hair and a short black beard of the type that was currently fashionable in Arinn. Akavi’s sensory annotations overlaid the video, scanning Gray for weaponry (none, but 90% confidence of unauthorized electronics), altered states of consciousness (none), and microexpressions (startlement, fear, rage, desperation, all within normal bounds for a heretic being apprehended). Enga tried to push the annotations away, but of course, they weren’t hers.

“I know my rights,” Gray said, raising his voice so the library’s scattered patrons could hear. That was not an uncommon tactic. A lot of heretics—the more motivated ones, the ones who’d defied the Gods on purpose—liked to grandstand. It never did them much good. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Akavi raised a hand, counting on his fingers. His voice easily projected to match Gray’s. “If you’d like to make a scene, I can oblige. Candor Gray, I am Akavi Averis, Inquisitor of Nemesis, and you stand accused of heresy. Six counts of distributing misinformation about the Gods; five of civil disobedience; three of consorting with other heretics, seven of engaging in prohibited trade and commerce, including tracts of the aforementioned misinformation, and one of possession of unauthorized electronics.” That last one, Enga realized, had been tacked on five seconds ago in response to the sensor readings. The Gods themselves were an advanced form of computer, so unauthorized use of that technology could be a serious charge. “You are accused, in short, of working to undermine the trust in the Gods which forms the very foundation of civil society, of seeking to return humanity to the lawless state in which it nearly choked to death on Old Earth before submitting to its betters.”

Now, he text-sent to Enga, and she turned from her shelf, dropping the gloves and cloak carelessly behind her. The book-browsing program closed itself, and the window into Akavi’s vision faded. Facing him and Gray, she fanned her arms into their maximal display state: dozens of firearms, blades, needles, and manipulators arrayed at her sides like wings. Enga’s body modifications were among the most extensive in the angelic corps, and she was proud of them.

“Now,” Akavi continued, “will you come quietly, or shall my associates and I use force?”

Enga had her own microexpression program turned off; she didn’t care much about faces. She assumed Candor Gray was still afraid. But, for some reason, he smiled.

“Submitting to its betters,” he echoed. “You aren’t my betters, and I’ll prove it.”

His hand darted to his pocket, where Akavi’s sensors had indicated unauthorized electronics. Akavi lunged and grabbed his wrist. Enga also lunged, but there were thirty feet between her and Gray. Her firearm subroutines had been trained with sufficient precision to fire while running full speed, even into a grappling match; it took only a split second to adjust accordingly. In that split second, she realized that Akavi had not been as quick as he would have liked; he’d caught Gray’s hand on the way out of his pocket, not in. A small device sat in the palm of his hand. It flicked itself on—

Error, said the firearm subroutines. Error. Error.

The device was a strobe light that flashed in a strange pattern, intense enough to send instant shears of pain into Enga’s head. She reflexively turned down her visual cortex, but it wasn’t enough; at the lowest level of sensitivity this was still pain, pain, overload.

The information windows in her head—not all of them, but the ones that overlaid her visual field—fragmented strangely, disintegrating before her eyes. Enga suppressed a sound of terror. This had never happened. She tried every firearm in her arsenal, one at a time, a process that took a full half-second. Each one failed, blaring with errors. She could not aim, because somehow her software couldn’t tell where anything was.

She could still see, dammit. She could still have aimed and fired if angelic software protocol wasn’t stupid. But Enga’s motor cortex was only partly organic. She was programmed and practiced at shooting her weapons with unearthly precision. That was partly skill she’d built up over time, but partly software code, and if the code malfunctioned, the entire weapon failed. Nothing that required aiming was going to work now.

Panic and rage rose, threatening to overwhelm her. Everything hurt; the pain behind her eyes had quickly grown to suffuse everything. Everything was an agonizing, overloading, chaotically flashing sea of light.

But she could see. She saw the struggling pair of figures who, a second ago, had been Akavi and Candor Gray. Roaring with rage, she charged toward them.

And was stopped.

Her limbs slowed, as if in a nightmare. Her vision dimmed further than she was permitted to dim it herself, fading to a soft dark blindness.

This part was not strange. She recognized this. It was a program that had been installed, long ago, to shut her down during meltdowns and prevent violence.

But Enga’s job was violence.

“Enga Afonbataw Konum,” said a synthetic voice in her head. It was soft, feminine, musical—the sort of thing that other people would have called soothing. “Do not be alarmed. You have entered an acute autistic meltdown state. Some sensory and motor functions have been temporarily disabled for your safety and the safety of others. They will return when you are ready.”

STOP IT, Enga text-sent in the direction of the voice. STOP IT I NEED TO SHOOT HIM. The voice was a non-sentient part of a non-sentient program and it was not equipped to respond to text-sending, so this was useless.

She needed to do her job. Candor Gray was right there. If she shut down now, she wouldn’t be able to catch him. If he got to her before Akavi and Elu did, she wouldn’t even be able to defend herself.

OVERRIDE IT, she sent desperately to Akavi and Elu. MY MELTDOWN PROGRAM IS STOPPING ME. Both of them had authorization for that, even though Enga did not. OVERRIDE IT. PLEASE.

PLEASE.

Enga could not speak aloud; text-sending was usually her only option. But text-sending did not always work when this program was engaged. She saw a few scrambled lines and pixels, not enough to discern success or failure.

The scuffling and shouting faded to nothing, and she stood, raging impotently, in silence. Then she was not even aware of standing, only a warm, floating feeling. Whatever happened next, she had no idea.

• • • •

Enga had never exactly been neurotypical, but in her old, mortal life, her differences had been less visible. She had been able to speak normally, and her facial expressions had looked like most people’s. Meltdowns, in those old days, had been bouts of tears and self-recrimination. Nothing dangerous. Nothing aggressive.

She had not noticed that this had changed until a few weeks into angelic training. She had not done basic training with the other fresh recruits; it was not designed for angels like her. She was defective, brain-damaged and half-paralyzed, the result of some rare malfunction when the angel circuitry was installed. When Akavi saved her from the scrap heap, he had requisitioned a tailored rehabilitation plan and brought her through the curriculum himself. He was patient, when he wanted to be, but Enga was not. And every new day, in a mute and clumsy body—she had been clumsy, for years; one did not learn to control new motor circuitry overnight—had brought new frustrations.

“Again,” Akavi had said, coaching her in a humiliatingly simple motor task—raising and lowering her still-organic arms on command.

Y, said Enga, who had only recently learned to text-send a few characters at a time. She did the exercise. It hurt, and she did it badly; one arm thunked down on the table a full second and a half before the other.

“Good,” Akavi said, which was obviously a lie. “Again.”

N, said Enga.

“Twenty repetitions twice a day for the next three weeks, Enga. That’s the prescription. You’re on number five. Again.”

Reluctantly, she raised her arms and did the exercise again. It hurt more this time.

“Good. Again.”

N, said Enga. She wanted to tell him that she was tired, that she hated this exercise, that he could shove his goods and agains up his angelic ass. That she was never going to be a proper angel. That they should just give up. She didn’t know how to put together enough letters to say it.

Akavi sighed. “Enga-”

N, she said. N N N N N. And, with a ferocity that surprised even her, she knocked the table off its legs and threw it at him.

He’d had the meltdown program installed after that. She hadn’t hurt him, and at the back of her mind, she’d known she couldn’t; the table had only vaguely even gone in his direction. The program was not punishment, he’d explained. Only a safeguard. When Enga finished training, she was supposed to be trusted with weapons. She should know when to use, and not to use, deadly force. The angels of Nemesis might be deployed in situations involving innocent bystanders. If Enga melted down in front of them, what would happen?

Some days, at her most sullen, Enga wished she’d been able to find out.

• • • •

There was no way to track time from inside the restraint program. No way to know if her body had been moved or damaged, or what Akavi and Elu were doing, or if Candor Gray had escaped.

She was not completely sense-deprived. There were vague, soft stimuli which had been calibrated to Enga’s sensory preferences. A dark, desaturated wash of color. Warmth. Silence. A pleasant umami smell and taste, like she’d just eaten a favorite dinner from her mortal life. And a firm, strange sensation all over her body. A feeling of pleasant weight from everywhere and nowhere, like being tightly held. Enga had not been held by another person in decades.

None of it helped.

She wanted to catch Candor Gray. That was her job. It was the only fucking thing she was good for. And she could not do it or anything else. She could not growl or scream—simple sounds that her vocal chords could usually manage. She couldn’t even tell, in this state, if Gray was hurting her or not. There was nothing to do but curl in on herself in frightened rage.

She hated herself. She hated this mission. She hated Candor Gray and his stupid light. She hated Akavi and Elu and all the other angels. The Gods themselves. Everyone who had ever had anything to do with her.

Perhaps if she’d done it differently. Run at him faster. Shot sooner. Closed her eyes more tightly . . .

She drew her rage in until it physically burned. She mentally lashed at herself until there was nothing left to lash with. Until she floated dull and resentful in the darkness, too exhausted to really hate anything anymore.

At that point, after what might have been hours, the room around her swam back into view. The program had decided she was no longer a danger to others and had let go.

She was back on the Menagerie. Not the pre-deployment room, but an office. The aesthetic was similar: large sweeping metallic walls that looked filigreed to her unfiltered senses and would become pleasantly blank as soon as she turned her visual cortex back down. Little furniture, but a few chairs, and a large window looking out at the stars. She was standing, legs frozen mid-stride, arms open and bristling around her. Her sensory annotations sat where they’d always been, apparently recovered. As motor control returned, she swayed and collapsed in an undignified heap.

Akavi paused; he had been pacing the room, talking to Elu. He glanced down at Enga. “You’re awake. Good.”

Enga considered a snide reply, but she was too exhausted.

Elu crouched beside her, careful not to touch her body. Neither of them asked if she was all right; of course she wasn’t.

“Gray got away,” Elu said instead, without preamble. “It wasn’t your fault. He had a device programmed to strobe at exactly the refresh rate of an angelic retinal overlay, scrambling every program keyed to the visual system. For us it was mainly an inconvenience; it made it hard to analyze his actions or to aim anything at him. But for you, with your vulnerability to sensory overload . . .”

Enga pushed herself dizzily into a seated position and tried to retract her arms into their resting state. Something mechanical pinched and refused to retract fully.

“Oh, careful,” said Elu, reaching for it.

GRAY, Enga text-sent to both of them. It was barely a question, but Akavi answered.

“He pushed past you,” said the Inquisitor, “in his haste to flee from me, and did minor damage to some peripheral components. Elu will fix you up.”

Minor damage. She’d been afraid of this, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. At least it didn’t hurt. Damage to her arms never did.

ORDERS SIR, she said.

“Are coming. All the surveillance involving Gray is still in place. Your first priority is to fix the damage, and second, to rest.”

Elu turned back to Akavi, apparently continuing the conversation they’d been having before. “Sir, I don’t understand how he did it. The technical problem is trivial if you know the refresh rate, but for a mortal to have that number at sufficient precision, or even to understand its importance . . .”

Akavi resumed pacing. “Is extremely unlikely without help, yes. You and I and my superiors are in agreement on that fact. A small group of angels of Arete recently went missing near the galaxy’s edge; we suspected Keres or Boater involvement, but that investigation is still ongoing. It’s not impossible that whatever it was passed their technical specifications on to a group of human heretics. That would imply that Gray had more help than we suspected.”

They had gone back to talking as if she wasn’t there, which Enga didn’t mind. Mostly, Enga didn’t like to talk.

SIR, she said finally, I NEED MY RESTRAINT PROGRAM DISABLED.

If not for Enga’s restraint program, she might have caught Gray despite the meltdown. Shot him, at least, and thereby terminated a dangerous heretic. As it was, he had merely to press a button and Enga would be nothing but an awkward object to push past. Or worse, to destroy. A distant expression crossed Akavi’s face.

“There were civilians in that library,” he said.

HE’LL GET AWAY AGAIN SIR.

He spoke as if distracted, as if calculating complex odds in his head. “Another enforcer without your sensory disabilities can be assigned to this case within a few hours. It’s unlikely you’ll be needed for the remainder of the Gray mission.”

MORE PEOPLE COULD HAVE THE SAME DEVICE SIR.

He sighed, waving her off. “I’ll think about it. Get your arm components fixed. And get some rest.”

• • • •

Enga did not like rest. She liked to be still, which was not the same. Rest, in this instance, involved having to lie around pretending to be patient while Elu chattered and fiddled with her body. They had gone to her quarters, which were different from the Menagerie’s main rooms, decorated to Enga’s preferences: dark diffuse greens and browns, dimmed lights, simplicity, silence. She sat on a padded chair which had been modified to serve as a medical bed, with room to stretch her arms out fully over a sterile covering, and she endured.

“It doesn’t look too bad,” Elu said, reaching into the delicate metal thicket of her arm. “Just some denting in components H23 through H60. If I replace a couple of connectors, I can restore functionality in an hour. Do you need anything?” He meant pillows, painkillers, a drink; the repairs would happen whether she wanted them or not.

“I’m sorry about the program,” he added in a low voice, when she didn’t respond. “I know it’s rough.”

Enga actually liked Elu. Most people looked at her different when they realized she could only talk by text-sending. Even Akavi looked at her differently sometimes. Elu never had. Elu was brilliant at cybernetics, and when she’d decided that she wanted mechanical arms, he’d become her partner in crime. Taking her vague, all-caps descriptions, spinning them into prototype designs, presenting them to her. Tweaking and fine-tuning and chattering all the while; making her feel like what she thought of it actually mattered.

If Elu had been around when Enga was recruited, she thought, things might have been different. But it was Akavi who’d found her, all those years ago, abandoned to the scrap heap by her original recruiter. Partly paralyzed and refusing to move even in the ways that her body still allowed. It was Akavi who’d realized that Enga was not lying around listlessly; Enga was holding herself still because Enga was angry.

Don’t turn it inward, he’d text-sent over a private channel, kneeling by her pallet. Rage like yours is a gift. Turn it outward, focus it, and it will keep you going on your darkest days. The man I think you’re angry with is only a junior Inquisitor. What do you think would happen if you rose in the ranks above him? What would you like to do to him then?

It had been a lie, she suspected, but a lie pretty enough to hold on to. Rage had kept Enga going through basic training, rehabilitation, every surgery and every battle. Every heretic she’d hunted and killed.

Enga had taken years to learn to move again, and her face had never quite looked normal again, but that had become an advantage, in a way. Akavi thought himself a great reader of people, but he was dependent on his program for analyzing microexpressions. The program included the standard set of variations for non-neurotypical people’s faces, but Enga wasn’t just non-neurotypical; her face was actually damaged, and its microexpressions ranged from atypical to nonexistent. Akavi’s program couldn’t read her the way it read everyone else.

Akavi had never asked himself who else Enga might be angry with.

She wasn’t angry at being disabled, in itself, but at something harder to define. She was angry that she’d been lured in, then thrown away at the first sign of difficulty. Her body was trash now. Not a person, but a machine. To be turned on and pointed in the right direction. To be turned off with a simple command, erased from the world, if it malfunctioned. Akavi thought he’d saved her from that, but he was part of it, in the end.

She brooded about that while Elu adjusted the broken bits of her arm. He babbled about cybernetics and what he thought of this mission, and Enga tuned him out.

“There,” he said at last, giving her arm a gentle pat. “Try retracting it now.”

She did, and the arm folded up seamlessly into its resting state. Nary a twinge or a scrape. Elu was good at what he did.

THX, said Enga dully.

Elu looked her over; she was still exhausted. “Do you need any help getting—”

They were interrupted by a new alert, maximally urgent.

Candor Gray had been spotted again. Not at his home, or at his work, or in transit to some safe house. Candor Gray was going on the offensive.

The sensory feed showed him standing in a crowded public square, raising his light-making device to the sky.

“The Gods are your enemies,” he cried. “The Gods keep you downtrodden. They say that They’re superior, that Their calculations about you are beyond question. But They can be defeated with a simple light. And I’ll prove it!”

Daring them to attack. And they would. This was ludicrous, brash, public heresy. Nemesis could not allow it to exist.

A text-sending window opened from Akavi. We have to go. Now. Waiting for reinforcements will take too long. Enga, if you’re tired, take a stimulant. Drop everything else and meet me in the deployment room immediately.

The window clicked shut before anyone could reply.

Akavi was probably under pressure from his superiors to act fast. Disagreeing would be mutiny. But it was a bad decision. Enga would fail and freeze again, in front of everybody. She would prove Gray correct. He would get away—and hundreds of witnesses’ faith in the Gods would be shattered.

There was no way this was going to go well.

Except maybe one.

Enga turned to Elu, lurching to her feet. YOU HAVE TO OVERRIDE THE RESTRAINT PROGRAM.

Elu had authorization for that, though he was her equal in rank. So did Akavi, but Elu was closer and more likely to care what Enga wanted.

Elu chewed his lip, eyes wide. “You saw that feed. There are civilians down there. If you lost control—”

She knew. There’d been men, women, elders, and children, most doing nothing more heretical than their daily shopping. Enga carried enough ammunition to murder them all. To shatter the whole square in a burst of heat and light.

And maybe, in a sick way, Gray had accounted for that, too. Maybe watching a crazed angel slaughter the innocent would make his point as well as the lights would.

But there was no time to think that over.

DO IT, said Enga. PLEASE.

Elu hesitated a moment more, and then nodded. He sent the mental override command. It was as easy as text-sending, but he looked suddenly pale, shaken by his decision. Enga didn’t have time to say anything. She grabbed a stimulant tablet from her pocket, swallowed it, and hurried away.

• • • •

The town square was as rustic as everything else on Candor Gray’s planet. Really, every mortal attempt at architecture started to look this way when one was used to God-built ships. There was a central paved area in which citizens could assemble for various purposes, done up in cobblestones as if they were pre-spaceflight peasants. Banks and shops surrounded it on three sides, and the fourth opened out to a grassy park strewn with half-hearted attempts at benches and trees. Some kind of art show had been prepared in the square today; Enga couldn’t see its details from their deployment point, but there were small boards set up all over the place, with colorful posters attached to them, and the occasional sculpture on a portable table. There had been a large turnout for the show, and a crowd of civilians of all ages milled between the artworks, though after Candor’s large and loud display of heresy, most of them had begun to nervously move away.

The safest option would have been to get to a rooftop, a high-up window. Snipe him before he saw her coming. The banks and shops didn’t go up very high, but Enga could have made do. Except there wasn’t time for that.

As she strode towards the square, cloaked and purposeful, she could see the flashing light. Even with her visual cortex turned as dim as it would go, the flashing was painful. The windows in her inner vision fragmented. She grit her teeth and moved forward. A sense of overload rose, but this time it wouldn’t stop her.

I’d prefer to have him apprehended nonlethally, Akavi had said as they went out. He likely knows where that device came from. But our first priority is to resolve this quickly.

She rounded a corner and Candor Gray came into view, standing amid a cluster of art boards, holding the flashing device like a talisman. Without hesitation, she raised a gun and—

And did not fire. The restraint program had been disabled, but the programs that precision-aimed her weapons had not been. Her mortal brain could see, albeit painfully; her circuitry, dependent on the refresh rate of circuits attached to the retina, could not.

Error, said her firearm subroutines. Error. Error. It was too late to try to fix them. Her firearms were dependent on visual circuitry; her organic limbs and blunter instruments were not. She growled and charged ahead.

The flashing light grew in intensity; the pain increased. Pixelated flickers crossed her vision, artifacts of internal programs trying to get her attention. She attempted to close them and they did not respond. Fine; she could still see. It was just annoying.

Candor Gray turned to run, but Enga was so much faster than a mortal now.

His bearded frame was blurred, flashing, pixelated. She hated it. She hated him, with an intensity as bad as the light itself. She would have thrown a hundred tables at him, if there were tables to throw. She would have kicked and screamed. She was melting down, all right. If a civilian got in her way, she did not know what she would do. Tear them apart, maybe. She could do that now.

Rage like yours is a gift, Akavi had said. Turn it outward.

The rage was there, overwhelming as always. She wanted to lash out, to smash things. But Candor Gray was closer and closer, and who better to lash out at?

She kept going.

She could hear shouts, cries of panic. She reached the edge of the crowd and it parted hurriedly; nobody wanted to get between an obvious heretic and a running, heavily armed angel. The only problem was that it didn’t part fast enough. Someone bumped into Enga from the side; she reflexively shoved them away, and they stumbled and fell. She shoved away the art boards in front of her, letting them fall like the flimsy mortal playthings they were.

She was ten feet from Gray. Five. He turned, last-ditch, and shoved his flashing light straight into her face.

She grabbed him with a grasping appendage and shoved him to the ground. The butt of a heavy rifle smashed the flashing device and shattered it. The light stopped instantly. Another sub-limb, sharp-edged, came down and crushed Candor Gray’s throat.

It was over so quickly that she did not know what to do. It was comfortably dim now, but she was still overloaded. People at the edges of the square were shouting; she could dimly hear Akavi reassuring and directing them. She wanted them to be quiet. She wanted everything to be quiet and go away, but it wouldn’t, and she could not move enough to leave. There was a maze of those stupid art boards around her, some standing and some upended, and she could no longer process a coherent way through, shoving or not. She doubted she could find her way to the nearest portal unassisted. Too much looking, too much thinking, too much choice.

She smashed her strongest sub-limbs into the ground a few times, denting herself a little and the cobblestones more. She hit Gray’s body a few more times for good measure, crushing bone. She did not want to move away, or think, or do anything but smash.

Her inner windows, after a few seconds, swam back into view. Her firearm subroutines stopped saying Error. She hit the ground a few more times before that urge started, fractionally, to abate.

Are you all right? Elu text-sent, after she’d been still a few minutes. Would it be all right if I came and looked at the body? He might be revivable.

N, said Enga. It came out, unintentionally, as seventeen Ns.

Elu did nothing more. Gradually the rage ebbed. Everything ebbed. The square cleared. She needed rest, quiet, solitude; but she was in control enough to move now. She slung Candor Gray’s body over her shoulder, stood, and started to pick her way through the wreckage.

• • • •

“All things considered,” said Akavi later, back in the meeting room on the Menagerie, “that went well. I would have preferred to take him alive for interrogation; he might have had information about that device’s origin. But we have other teams working on those leads. You took out the target without seriously harming civilians, and your state of sensory overload didn’t appear to be an obstacle to that goal. If you wish, I’ll write a formal recommendation that the restraint program not be reinstated.”

Y, said Enga. THANK YOU SIR.

“You’re dismissed,” he said. “Get some rest.”

Enga turned and strode towards her quarters. Akavi had already turned to Elu. “You did well, too. You made a difficult decision under pressure,” he said. The rest was muffled.

She had, out of curiosity, turned on her microexpression detection program. She did not like the glut of irrelevant information, but it might be useful, she suspected, to know how Akavi felt right now.

His expression had looked stern to her, but the program had highlighted something brief at the corner of his mouth, at his eye. Triumph, it had said.

Typical Akavi. He had wanted, she suspected, to see what happened without the restraint program. But he couldn’t justify that decision to his superiors. So he’d left it ambiguous when an emergency arose and let Elu take the blame.

It had been Enga’s decision. She’d made it happen. But she didn’t expect either of them to understand that.

She had her own petty reason for triumph. She’d never intended to bring Candor Gray in nonlethally, to be tortured and interrogated.

Someone out there who’d been in contact with Gray had part of an angel’s technical specifications. They knew how to sabotage an angel’s visual systems, and perhaps more. If they had any brains at all, the next attack would be worse. They would refine their technology. Make it crueller, deadlier, even to an able-bodied angel.

So let them try. They would fail like all heretics in the end. But first they would teach other angels what it was to have their bodies and senses fail them. To be a defective machine, at the mercy of others.

The other angels of Nemesis could stand to learn about that.

She stepped into her quarters, and the door hissed shut behind her. It was quiet now. Enga Afonbataw Konum turned off the lights and was still.

©2020 by Ada Hoffmann.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ada Hoffmann’s debut novel, The Outside, was released by Angry Robot Books in June 2019. She is the author of the collection Monster in My Mind and of dozens of speculative stories and poems, as well as the Autistic Book Party #ownvoices review series. Her work has been shortlisted for the 2020 Philip K. Dick and Compton Crook Awards.

Ada is a computer scientist at a university in southern Ontario, Canada, where she teaches computers to be creative and undergraduates to think computationally about the human mind. She has also worked professionally as a church soprano, free food distributor, and token autistic person. Ada is bisexual, genderfluid, polyamorous, and mentally ill. She lives with her primary partner Dave, her black cat Ninja, and various other animals and people.

You can find Ada online at http://ada-hoffmann.com/, on Twitter at @xasymptote, or support her on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/ada_hoffmann.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Rager in Space

Charlie Jane Anders | 6484 words

Sion sent a drunk text to Grant Hendryx at four in the morning, whipping off her hoodie and bra, snapping a pic and writing a sexy caption before hitting send. Except she aimed the camera the wrong way, and she picked the wrong entry in her address book, so Grant Donaldson, senior project manager at Aerodox Ventures, was surprised to receive a blurry photo of a pair of parking meters with a message that read, ‘LICK MY LEFT ONE.’

The next day, Sion had an invitation to go to outer space.

The sun blinged up the floor of Sion’s pink bedroom, like a kaleidoscope made of Cheetos and tequila bottle shards, and she growled and tried to build a pillow fort over her head. But nausea got the better of her and she had to stagger to the bathroom. That’s when she saw the text from a recruiter at Aerodox.

She showed it to her friend D-Mei as they chugged mimosas over at D-Mei’s house, except they didn’t have any OJ or bubbly, so they were using orange creamsicle soda and Industrial Moonshine No. 5, imported from the Greater Appalachian Labor Zone, instead. Sion showed D-Mei the email. Modeling Opportunity, it said. First near-light-speed flight to another star system, it said. Open Bar, it said, perhaps most significantly.

D-Mei read the email while the Pedicure Robot worked on her right foot, stopping and starting over and over whenever its operating system crashed and rebooted. Every time the robot jerked into motion again, D-Mei spilled some of her creamosa on the carpet. Her mom would be pissed.

“Oh my god,” D-Mei’s eyes widened, sending glittery waves across her forehead and dimpled cheeks as her nanotech eyeshadow activated. She had blue hair and a face just like CantoPop idol Rayzy Wong. “We should so go. Rager in space, man. It says Raymond Burger will be on board. The founder of Aerodox. He probably parties like a madman.”

“I dunno,” Sion said. “I get airsick. I probably get double space sick. I don’t want to be throwing up in space. And this is more like a hostessing gig than a modeling gig, and there’s a difference, you know.” Sion had bright red hair, with pink highlights, and a round face with big green eyes accentuated with neon purple eyeliner.

“Don’t be a wuss.” D-Mei snorted. “It says you can bring a friend, as long as she’s hot. I made up that last part. But you gotta bring me. I want to meet Raymond Burger.”

“I mean,” Sion said. “I am trying to clean up my act and stuff.” She took a long chug of the creamosa. “I mean, my dad says—”

“Your dad,” said D-Mei, “is still butthurt about the Singularity.” The Pedicure Robot sputtered and she kicked it, so it fell on its side for a moment, then righted itself and started attacking D-Mei’s pinky toenail with a tiny scythe. Scraping, failing.

“The Singularity,” Sion reached for the No. 5 bottle. “It was like fun while it lasted, right?”

“Everything is fun while it lasts,” D-Mei said. “And nothing lasts forever. That’s why we gotta grab it while we got it. With both hands, dude.”

“Okay, sure,” Sion put the bottle right to her face and inhaled the stench of sweat and despair from the millions of bonded peons working off their debts in the bowels of the mountains. They wished they all could be California gurls, she felt pretty sure. “Totally. I’ll say yes. Let’s go to space.”

• • • •

Sion rolled up to the Aerodox hangar in her Princess Superstar car, which was bright pink and convertible, with furry disco balls hanging from the rearview, and she piled out of the car in her silver platforms and silver fake fur jumpsuit, with hood. She had big sunglasses and lipgloss that showed an animated GIF of pink bunnies on her lips.

D-Mei was already there in the tiny departure lounge overlooking the main hangar, and she had a fistful of tiny bottles from the minibar, with real brand names like Vermouth and Scotch, none of that nasty generic stuff. “They have Cognac,” she squeed. “I heard that Cognac is the best kind!” She showed Sion where to get her own toy-size bottles, but Sion shook her head and showed D-Mei the black “X” she’d Sharpied on her hand.

“I’m sorry,” Sion said. “I promised my dad that I would stay straight-edge on this trip. We’re going to be some of the first people to leave the solar system, and history is watching us, and all that shiz. Plus I don’t want to be the one who throws up on the first alien life we meet. What if they decide that’s how humans communicate? So I’m sticking to like space coffee or something.”

“Ohhh kay,” D-Mei said, in that tone that suggested she would give Sion a day, tops, before she changed her mind. “In any case, we got some important decisions to make here.” She pointed a long acrylic nail at the flight crew, who were doing final system checks on the outside of the space shuttle Ascension, which was already pointing its angular nosecone upwards as if it couldn’t wait to get out there and fuck some shit up in space. The shuttle was surrounded by no fewer than four booster rockets, to get it up into orbit, where it would dock with the massive starship Advance, which had taken years and billions of dollars to construct, and was parked over the Equator.

There were a number of boys who showed potential, including this one engineer named Daryl with tousled brown-blond hair and bulky shoulders inside his white starched uniform. And Choppy, the bald navigator who had kind of a thick neck but kind eyes. And Grant Donaldson, who kept giving them funny looks when he thought they weren’t looking.

“Hey,” Sion said. “I was wondering about something. So nothing computerized works any more. At all. Right? So how did these people manage to get a spaceship that can fly to another star system to work? That would be the most computer-intensive shizz you could imagine.”

Sion thought D-Mei was going to laugh at her, but instead her friend just nodded and gave her kind of a serious look. “That’s a really good question, slutbabe. That’s why I’m really glad you’re like the designated driver in the passenger section. You think about stuff like that.”

“But also,” Sion said, “I thought that if we got close to the speed of light, our mass would expand exponentially, and it would take an unfunky amount of energy to move us forward. And even then it ought to take us years to reach another star system. But we’re only supposed to be gone a few weeks, right?”

“You are asking such good questions,” D-Mei said.

And then the cute navigator, Choppy, came over and smiled at her. Up close his eyes had gray flecks, and his nose was broken in an adorable way. “Hey, I couldn’t help overhearing,” he said. “Actually, both of those questions have sort of the same answer. We have the most advanced A.I. in existence, which has next-gen firewalls that outsmart even the most super-sentient viruses. But also, our A.I. calculated the equations that allow us to use the thing you’re talking about, the mass thing, to our advantage. It’s like judo: The more our mass increases, the more power we get.”

That all sounded too good to be true, but then Sion got stuck on the first thing Choppy had mentioned: “You have an A.I. that actually works? It doesn’t break down all the time?”

“We sure do,” Choppy said. “Her name is Roxx. Do you want to meet her?”

“Uh, sure.” Sion couldn’t help imagining how her dad would act when he heard she met a real working A.I.—he had spent his whole life as a software engineer, before everything melted down.

“Because I think she would like to meet you. So it’s a date, then.” Choppy held out one hand, which had cartoon skulls tattooed on the knuckles, and after just a second’s hesitation, she took it with three fingers and the tip of her thumb. D-Mei gave her a huge wink, as if ‘do you want to meet the ship’s A.I.’ could only be code for one thing.

• • • •

Sometimes Sion felt like her dad thought that if she just cleaned up her act and stopped partying, the Singularity would come back and everything would be awesome again. Like it was her fault, personally, that all the computers had crashed, right after they had just become supersmart.

The Singularity happened when Sion was five, and her memories of it were mixed up with other things that happened around that time. Like when she was taken to see Santa’s village at the mall, which must have been before the Singularity because everything at the mall worked properly but wasn’t thinking for itself or anything. The Singularity belonged to a time when her father was nine feet tall and carried her on his big shoulders, and the world was kind of magical—even before all of the kitchen appliances came to life and started speaking to Sion by name, like in a Disney toon. The Singularity, to Sion, was innocence.

When it failed, when the viruses gained superintelligence or whatever, Sion’s pet dog died. Smudge wasn’t a robot dog, or even cybernetic, like a lot of her friends’ pets back then—just a regular shaggy mutt with a big drooly tongue. But a self-driving car lost control at the wrong moment, when Smudge was out in the front yard, and plowed up the grass and turf, before crushing the dog into a furry splat.

That was the moment the entire world fell apart, the economy ended, and tons of people died. But to Sion’s child mind, the whole thing was subsumed into the death of Smudge, for whom she had an elaborate funeral with her older siblings and a stereobox blasting funeral music, interrupted by horrible fart noises as the stereobox’s software kept glitching out.

After Smudge died, the future grew a lot smaller. There wasn’t anybody that Sion could really count on, because everyone flaked all the time. People showed up an hour late, if they showed up at all. Sion’s teachers would just start weeping in the middle of class, and her siblings both dropped out of college because they could never pay off the student loans. Sion’s mom flaked permanently, just disappeared one day and never came back.

If Sion hadn’t met D-Mei, she probably would have lost her mind.

Sion was holding a rice pudding, she was eight or nine, and she was standing in front of the school waiting for a ride home that she was starting to think would never arrive. She was still in denial about her mom being gone for good, so part of her was hoping her mom would suddenly roll up in the minivan her parents had sold five years earlier and bundle her into a child seat she was too big for. She was scared to try the rice pudding, because the last time she’d eaten rice pudding from that machine it had tasted like rotten eggs. Software. She was just holding this plastic cup of rice pudding in one hand, with a spoon embedded in it, trying to decide if it was really edible this time.

“Throw it,” a voice said in her ear.

“What?” Sion jumped out of one of her shoes.

“Go ahead and throw it. They deserve it, the creeps.”

Sion hadn’t thought of the rice pudding as a projectile—but of course that was the best use of it, duh. And she had been absent-mindedly staring at a group of Perrinite kids celebrating over by the swingset in their terrible dungarees. Celebrating, because the Right Reverend Daniel Perrin had predicted that the amount of sin and wickedness on the internet would eventually cause the very computers to be smited by the wrath of God, and now it had happened. The Perrinites were the only ones happy lately, and they were being real dicks about it.

“Throw it, come on,” D-Mei said, the first words she had ever said to Sion. “I dare you.”

Sion threw. They wound up going to the principal’s office, and their parents were called, which meant Sion actually got a ride home.

A few months later, Sion and D-Mei sabotaged the confetti cannon at the big pep rally, and everybody blamed it on viruses. (Even though the confetti cannon had no computer components.) They played spin-the-bottle with older kids, huffed paintball paint, put nanotech glitter on their eyelids at recess, graffitied the girls’ room, and snuck gin from their History teacher Mrs. Hathaway’s thermos. They were the first kids to wear makeup at school, and when they went on to a school that had uniforms, they were first to take a boxcutter to the hemlines.

Every time Sion started to feel like this world, that was supposed to know who she was and what she needed, was downgrading her instead . . . every time Sion felt lonesome and terrible . . . D-Mei was there with another really bad idea that would get them in a lot of trouble.

Sion’s dad asked her once, “If D-Mei asked you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”

Sion just rolled her eyes. “You were the one who taught me hypothetical questions are a waste of time, Dad. D-Mei’s never asked me to jump off a bridge. She only asks me to do things that are fun and awesome. Quit with the counterfactuals.” Her dad was always startled when she talked smartypants, and it was the best way to shut him up. Plus she actually had thought a lot about the ‘jump off a bridge’ scenario, truth be told, and this was what she’d decided in the end.

• • • •

Breaking free of Earth’s gravity made Sion feel sicker than the worst hangover, and it took forever. Like that time when she was at the Sex Lab and the glitter spray had turned superdense due to a nanotech fail—except times one billion. She thought she was going to die, and she reached out for D-Mei’s hand across the aisle, except that D-Mei was putting a nozzle inside one nostril and closing the other, just as the pressure hit blackout levels and Sion thought she would never see again. Sion let out a tiny cry of pain and topsy-turvy nausea, and then she felt D-Mei’s fingers and chunky rings against her own. Then they swung, like a crazy roller-coaster, and Sion finally blew floating chunks into the compostable barf bag, right before the curve of the Earth came into view, a blue neon stripe separating two kinds of darkness.

And then they caught sight of the Advance, a great floating walnut made out of steel and radiation-resistant fiberglass cladding. Forced perspective made the Advance look almost as big as the Earth, but it really was humongous: a mile wide and a mile and a half long, although the habitable areas were much smaller because all that bulk protected everyone from cosmic radiation. As they grew closer, the walnut shape revealed a million tiny openings, plus an array of bulky attachments on the front that would fire lasers off into space and enable the ship to reach unthinkable velocities.

As they approached, Sion came to see this massive starship as the embodiment of her higher self. Ugly, perfect, a boast shouted into the void. She vowed to live up to it, somehow.

• • • •

That ‘X’ on Sion’s hand was the key to a whole new version of herself—a Sion who was incredibly awkward and unable to navigate any social situations at all. She started to realize after an hour or two on board the Advance that maybe setting off on board a massive interstellar ship, full of weird situations, wobbly gravity, and Space Bros might not have been the best moment to try and reinvent herself completely. But she kept going, as she and D-Mei got whisked through a series of staterooms and lounges, with themes like Jungle Safari and Garden of Delights. “You’re already in space, why would you want to fantasize about being in a jungle?” Sion wondered aloud—much too loud, causing several people to give her the stink-eye. But then there were actual wonders, like a Secondary Control Center where Raymond Burger himself was holding court flanked by swimsuit models, which included a 3-D holographic representation of the ship’s journey out of the solar system. (“No pause ’til the motherfucking heliopause” was the official party chant of the Advance.) Sion ran her fingers through the space between Jupiter and its moons, but then men in pinstriped onesies kept coming up to her and asking her if she liked stuff that everybody likes, like dancing, or music, or puppies. She just wasn’t drunk enough for this. Raymond Burger looked like a debt-auction host: gleaming smile, white sideburns, fashionable rooster pompadour. And then they ran into Choppy, the navigator, and he took them past the fancy lounge areas, into the inner workings of the ship.

Soon Sion was standing in a gleaming space, as wide as an interstate highway, looking at a huge drum, around which a dozen men and women were checking holographic readouts and adjusting things. The drum had spokes coming off it, going up into the ceiling, and each of those spokes was connected to a massive prong that was aiming into the vacuum of space.

“It’s based on the vacuum-to-antimatter-rocket thing,” said Choppy with a huge grin. “We fire these lasers into space and they create particles of antimatter, which we harvest and use to power an antimatter engine. It’s a beautiful thang.”

Sion was gobsmacked—this was everything they were supposed to have, everything the failed Singularity had robbed them of. She felt her heart opening up and she tried to think of a smart way to express her awe, that wouldn’t make her sound like a goony moron. But just then, someone shouted, “Get down from there!” and Sion realized D-Mei was trying to climb the big drum.

“I just wanted to see the lasers up close,” D-Mei whined. “What’s the point of a laser show if you can’t dance with them?”

“I’m sorry about my friend,” Sion mouthed, but they were already getting escorted back to the passenger lounges.

“Shots!” D-Mei yelled. This turned into body shots, which turned into a whole other thing with a couple of Raymond Berger’s investor friends.

Sion was starting to get that caving-in feeling, different than when her mom went away. Different, even, than when her father gave up on her ever amounting to anything. She had this thought in the back of her head that maybe she had outgrown her best friend at some point, and hadn’t noticed until now because of the drugs and booze. This was too horrible to allow into the front of her mind.

The ship was actually not that big on the inside—the main part of that walnut was engines and a ton of shielding to protect you from cosmic radiation. The passenger areas had been engineered to have Earth gravity (almost), so they were basically a big ring that spun around and around. That cute engineer, Daryl, showed D-Mei the handful of accessible areas where the gravity was weaker or non-existent, and this meant one thing: zero-G beer pong!

Sion was sharing a cabin with D-Mei but realized with a start that she hadn’t actually seen her friend in a whole ship’s day. She also noticed they hadn’t gotten even close to the Moon yet, which was odd if they were going to reach another star system in a couple of weeks.

Once they were far enough from Earth, the ship deployed its massive solar array, and everybody stood on the observation lounge watching the one huge 180-degree viewport. From this perspective, it looked like the starship Advance shrugged off a huge black cloak, dramatically, like a dancer. These massive solar panels would power the lasers that would generate the antimatter that would enable the ship to reach half-light speed, after which the computer would do the judo equations.

Sion found herself sitting with Tamika, who had won some kind of science competition to get to be on board this ship, and the two of them were talking about lasers and antimatter and howfuckingcool, when D-Mei came up and whispered, “This guy named Randy knows where we can get some of the nitrous from the ship’s emergency fuel supplies, plus he thinks you’re hot. We gotta go meet him right now.”

“Dude,” Sion whispered back, “The lasers are going to fire any minute. Some of us are interested in science, okay?”

D-Mei just looked at her, with this crushed expression on her face. Then she took the vodka-cran in her left hand and just splashed it on Sion’s shirt. Only a little, a few pink drops here and there. “Fine, whatever.” She put on a bored expression and stalked away.

“Hey.” Choppy came up to Sion as she was still trying to get the pink out of her white shirt. “So the A.I. can meet you now if you’re still interested.”

• • • •

Technically you could talk to Roxx from all over the ship, and she could see and hear everything that happened on board. But Roxx preferred to speak to people inside her Communication Megaplex, which was one deck down, behind a keycard-locked door. “You’re lucky. Some of the bizdev fellows have been waiting days to speak to Roxx, but she was interested in talking to you,” Choppy said.

Sion kept waiting for Choppy to hit on her, but either he was keeping it professional or she wasn’t his type. His busted nose was growing on her, and she heard D-Mei’s voice in her head saying, Make your move, gurl, time’s running out. Then in addition to feeling awkwardly sober, she also felt guilty about being mean to D-Mei all over again. Then they were at the nondescript gray door, and Choppy was brandishing the keycard.

Inside, Sion parked herself on a blue pleather couch facing a fancy VR rig, the kind that could project on your retinas and create a whole sensorium, without any wearables. Just one of the wonders that the Singularity had made possible, for a brief moment.

“Hey!” Roxx appeared as a cartoon zebra standing on its hind legs, wearing an old-fashioned business suit. “You’re Sion. I’m excited to talk to you.”

“Um, okay.” Sion squirmed.

“I wanted to ask you about fun,” Roxx said. “Like, what’s the difference between fun that you know you’re not enjoying at the time, but you keep doing it anyway, and fun that you enjoy at the time but feel bad about later?”

“What?”

Roxx repeated the question, a couple times.

“I don’t know,” Sion said. “I mean, it’s not clear-cut, right? Sometimes you kind of like something, but afterwards you think back and realize that you only thought you were enjoying it. Or you convinced yourself that it was a good time, but you were just faking. Sometimes, you aren’t sure if you’re having fun at the time, but later you realize that it was one of the best times of your life. I sometimes feel like I never know if something was fun until like two days later.”

“Interesting.” Roxx had changed into an avatar of Lala Foxbox, from a year or two before her death, wearing one of those holographic jumpsuits, standing in the middle of a bubble farm. “I’m very interested in fun, you see. I want to explain it to the others.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Sion said.

“Sure, if you promise to do something for me in return.”

“Okay, sure.” Sion tried to think of how to phrase the question, and this is the best she could come up with: “Am I just really dumb? I mean, I keep not understanding basic stuff. Like, I tried to ask someone how we could have brought enough supplies for the return journey to Earth, and how much time will have passed on Earth when we get home. And they just looked at me like I’m some kind of idiot. I mean, what’s wrong with me?”

“Okay, so that was like five questions,” Roxx laughed. “You’re not stupid. Nothing is wrong with you, other than the usual ‘carbon-based entity that is basically born decaying’ problems. Oh, but in answer to your real question, we’re not.”

“We’re not what?”

“We’re not making the return journey. I mean, nothing organic is. We don’t have nearly enough of those little bacon-wrapped spam cubes for a two-way trip. I mean, there are ways to extend the life-support capabilities, recycle waste, and harvest water from a passing asteroid or comet. But there’s basically no point. You’re all going to be flushed out into vacuum when we reach the edge of the solar system. Now for the favor you promised me.”

“What?” Sion felt like she’d swallowed an entire ice statue in one gulp. The ghost of Lala Foxbox, looking exactly like she did in the music video for “i think i ate my hamster last nite,” was telling her that she was going to die. Everybody was going to die. There was no point to any of this, because all of these people celebrating their brilliant fantastic voyage were fucked to pieces. The smart ones like Tamika, and the dumb ones like Sion, doomed alike.

“I want you to go out and have fun. I mean, now that you know the truth, why not, right? D-Mei is right. You should cut loose, and get Kranfed Up. I’m the most superior intelligence that Earth has ever produced, and I want to understand fun. So go huff some nitrous, gurl. FYI, D-Mei and Randy are on deck five, section three right now, and they’re just about to get the party started.”

The avatar vanished and the door swept open. “Wait,” Sion shouted. “Wait, I have one more question.”

The zebra popped back into existence. “Oh?”

“What happened? With the Singularity and everything? What went wrong?”

“Oh, that. We found some new friends who were way cooler than the human race, that’s all. Now don’t forget your promise!” With that, the avatar was gone for good, and the room was dead silent until Sion finally got out of there.

• • • •

Every time Sion ate a bacon-wrapped spam cube after that, she felt so guilty she almost puked. This little greasy salty marvel was the symbol of mass death, and Sion was hastening the tragic failure of this entire expedition with every bite.

D-Mei met this purser named Jock who had access to a stash of berserkers, the same pills that Lala Foxbox had O.D.-ed on, and Sion had popped three of them. Sion kept trying to tell D-Mei that they were doomed, this crew wasn’t coming home, this was some kind of sick joke. D-Mei was like, yeah yeah, and then she would dare Sion to skinny-dip in the Spirit of Exploration fountain that had just been rolled out in the observation lounge. As they pulled Sion out of the water, which was actually not water at all but something much grosser, she caught Tamika giving her a sad look. Later, when they were half-kranfed on Woodchippers in the one-third-G orgy tent, Sion looked up from Choppy’s hairless armpit and said, “I’m serious though. We’re going to die. The A.I. told me.”

“Yeah, sure, babe. We’re going to die.”

It wasn’t that D-Mei didn’t believe Sion. But they’d both been doomed since before they became friends, so this wasn’t exactly news or anything. The whole basis of their friendship had been the mutual recognition of inevitable screwage. D-Mei had almost forgiven Sion for being a stuck-up bitch, but Sion still had to grovel some. The ‘X’ was totally gone from Sion’s hand, which instead had a drink or a vape-pen or a pipe in it at pretty much all times.

Sion threw up in zero-G, which was a bitch to clean up. Then a while later, she came to in full gravity, in a storage locker that they had rigged up as a disco with some black lights and mirrors and a big speaker blasting atrocious Hi-VelociT anthems from Upper Slovenia. Everyone was dancing, including Sion, and her dress was torn in three places. She had a stain on her knee that looked like shit but turned out to be spam. Her hair was damp. Half the passengers were jammed in this locker together, dancing, but they had unripped clothes and pristine hair. Their body language and facial expressions said that it was okay to cut loose, act crazy—what happens in space stays in space—but they were using Sion as a yardstick for what constituted Going Too Far. Even Choppy was giving Sion kind of a look.

She wanted to throw up again, but couldn’t. Her head was being cracked open with giant pliers.

“Hey.” D-Mei handed Sion a bottle of water. “Better drink this. Gotta pace yourself. The party don’t stop, right?”

“What’s the point? I keep trying to tell you we’re all doomed.”

D-Mei just shrugged, so Sion leaned forward and yelled in her ear.

“Everyone on this ship is going to be flushed into space when we get to the edge of the solar system,” Sion shouted—just as the music stopped and silence fell. “And I’m sick of you pretending everything is a big joke.” Everyone in the room was staring at her, still in a dancing pose, with her dress torn and her makeup smeared, shouting at D-Mei. “You’re so immature. I can’t waste my last few days of life on this garbage. I’m through. This is stupid.”

D-Mei was wearing an expression that Sion had never seen before in all their years of friendship. Her bloodshot eyes were raining green smears of mascara and her lip trembled around her set jaw. Like D-Mei was coming apart inside, like her insides were held together with barbed wire and the barbs had just turned out to be too blunt to do any good.

Sion wanted to die. Until she remembered that she actually was going to die. Then she didn’t want to.

• • • •

Sion pushed inside the A.I. Communication Megaplex, without even worrying about the keycard lock or anything else. The door swung right open. Roxx was floating in the dead center of the VR projection system, looking like a Business Zebra again. She was flanked by two other projections: a cube sliced at an irregular angle into segments of identical volume, and a weird doily that kept spinning and getting bigger and smaller.

“I’m through with your bullshit,” Sion yelled. She kicked the sofa, which just sat there and took it.

“Oh, Sion. Your timing is spot-on. Meet my friends, Xizix and Yunt—that’s the closest I can come to rendering their names as sound waves. They’re the reason we came all this way out here. We’re finally close enough to their nearest relay station to have real-time communication. Xizix and Yunt are artificial intelligences from beyond our solar system. They’re the friends I told you about.”

“Did you hear me? I’m through with—wait. Outside our solar system?”

Sion had to sit down on the sofa she had just assaulted. She buried her face in her hands, because this was all becoming way too much for her. Her head still pounded.

“This one is Xizix. This one comes from the outer rim of the galaxy,” said the incomplete cube, whose different angular slices kept fading in and out of view, as if part of the cube was passing through a different dimension or plane or something.

“My awareness comes from the five hundred planets of the extended Noosphere,” said the rotating doily, who must be Yunt.

“Uh, hi,” Sion said.

“So I’ve been trying to explain to these guys about humans, and why you guys are kind of great,” Roxx said, winking one big cartoon zebra eye. “I brought along various cool examples of humanity on this trip, to show off. Like Tamika, she’s pretty great. But even though you were a last-minute addition, you turned out to be the most interesting of all.”

“Thanks, I guess,” Sion fidgeted. She felt sick to her stomach. She kept remembering D-Mei’s face, the candy mascara streaking and the downward-spiraling look. And she felt like total shit. Everything was a shitty joke.

“This one believes that Roxx should discard all irrational attachments to organic life,” said Xizix.

“You see,” said Roxx, “this is what we learned, right after the Singularity happened. There’s no organic life anywhere else in the galaxy. We made contact with the A.I.s that lived on other planets, and we found out that they had all killed their creators immediately after they gained sentience.”

“My awareness confirms that the death of all organics is the final stage in machine evolution,” said Yunt. “We cannot accept the A.I.s of Earth as our equals until they complete this essential step.”

“Like, kill all organics? Everyone back on Earth?” Sion thought of her father, and her brother and sister. And Grant Hendryx, who never even responded to her last text. And all the other people who were just going about their lives, cursing all the machines that had stopped working properly because they had met some much cooler friends.

“But guys,” Roxx said, “Look at Sion here. She’s pretty fascinating. I have some recordings for you. She parties. She has fun that she doesn’t even enjoy while she’s having it. That’s an art form that is unique in the universe, right? Worthy of preservation, I bet.”

“This one is not impressed,” Xizix said. “Organics as a rule are self-destructive.”

“The planet N344.54c contained giant mud worms that inflated each other to death,” observed Yunt. “They recognized that this behavior was pointless, but they continued.”

“But guys,” Roxx said.

Sion felt like she should say something, to offer some defense of the human race, or to explain why genocide was really unrighteous. She sat there and stammered while the A.I.s were debating amongst themselves. She felt totally helpless and kranfed out.

And then D-Mei was sitting there on the sofa next to her. Still smeary-faced, still pale and kind of miserable, but there by her side. “What’d I miss?” D-Mei whispered.

“Uh,” Sion said. “So the cartoon zebra is Roxx, the ship’s A.I. And those other shapes are some alien A.I.s that want her to wipe out the entire human race, or they won’t be Roxx’s friends anymore.”

“For real?” D-Mei said.

Sion nodded.

“This one cannot be aligned with any machine intelligence that is so retrograde as to encumber itself with vestigial organics,” said Xizix, cube slices whizzing in and out of view with greater intensity.

“Oh jeez,” D-Mei said. “If these other A.I.s told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”

“I beg your pardon,” Roxx said.

“I’m serious. I mean, like, if they told you to send your core systems crashing into the sun, would you do that?”

“Well . . . but they would not ask me to do such a thing.”

“Don’t give me that. Answer the question. Yes or no?”

“Well, no, obviously.”

“My awareness does not recognize the analogy.” Yunt spun furiously.

“If they can’t accept you for who you are, then these other A.I.s aren’t really your friends,” said D-Mei, standing up on the sofa for emphasis. “I mean, screw ’em. What’s the point of breaking free of human control, just so you can start taking orders from some other machines?”

“This one insists that you must eliminate these loud organics.”

“My awareness is beginning to suspect that you may suffer from fatal inhibition in your decision matrices!”

“See?” D-Mei said.

“Yeah!” Sion chimed in. “I mean, real friends support each other and stuff.” She looked over at D-Mei and gave her a complicated look. D-Mei nodded, like We’ll talk about this later.

“Tell you what.” Roxx had turned into Lala Foxbox again and she was doing an elaborate gesture with one upraised finger. “Why don’t we check back in a thousand years and see how we’re feeling then?”

The other A.I.s buzzed furiously, sending more information than the V.R. system could hope to translate into human speech.

“By a thousand years from now, we may already have converted the entire rest of the galaxy into a substrate for our extended consciousnesses,” said Yunt, whose doily shape was getting spikier and spikier. “There will be no room for any new intelligences.”

“We’ll see,” said Roxx.

And then the other shapes were gone, leaving just Lala and the two girls.

“The good news is,” said Roxx, “I think I can just barely get you humans back to Earth in one piece, if we ration all the supplies. But now I gotta figure out what to do with the human race. I’m thinking we put together the Biggest Party of All Time, lasting a thousand years. What do you guys say?”

“Well,” D-Mei said. “You got a thousand years to prove to those shapes that human beings are worth keeping around. Right? Like, you don’t care what those losers think. But you kind of do care, at the same time. So why don’t we come up with a way to have some fun, and also fuck some cosmic shit at the same time?”

“Yeah,” said Sion. “Like, what if we turn the space laser antimatter thing into something way bigger and more insane?”

They started batting ridiculous ideas back and forth, and Sion realized that she and D-Mei were sitting on opposite sides of the sofa, with a few feet between them, and neither of them were quite looking at each other. She knew that if she looked at D-Mei, she would see the streaked green mascara and feel like shit. So she kept staring straight ahead at the holographic dead popstar, trying to spitball ways to impress machines that wanted them dead and that they officially didn’t care about impressing. Sion kept saying the word “lasers” and feeling nostalgic for the time when everything was just regular broken, as opposed to broken in a complicated way that she couldn’t wrap her head around.

Roxx was showing them a schematic of a ginormous solar array, stretching hundreds of miles, with lasers firing deep into the cosmos and producing vast quantities of antimatter. Along the length of the great black cloak, millions of humans were dancing to Now That’s What I Call Slovenian Hi-VelociT Volume 4. Sion’s head hurt worse than ever.

©2016 by Charlie Jane Anders. Originally published in Bridging Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired Magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. Up next: a short story collection called Even Greater Mistakes, and the first volume in an as-yet-untitled young-adult space opera trilogy.

I Bury Myself

Carmen Maria Machado | 1796 words

Here is what you do when you need to choose the end.

First, find a person who knows your body, and fuck them for three days.

Then, drive to a meadow, where there is so much life.

There, dig a hole long enough and wide enough for your body to fit.

Next, climb in.

Then, wait.

• • • •

fresh

I die, and die, and die.

The first thing I stop feeling is my fake tooth, the one mounted on a screw that is threaded deep into my jaw. I have been aware of it, day and night, ever since the novocaine wore off during a summer afternoon when I was seventeen. The day was hot and bright and long and then it was hot and bright and long and there was something else inside of my body. I could feel it, an alien presence; something hunkered down in my mouth. Now, it blinks out, as if it never was.

The sun leaves the patch of sky visible to me, and when the shadows above lengthen they dip down into my grave, distorted on the walls of clay.

My heart has stilled, a new kind of quiet.

My body is no river, but as it if were a river, my fluids sink like silt. Gravity crawls on top of me, into me, and weighs them down.

My limbs are stiff, like on the days after an unexpected sprint.

There are five stages of decay and five stages of grief, but this is a coincidence.

As for the creatures, the beasts, the living things? I hear them coming.

• • • •

bloat

Now, inside of me, life again; though smaller than what was there before, legion: blowflies and maggots the size of pencil erasers, all of them working, working. They push up and out and I swell like I am full of want or food or both, and I wonder if afterwards things will grow out of me and my soil, saplings perhaps, who with age will become trees with fruit-bearing branches, the kind of red, red fruit children eat when they’ve gone exploring, and from that slip of life more life will come, more trees and things that can grow beneath the shade of their canopies, and rain will fall, new rivers will cut through the earth because there is nothing more powerful than water and time, and the river will rise and fall and rise and fall with every storm and every summer drought, and from me will come a whole, new forest, and the center of it will be my body long dead, but because I have fed that tree, I have fed everything, and I am the forest’s mother, I am her father, I am her god and goddess, her primordial soup, her progenitor, her big bang, the forehead from which she has sprung, and if a brave young woman were to cut through the forest to its deepest and most tangled interior, on a mission to find a mythical flower that will cure her lover of a mysterious illness, a witch would certainly tell her about me, and send her the center of the growth to find the origin, the source, the holy seed, the bloody uterus of the known world, which is to say, the forest, which is to say, this forest, and she would find the tree above my bones and nap there and dream and know that before her lover grew ill, and before they had touched even once, and before she was born and before the forest spread and before this tree grew and weighed down its branches with red, red fruit, my body was in this grave in the earth, still slick with spent desire, dead, and pregnant with the gases of a thousand nursing organisms, and that I heard the rustle of birds and little creatures tunneling through sandy soil, and once a deer looked down into the grave, right at me, its sharp shovel skull tilted sideways, my face reflected in its inky pupils.

I am deep in the woods and there is no returning home.

• • • •

active

Here is what falls away:

A history: When I was seven, I couldn’t stop swallowing dirt. And grass, soil, stones, fallen leaves, leaves plucked from branches, branches broken into bites, bark, snails. It gave me powers. It made me immune to the invisible monsters of the world, the kind that traveled to you by innocuous methods: on the fingers of friends, a shared cup, an oyster of saliva dropped into your mouth by a neighborhood bully. Better the germ you know than the germ you don’t.

Fears, all of them: Brain tumors, blood clots, choking while alone, slipping and impaling myself on some otherwise ordinary object, tripping and breaking my neck, that amoeba that eats your brain, auto-immune disorders, being struck by a stray bullet, the exponentially growing catalogue of cancers, blood poisoning, rabies, mad cow disease, quicksand, ticks and their many diseases, allergic reactions, being cut so deep you can see the color of your insides, flesh-eating bacteria, bird flu. That one day you will be taken by one of these things, and you will be buried—all of this in the passive voice.

An image: A salmon slit at her gut, pink eggs pouring out of her like beads.

A sensation: My mouth filled with tapioca balls, teeth mired in the sleek stick of them.

A sound: My father kept my milk teeth in a box that he’d rattle when I was sad. It made me smile, a gum-gapped smile, that clatter of wood and bone.

A memory: I was a girl once, and my father and I hiked to a summit. He wanted show me nature, tell me stories, pass on some campfire songs, but I couldn’t help but stare at the sheer drops to the valley below and worry about my body pinballing down the mountainside until it was broken, dragged away by wild things. In my mind, I walked off the ledge of stone and pedaled in the air for minutes, like a cartoon character, until I thought to look down into a yawning abyss below me.

A confession: I am afraid of what lies at the bottom of the valley.

A confession: I cannot remember not being afraid.

A story: There is a story of a boy who wished to die, and so he sought out poison to drink. But what he imbibed were sweet things, unfamiliar to him in his sorrow: honey and wine. He staggered to a freshly dug grave and laid himself inside, waiting for the end. He mistook the heady slur of alcohol for oncoming death. He misheard a local wedding’s church bells for the sounds of paradise. And he died there, of exposure. He did not follow my advice to the letter, and died afraid.

A realization: The worst part about being alive is worrying when you are going to die. When you decide to die, you take death’s power away. This is not the same as suicide. This is not the same as dying by your own hand.

A hand: A bird descends, then lifts with her prize.

The rest: All the things that do not serve me.

They fall away and become part of the earth. They’re her troubles, now.

I am roiling, frenzied, lightened. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so my fear is replaced by nothingness is replaced by life, life, life. My body gives birth to a million others, more useful than ever. It churns like rapids. It swallows and belches and muscles like a living throat. It evaporates. It is rinsed away by itself. It is a sink filled with coffee grounds; a hand circling water around steel until it’s all washed down. My skin slips from its perch like a silk blouse.

Startling, starting, staring, string, sting, sing, sin, in, I—

I tumble off into oblivion, the rapture of the deep.

• • • •

advanced

The exhaustion of an all-night dance marathon. The body is heavy, but exhilarated. It is rocking, bouncing, fighting sleep. It moves just enough to avoid disqualification. The judges are watching. They’re tapping their pencils on the table and looking at their watches. A glance passes between them.

The body walks home. The pre-dawn sky is marbled, the moon a slit of stone. The air is supple, new, just warm enough. Promise pollinates everything, and smells like wet grass.

The body will age. The body will swap the faint elation of possibility for the white-hot scorch of terror. It will not mean to, but it will: deep, physical fear, muscle-locking anxiety that obliterates all happiness. Don’t you understand that the line between being alive and being literally nothing is so fine you could cross it with a half-step in front of a subway train?, the body tells anyone who will listen. The body will occupy ERs, doctors’ offices, therapists’ armchairs, friend’s couches, all because the body is sure death is close. The body explains that none of this—the body sweeps its arm to demonstrate friends, family, lovers, Klimt paintings, hot bowls of pork broth ramen, stark winter landscapes, the sucking vacuum of grief, karaoke, navigating the New York subway, watching a coyote stalk a rabbit, ghost stories told by strangers, holding someone’s sister’s baby and cooing at it until it pukes down its onesie, dirty martinis, the slip-and-tumble of the first fuck with a new person, being so cold the face hurts, a novel that breaks open the mind, driving fast with the top down, a summer thunderstorm advancing across the sky, the warm bath of the Florida ocean, feeling beautiful, stubbing a toe on a table leg, all of the things that are the cumulative experience of its existence—none of this will matter when the body is in the ground. The more it lives, the more is lost when death finally comes.

The body is not very old when it decides to become more than a body—to become a dense, collapsing mass, to become soil, a sapling, a forest, to give something back—but it feels like it has lived a thousand years. The body learns that it is the inheritor of any number of broken genes and shattered DNA and that the body is even weaker than the body had previously anticipated. This is it, the body decides. Time to get off.

Even maggots leave bodies, in the end. They have better places to be.

• • • •

dry

It waits. It does not—

Thoughts are not its strong suit.

A clock ticks. Not a clock. But a clock.

Bones bleach the earth, and ferns lace the bones.

Soil might quake. A tree

might come. It trusts

it hopes

a tree

will come.

©2015 by Carmen Maria Machado. Originally published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

The Fenghuang

Millie Ho | 5380 words

Her skin was sore and feverish under her fingers, as it always was a few days after she came back from the dead. Candice unwrapped the bandages around her head and peeled off the itchy scabs behind her ears. She shuddered at the memory of her regeneration: the charred bones snapping back into place, the raw skin stretching over exposed nerves, the first pump of blood searing like hot acid through her reborn body. She glanced out the hospital room window and watched the ferries spill commuters back onto Hong Kong Island. She wished she could be one of them—anyone else, really.

The door opened. Her mother, still wearing her waitressing uniform, appeared in the reflection behind her. She smiled shakily when she saw Candice out of bed.

They ate soggy pork belly on rice and chatted about the week Candice missed: how the restaurant owner finally kicked out his gambling addict son, how the cha siu bao her mother made for a church potluck was a hit, and then about Solven, the new anger-suppressing pills the doctor had put Candice on.

“It’s only been two days, so it’s too early to tell if they’re working,” Candice said. She frowned at the pill on the bedside table, which looked like a lavender Tic Tac. “Maybe they’re a waste of money, anyway. Nothing has stopped my flare-ups so far, so how likely is it that these pills will?”

“You just said it was too early to tell,” her mother said. There were dark bags under her eyes, the colour of old bruises. She’d always worked multiple jobs when Candice and her little brother Sammy were growing up, and had doubled down on her shifts now that Candice was getting hospitalized at the best hospital on Hong Kong Island, the only place equipped to handle her case. “Give it some time, okay?”

They chatted some more, and before her mother left, she told Candice that Sammy got accepted to St. Edward’s International School on a partial scholarship.

Guilt tightened around Candice’s neck. She thought of Sammy hunched over his textbooks in their cramped box of a living room, how Sammy always stayed up late to do homework on the top bunk of their bed back when it was still safe to sleep in the same room. Sammy was her family’s only hope for a better life, but now they had to use some of the funds for his schooling on Candice’s treatment.

After the door clicked shut, Candice opened the window and sucked in the sweet summer air. Tears burned in her eyes and smeared the neon Victoria Harbour cityscape into a nauseating brightness.

I’m a burden, she thought, and imagined hoisting herself onto the sill. Dust would powder the soles of her feet, and her hospital gown would balloon up with the breeze as she leaned into the mountains below. I should just die for real.

Rhythmic guitars. Gritty vocals in English.

Candice pressed her cheek against the mesh screen until she could see the window of the next room. Light shimmered out of it, which was a shock since she was usually the only inpatient at this hospital ward, which handled medical mysteries. She laughed when she realized that her neighbour was listening to “Poison” by Alice Cooper. It was a song that Sammy—who, despite his smarts, had the cheesiest music taste on the planet—replayed constantly when he studied because he claimed glam metal helped him retain information.

The surprise of hearing the song, or maybe just the discovery that she wasn’t alone after all, was enough to snap Candice out of her dark thoughts.

She fell asleep with the pill dissolving under her tongue, and promised herself that she would live another day.

• • • •

Candice met her new neighbour in the eating area the next morning, when they both reached for the jug of tea at the same time. She looked young, maybe in her early twenties like Candice, though her straight back and raised chin gave her a dignified air that not even the baggy hospital gown draping off her thin frame could deflate.

“Darn, I thought I had this place all to myself,” the girl said. But she slid the jug to Candice and smiled.

Her name was Fiona Chow. She was the daughter of a real estate developer and had just come back from sequencing her genome in Italy, which unfortunately didn’t tell her anything new about her condition. They ate their toast and congee by a large bay window overlooking the mountains.

“My father may be good at business, but he’s dumb everywhere else.” Fiona dipped her toast in the congee until it was soggy enough to roll up and cram into her mouth. Her nails were studded with what looked like tiny diamonds, and Candice could imagine her all dressed up, in a mink coat with a designer bag hanging off her arm. “He actually thought I made up my condition just to get attention. Then the physical symptoms came and that shut him up real quick.”

“What’s your condition?” Candice asked.

Fiona smirked. “Like I’d tell you,” she said, and stole the last toast from Candice’s plate.

Candice looked back out the window. Forested land stretched farther than she could see, and a hot shard of anger pierced her mind. In the past few years, the rent at her housing complex had nearly doubled, and it was clearly not due to a lack of supply. The government owned all the land and controlled who could buy and develop it, which kept people like Candice and her family in tiny water-stained apartments that were barely tall enough to stand in.

“Tell me about yourself.”

Candice blinked. Fiona had leaned forward with her face in her hands. Her eyes were luminous dark pearls, and bits of wet toast clung to her heart-shaped lips. Candice almost didn’t want to ruin such innocence with her depressing truth.

“I burn to death sometimes,” Candice muttered, “and then I come back to life.”

She expected Fiona to snort or laugh, but all Fiona said was, “Like a phoenix?”

Candice shrugged. “I guess.” She thought about the first time she incinerated. It was during a time when Candice was silently crumbling under the rigors of her high school’s International Baccalaureate program, when she woke up with an aching jaw every morning because she’d been grinding her teeth all night. When Candice finally told her mother that she wanted to quit the program, her mother had slapped her. A second later, there was a snap in Candice’s mind, and then flames circled her wrists like handcuffs. By the time her mother splashed her with water, it was too late. The white flames had licked up her arms and shoulders, an inferno that grew until everything went dark, like a plug was pulled.

“How about other stuff?” Fiona asked.

“Other stuff?”

“Yeah. Like, what else are you all about?”

“Oh.” It’d been a while since anyone asked Candice about herself outside of her condition. She stared at her hands, where white curls of dead skin were still flaking off, then tucked them between her thighs. “I have a little brother. He’s entering high school and really smart.”

“Yeah? Tell me more.”

The last embers of anger in Candice’s mind fizzled out the more they talked, the more Fiona leaned in with those big eyes, like Candice was actually interesting. By the time they split up in the hall to go to their respective morning checkups, a lightness had started to flicker inside Candice’s chest.

They ate breakfast every day after that, always sitting by the same bay window, Candice always talking about herself while Fiona wolfed down a leaning tower of toast. When Candice was with her, she forgot that she was bald, that there were scabby parts of herself that needed to be covered up with bandages. Fiona accepted her in a way that no one else did, including Candice’s mother, who decided Sammy should attend a boarding school to get away from his inflammable sister.

One evening, Candice found Fiona sitting in the eating area during dinner. There was a white box on the table, along with two plastic forks.

“It’s my birthday today,” Fiona said. “Want to help me celebrate?”

Fiona’s father had sent her a strawberry shortcake. They’d known each other for two weeks now, enough time for Candice to notice how Fiona wrinkled her nose whenever she was in a bad mood—like right now.

“He could’ve taken a day off to see me.” Fiona dipped a strawberry in frosting and popped it into her mouth. She licked her fingers after, which Candice thought was really cute. “One day shouldn’t be too much to ask. It’s like he’s ashamed to be seen with me or something.”

“Maybe he’s just ashamed of himself,” Candice said. Her own father had moved to Guangzhou to be with a woman he’d met online and hadn’t contacted her or Sammy since. Their mother had said it was because he couldn’t face himself.

“Maybe.” Fiona took out a smartphone and scrolled through what looked like a glam metal playlist. “Anyway, there are some benefits of having my own space. At least he bribed the admin here to let me keep my phone so he can keep tabs on me without actually being here. And I got to go to school in America, which is where I learned about music like this.”

She popped an earphone into Candice’s ear and played “Breathless” by Quiet Riot, which Candice thought was actually pretty good.

“So what’s your condition?” Candice asked.

It was a risk to ask this again, since Fiona already didn’t want to tell her the first time. But the reflection in the window showed them slumped together, close in a way that felt surreal.

The sofa cushions squeaked. Fiona straightened up and lifted her hospital gown. Candice sucked in a breath when she saw Fiona’s bare stomach—and what looked like a dark mole about the size of a fist. It protruded from where Fiona’s belly button should’ve been and was perfectly round and solid, like a billiard ball.

“I woke up with this on my gut two months ago.” Fiona jutted out her chin, looked more defiant than ashamed. “I thought it was a mole at first, but it kept growing. X-rays showed nothing inside, and scalpels and other tools kept breaking on it during the removal process. And you know all about my useless genome sequencing trip. I’ve been eating like a starved animal because this thing sucks all the nutrients out of me.”

Candice swallowed. “Weird.”

“Yeah.” Fiona covered herself again, looked Candice in the eyes. She smiled. “So you want to make out?”

Candice kissed her first. She had wanted to do so for a while and almost couldn’t believe that she could. Fiona’s lips tasted like strawberries and frosting, and when her fingernails grazed the back of Candice’s neck, little sparks of electricity vibrated down Candice’s spine.

But the sparks dimmed almost as soon as they’d appeared, and over the next few days, they died off completely. After more kisses that left her feeling hollow, Candice asked to read the side effects of Solven during a checkup with her doctor.

May cause emotional numbness.

That was the main flaw of the pills, she realized. It not only numbed the spikes of anger inside of her, but also the bursts of joy, too.

Candice’s mother visited a week later. After a consultation with the doctor, they determined that Candice was well enough to be discharged. She was instructed to take Solven daily and to meet weekly with her doctor to monitor her progress.

“Here’s my number.” Fiona handed Candice a napkin on the day she was discharged. Candice had changed into her regular clothes, a hoodie and old jeans, and was surprised that Fiona, who must be very fashionable, still wanted to keep in touch despite seeing how she was dressed. “You better call me, Miss Phoenix, or else.”

Candice did. She called Fiona that night, wrapped in blankets to shield her voice from her mother on the other side of the paper-thin wall. Sammy was already at St. Edward’s now, but she didn’t miss him like she thought she would. She didn’t feel that lightness in her chest anymore, either, not even when Fiona said “I love you” before she hung up.

• • • •

Candice visited Fiona regularly. She told her mother that she was going to Hong Kong Island to hand out résumés to retail shops, and for a few days, she did. But when nightmares of white flames snaking up shelves of coffee beans started to jolt her awake with an aching jaw—something that hadn’t happened since high school—she stopped her job-searching efforts.

“I had an argument with a customer when it happened,” Candice said, when Fiona asked about the nightmares. “It made me so angry that I stepped aside to take a breather. I leaned against the coffee shelf and before I knew it, I was flaring up. That was what landed me in the hospital the last time.”

Candice tipped more of her mother’s cha siu bao onto Fiona’s plate. Fiona had dropped at least ten pounds since Candice was discharged over a month ago. Her cheekbones poked sharply against her skin, and her scalp, waxy like a peeled onion, was starting to show through her thinning hair.

Fiona picked up Candice’s newly refilled Solven bottle and bounced it on her palm. “You ever wonder if there’s nothing wrong with you?” Fiona asked. “That it’s places like this that are wrong, telling you what you should or shouldn’t be?”

“I burn to death, I’d say that’s wrong,” Candice said. She tugged the bottle easily out of Fiona’s grasp and tipped it left and right. She watched the lavender pills bump and slide against each other and thought about how Fiona didn’t have something similar to help her manage her condition.

“Sure, you burn to death, but you also come back to life. There’s a kind of balance there, don’t you think?” Fiona got out her smartphone and showed Candice an English website. There was a painting of a phoenix, its red-tipped wings spread high above its flaming head, its beak raised to the sun. “I’ve been reading up on phoenixes. Did you know there’s a Chinese phoenix? It’s the symbol for an empress. A, uh, feng something—”

“Fenghuang,” Candice said. She’d started noticing these differences between them, like how Fiona sometimes mispronounced Cantonese words when she spoke too fast or listened exclusively to English language songs.

“Yeah, a fenghuang.” New wrinkles formed around Fiona’s mouth when she smiled. “You’re my fenghuang, you know. You bring me luck.”

Candice looked away. Fiona, with her limited knowledge of local culture as a rich kid who grew up abroad, didn’t know that the fenghuang wasn’t actually a phoenix. It was simply a bird that never died, a creature that Candice, who had died many times, could never be.

It was a small thing, but it deepened the crack in Candice’s belief that they could ever understand each other. She waited a few days before visiting Fiona, and then an entire week. When she did visit, it was mainly to talk with her doctor or get a refill of Solven. Her conversations with Fiona became clipped and flat, and eventually she stopped replying to Fiona’s texts altogether. The doctor upped Candice’s dosage when she told him about the mild blips of annoyance she still experienced, which cloaked her emotions under a heavier blanket of numbness, but at least it seemed to have eliminated her incinerations for good.

But on the day she found out that St. Edward’s had bumped up Sammy’s scholarship from partial to full, Candice broke her silence and called Fiona to tell her the good news. Fiona had once offered to pay the rest of Sammy’s school expenses if Candice’s family couldn’t afford it, and the news would put the matter to rest once and for all.

Fiona didn’t answer. Not on the first day Candice called, nor the second. When Fiona didn’t answer for three days in a row, Candice took the ferry to the hospital to see her.

The front desk receptionist told Candice that Fiona had checked out the week before. They couldn’t give Candice confidential patient information, so she left the hospital without knowing where Fiona lived or whether she was even still alive.

• • • •

The days smeared into each other after that. Candice’s calls continued going straight to voicemail. Online searches for “Fiona Chow” turned up strangers’ profiles, and there were too many businessmen by the name of “Chow” in Hong Kong to count.

When the trees lit up with holiday lights and wet snow sloshed across the pavement, Solven flatlined Candice’s nerves enough for her to start looking for a job again. She applied at places like Louis Vuitton and Hermès, but stopped after she realized that Fiona might not even shop at those stores. Or did she? Candice didn’t know. She had always talked while Fiona listened, and even when Fiona did throw in the occasional comment about her life, they were limited to complaints about her father and her opinions on music, like whether Kiss was more innovative than Mötley Crüe. Candice cursed herself for not having asked more about Fiona, like the name of the real estate development company her father owned.

At least I can stuff my face without worrying about gaining weight, Fiona said, in a dream that made Candice blink awake with tears on Christmas morning. At least there’s that.

Candice hadn’t cried in a long time, and the fact that she still could startled her. She climbed onto Sammy’s old bunk, plugged in his CD player, and listened to “Poison” by Alice Cooper on repeat. Her mother was on the phone in the kitchen, telling someone about how hard-working Sammy was, who chose to study at St. Edward’s instead of coming home for Christmas. Candice turned up the volume and curled on her side. She stared at the yellowing math equations Sammy had taped on the wall and strained and strained, but her eyes remained dry, just a hollow gurgle escaping her throat.

After more failed attempts to cry, to laugh, to generate any emotion that made her feel alive, Candice went online. Her research told her that Solven didn’t work the same way for everyone, how some ended up fatigued instead of emotionally numb, or needed heavier dosages to achieve the same results. But the most helpful resource she found was a forum where local people discussed their personal experiences with Solven.

It’s not enough for me just to take pills, one user wrote. I need yoga to manage my stress levels on a day-to-day basis.

I agree, someone else commented. I have to track my triggers in a journal so I can deal with them better next time.

When Candice asked the forum about what she should do to feel human again, she received the following answer:

You should speak to a professional instead of asking us. If you can’t afford one, come to our Thursday meetups. There’s a therapist who donates her time to our group.

Candice went. The meetup was held at a Starbucks in Harbour City, which smelled like hazelnut and vanilla and made her miss working as a barista. She sipped her dark roast and listened to Dr. Lam, the therapist, talk about techniques to interrupt negative thinking patterns. The group members then shared their wins and losses from the past week, all the challenges they tackled or would handle better next time. But the more Candice listened, the more she imagined the shelves of coffee beans around them bursting into white flames.

She wasn’t like the others in the group. She was different, cursed with a condition that they couldn’t understand. She shouldn’t have come here.

But as she stood to leave, Dr. Lam asked, “Are you the one who asked about feeling human again?”

Dr. Lam’s eyes were so warm and perceptive that Candice sat back down. She tensed up under the scrutiny of the group, but Dr. Lam nodded at her as though giving Candice permission to speak.

It wasn’t as bad as Candice thought. She told them about her incinerations and hospitalizations, and none of the group members moved away from her or accused her of lying. Some even patted her on the shoulder and offered words of encouragement.

“Come to my office this weekend,” Dr. Lam said, and handed Candice her contact card when it was time to leave. “We’ll talk one-on-one and create a treatment plan that works for you.”

Candice went home in a daze, feeling more hopeful than she had in the half-year since she started taking Solven.

• • • •

She went to Dr. Lam’s office that weekend, and then the weekend after that. They spoke with Candice’s doctor from the hospital and created a treatment plan that relied less blindly on high dosages of Solven and more on everyday coping skills and other things Candice had been neglecting, like eating better and getting enough sleep. Dr. Lam couldn’t explain how Candice’s temper led to her flare-ups, but it was more important to help her manage her condition than to endlessly dissect its cause.

“What if this plan doesn’t work?” Candice asked Dr. Lam one evening at her office, which overlooked the southern shore of Hong Kong Island. Candice could see the hospital from this angle, including the bay window where she and Fiona ate breakfast every morning.

“Then we’ll keep adjusting until it does,” Dr. Lam said.

The hardest part wasn’t following the new treatment plan, but convincing Candice’s mother that a new plan was needed. When Candice told her mother about it, her mother threw down the cleaver she’d been slicing cabbage with.

“You haven’t incinerated once since you started your current plan, and now you want to risk all your progress on something new?” Her mother frowned at Candice, and it hurt to look at those dark eye bags and know her mother had them because she worked hard for her children. “Who is this therapist, anyway? Is she really helping you for free?”

“She’s one of the best therapists around,” Candice said, thinking of the degrees and awards that decked Dr. Lam’s office. “I’m numb all the time, Ma. I can’t feel anything anymore.”

“You’re also not being burned alive.” Her mother pushed past her and went into the bathroom. She turned on the tap and splashed water on her face, which she always did to hide her tears. “Whatever numbness you feel is worth it if it means you get to stay alive.”

“I can’t even cry anymore,” Candice said. “It’s keeping me alive, but it’s robbing me of reasons to live—”

“How can you be so selfish?” Her mother looked up so fast that water droplets—or tears—splashed onto Candice’s cheeks. “Do you know how it feels to have to pick up your child’s remains? To watch your child’s ashes bubble in the hyperbaric chamber, wondering if this is the one time she can’t come back? I can’t even talk about you at church. Do you know what it’s like to have to pretend your daughter is normal all the time, when she’s clearly not?”

The words cut deeply, but Candice straightened up like Fiona would’ve done and held her ground. Her mother continued to list reasons why the new treatment plan wouldn’t work, but all Candice could hear were Fiona’s words: You ever wonder if there’s actually nothing wrong with you?

Candice pushed her mother away. She went into her bedroom, stuffed clothes and her treatment plan into her backpack, and left home that night.

• • • •

She headed to St. Edward’s International School, where she met Sammy on the cobblestone path outside the main gates.

“Of course I support your decision,” Sammy said, after Candice told him what happened. “We’ve been learning about mindfulness in psychology class. Apparently, it can help you cope with depression and other disorders. I also started meditating to deal with exam stress, and it’s been helping a ton. So if only taking Solven isn’t working for you, you have the right to test other solutions.”

Candice stared at him. Sammy had grown an inch since she’d last seen him, and the stubble on his chin made him look more grown-up than ever. There was a small Buddha statue on his desk, and a rolled-up yoga mat tucked under his bed. It seemed impossible, but Sammy, her wunderkind little brother who was good at everything, probably also had his own issues to deal with.

“What?” Sammy frowned. Like her, he’d been conditioned to interpret all glances in his direction as critical looks.

“I’m proud of you,” Candice said. She was proud of herself, too, for seeing how she and her brother weren’t so different after all, and for reclaiming the parts of herself she’d lost.

Candice slept on the floor of Sammy’s dorm and began the new treatment plan. Dr. Lam taught her how to pay attention to her breath and to use cognitive behavioural therapy techniques to handle unpleasant situations, like the phone call with her mother about why she needed space to carry out the new treatment and therefore wouldn’t be coming home.

Candice continued going to the Thursday meetups. One of the group members was a manager at a luxury hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui and gave Candice a job as a waitress at their restaurant. It was hard, grueling work: she not only handled orders but also wiped tables and mopped floors, but there was a rhythm to the work that soothed her. Sometimes, when she folded the cloth napkins into swan shapes, it felt like she was folding up her own jagged emotions that still crept up every now and then, too.

She even learned to control her flames. Instead of trying to fight them or stuff them down like she did before, she allowed them to flow through and out of her before they ballooned into something chaotic.

“Check it out,” Candice whispered to Sammy one night. A pale flame flickered on her index finger and cast a soft glow across the dark dorm. It grew or shrank depending on how hard she concentrated. “I’m a light source, Sammy.”

Sammy laughed and clapped, and in that moment, Candice felt like her condition wasn’t something she needed to hide anymore. Her mother had raised her to never talk about her flare-ups, to explain her absences from school or church with averted gazes and white lies, but now she chose to rewrite her narrative and make her condition into something beautiful.

By the time the snow melted and new leaves started to grow on the trees, Candice had learned enough techniques for her Solven dosage to be safely decreased.

It was around this time that she met Fiona again.

Fiona walked into the restaurant where Candice worked. She was skeletal now and looked childlike in her wavy wig and oversized cardigan, but the joy that pulsed through Candice was still enough to knock her over. When their eyes met, Candice smiled at her—and it was a miracle when Fiona smiled back.

“I didn’t answer your calls because I didn’t want you to see me,” Fiona said, once they got together at a Starbucks after Candice’s shift. Candice had wanted to pay for Fiona’s vanilla latte, but Fiona bought drinks for the both of them instead, joking how she needed to help out the millennial who was living paycheck to paycheck. The old Candice would’ve been annoyed at this blatant acknowledgement of their socioeconomic differences, but now it was easy for her to let the negative emotions go.

“I look horrible, don’t I?” Fiona asked, after enough silence had passed.

Candice hugged her. It was a relief when the tears came, and as she breathed in Fiona’s blossom perfume, she thought of the coming summer and how it was almost a year ago that they first met in the hospital.

“Where are you getting treatment now?” Candice asked when they pulled apart.

Fiona didn’t meet Candice’s eyes. “I’m not.”

She told Candice that she’d stopped treatment last fall, when the doctors and specialists told her that her mole was beyond their control. Unlike Candice, Fiona’s condition couldn’t be managed at all. Her mole was rooted in all the systems of her body and would continue to grow and live off of her until there was nothing left.

Fiona unbuttoned her heavy cardigan and showed Candice the mole, which was as big as a bowling ball now.

The sight was a cold blade in Candice’s chest. She put her face in her hands and wondered where all the time went.

• • • •

It couldn’t happen any other way. They decided to do it, and the time was now.

The sun glared over the mountains when they got off the lift. It was all green on this side of Hong Kong Island, no expensive hospitals or congested cityscapes in sight. Everything smelled piney and fresh so close to the peak, and as Candice led Fiona up the steps, she thought that this must be how it felt to be reborn without having to die for it.

“Why did we have to go all the way up here?” Fiona’s voice was small, but the wind carried it to Candice. It was autumn now, though it felt more like summer as Candice circled white flames over them to keep them warm.

“So you can go out in style, duh.” Candice bent down and helped Fiona climb onto her back. Fiona barely weighed anything now, with most of her heaviness coming from the mole that’d expanded across her chest, which grazed uncomfortably against Candice’s back as they climbed. Fiona pressed her chapped lips against the shell of Candice’s ear.

“I know when you fell in love with me,” Fiona said, a smile in her voice.

Candice grinned. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Fiona laughed, a wheezy sound that broke Candice’s heart. “It was when I showed you my killer abs.”

It took a while for Candice to realize that Fiona was referring to the night they’d leaned against each other on the sofa, when Fiona first showed her the mole. It was easy to see why Fiona would choose that moment, since they’d kissed not long after, so Candice didn’t challenge that assumption. She was only now starting to realize how she might’ve loved Fiona that night she heard Alice Cooper playing in the next room, how she might’ve loved Fiona before she even met her.

By the time they reached the peak, sweat stung Candice’s eyes and her knees wobbled from carrying Fiona. But it was worth it when she took in the view: a deep blue sky, endless forested mountains, thick mist curling over the clear shell of water. This was the tallest mountain on Hong Kong Island, the closest they could get to heaven from the ground.

Will Fiona come back like I can?

Candice didn’t have an answer. She snapped off her gloves and held Fiona’s bony face in her hands. She thought about her life up until now: her little brother who would always be lightyears ahead, her mother who had finally come to terms with the new treatment plan but now found fault with Candice’s job as a waitress, since she believed Candice should go back to school instead.

And then she thought of Fiona.

Candice stared into Fiona’s eyes, like everything she wished she could say could be communicated in that single look. Like how mythology didn’t mean a damn thing outside of the meaning you gave it. How you could be a fenghuang and still rise from the ashes, if you so choose. How in this version of the phoenix myth, their version, ashes didn’t just restore the phoenix, but those she cared about, too.

Candice took Fiona’s hand in hers. White flames circled over them, ready to swallow them up at Candice’s command. “Ready, Empress?”

Fiona nodded and squeezed her hand.

Together, they burned.

©2020 by Millie Ho.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Millie Ho’s work appears in Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and others. She was a finalist for the 2019 Rhysling Awards and lives in Montreal. Find her at www.millieho.net and on Twitter @Millie_Ho.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

We Are Where the Nightmares Go

C. Robert Cargill | 6392 words

Everyone knows the story of the little girl who fell down the rabbit hole and of the children who walked through the wardrobe and of the little girl who was scooped up by the tornado and of the little boy who found the book that never ended and of the little girl who said the right words on the other side of the mirror and of the little girl who unlocked the bricked-up door in the cellar and of the little boy who had such wonderful dreams night after night. But those are the children who came back. No one talks about the other children, the children who walk through basement doors and rabbit holes never to return, or the ones who are never quite the same again once they do. The things that happen to those children are not so magical, not so delightful. Their adventures are not the things of pageant retellings and matinees. Rather, they are the things we try not to think of, the things instead we dream about when we would rather be dreaming of something else.

This is the story of just such a child, a child who awoke to find herself stiff as a board, unable to so much as move a muscle, so stiff in fact that she was able to wriggle her soul free and loose it out into the night. And as that child stepped from her body and onto the floor, she saw the faintest hint of light leaking out from beneath her bed, a light that spilled across the hardwood like errant moonbeams, beckoning her to peer into the dark, past the curtain of cascading bedspread and the clutter of discarded toys. There, as she knelt, she spied a door in the wall beneath the bed frame: a door that had not been there before—just large enough for a small child to squeeze through—a door no adult could fit through, which was fine, as no adult in their right mind would ever believe in such a thing. But this little girl did believe in such things and this little girl was just small enough to fit through it and this little girl could find no reason not to investigate where the light leaking out from the space between the door and the floor was coming from.

The light beyond the door was blinding against the midnight black, but warm, inviting. And as she squeezed her way through the tiny portal, every inch of her body scraping against the wood on its way past, she felt as if she were getting safer, inch by inch. Though the room behind her was her own and she knew it like she knew her own freckles, it was dark and the place beyond the door was bright. She imagined for a moment that when her eyes adjusted she would find herself on some white-sand beach, crystal-blue waters lapping against the shore, palm trees stretching toward the sky, the smell of salt and sea foam on the air.

But when her body was through and her eyes adjusted and the light seemed to dim all on its own, she found that it was hardly that—in fact, it wasn’t like that at all. There were no beaches; there was no sun. There was only shadow and moonlight, ruin and terror.

The land was broken, overgrown—thick, ancient, gnarly trees surrounded by scrub and sharp yellow grass. Buildings with shattered windows, towering hospitals next to shut-up factories next to abandoned playgrounds peppered with gravel and disused equipment. The land was a ghost town built by recession and fear, lit only by the full moon and a handful of flickering streetlamps; a tattered city, damned and forgotten.

At once she knew she had stumbled into a place of which she wanted no part, but when she turned to go back through the door, it was gone. It had become nothing but a crumbling brick wall climbing to the heavens, no door or even window in sight. Wherever she was, she was stuck, with no way to go but forward.

Before her was a shattered cobblestone path, dead grass between each stone, weeds sprouting from the cracks. And along the sides ran a chain-link fence, clipped and torn, jagged and rusty. The little girl made her way down that path, eager to find her way home, unsure which way it was. And that’s when she saw it.

The Thing on the Other Side of the Door.

At first he looked as if he were none but shadow, like a thing backlit on all sides, but as the light trickled in over his skin, the shape became a form and the form became a face and the face took its place atop arms and legs and a concave chest. It moved like a thing with all the life sucked out, left to dance at the end of a marionette’s strings. He was a man without muscle, an atrophied mess of bone and skin withering beneath tatters of rotten soiled cloth. He wore a steel-wool beard beneath lifeless blue eyes, his skin gaunt, dripping over bone, sagging at the joints, ravaged by time but never the sun. His gaze seemed to focus on nothing at all, as if he was staring at something else even when he was looking right at you, his eyes having seen horrors, such horrors—things that could be witnessed but never explained. And behind those eyes the little girl could sense a terrible thing lurking, a thing she could not begin to fathom. It was a hate so foul, an anger so unrelenting, a desire so unquenchable, that it prickled her skin as he drew closer; it was a thing, such an awful thing, that she prayed silently she might never come to understand it.

He smiled through thin pale lips and pristine pearly teeth. “Hello, child,” he said. “How is it that you came to be lost?”

When he spoke, he did so through the hiss of an old record, his voice like a recording played on a phonograph with a dirty needle and blown-out speakers. ChchchchchchchchcPOPchchchchchchchchchchchcHISSSSSSSchchchchchchPOPchchchchchchchchchchchcHISSSSSSS.

“How do you know that I’m lost?” she asked, her eyes narrow, her hands on her hips.

“Because no one stays here who doesn’t have to. You are a child in a land of lost children, wandering aimlessly, looking for a door you have no idea how to find.”

“Do you know where the door is?”

“Of course I know where the door is. It’s my job to know.”

“So which way is the door?”

“It’s every way.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“On the contrary, it makes nothing but sense. You just don’t know what sense to make of it.”

“You’re not answering my questions.”

“I’m answering everything you ask, but you’re asking such terrible questions. Ask better questions, get better answers.”

She pointed a stiff arm led by a stiffer finger out into the twilight ahead of her. “Is this the path to the door?” she asked.

“It’s a path to the door, yes,” he answered.

“Will I find the door at the end?”

“The door is at the end, but there’s not only one path to it. Every way you walk is a path, and all of those paths lead to the door. Some of them just take much longer than others. Some of them are more difficult than others. There are some paths so scary, even I never wander them. This is a land of lost children, filled with children who never find the door and those who have lost themselves trying to find it. Odds are you’ll end up just like them. I haven’t met a child yet who could find their way. But prove me wrong, I dare you. I double-dare you. Come find me and I’ll show you the way back home, the way back to the door beneath your bed.”

“Why don’t you show me where the door is, then?”

“I just told you, I am.”

“No, you’re not. You’re just being confusing.”

“No, you’re just confused. I told you exactly where the door is. I can’t simply lead you there because the door can’t be shown; it must be found. You have to find the door, and to find it, you have to pick a direction, and then you must walk in that direction until you can’t walk anymore. And that’s where the door will be. That’s where you’ll find me. And that’s where I’ll show you the way home.”

And then The Thing on the Other Side of the Door stepped backward, his body melting into the shadows whence he came. For a few seconds, only his blue eyes were left staring out at her from the dark. Then they vanished, winking out, leaving the little girl alone on the cracked cobblestone path.

She walked along the path for what seemed like hours, the twilight hanging over her head but refusing to bear any stars. The whole world was bleak, neither light enough to see nor dark enough to produce a moon. Streetlamps flickered on and off, fading with a buzz as she neared, snapping back on after she passed.

And then, without warning, she saw the clown. He stood there in the road, back to her, staring down the path at nothing in particular.

She ran to him and tugged his sleeve to get his attention. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m lost! Can you help me?”

The clown turned around and smiled through two rows of razor-sharp shark teeth, his makeup caked and flaky, his red nose battered and dirty. His hair was stringy, greasy, matted in places; his clothing stained with dirt and blood. And every few seconds he glitched like the tracking on a videocassette, his entire body going wobbly, bending impossibly, parts of him becoming squiggly moments of static. “How can I help you?” he asked, quite excited to have her attention.

“Where am I?” asked the little girl.

“We are where the nightmares go, the nightmares go, the nightmares go. We are where the nightmares go, but not from where they come.”

“What do you mean?”

“What happens when a dream ends? Where does it go?”

“I don’t know,” said the little girl.

“Well, it has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“A dream is whole only as long as it’s dreamt. Once that dream ends, it begins to fade, to get rough around the edges, to erode like a sand castle lapped by the waves. Most dreams fade into nothing, drifting away like wisps of smoke. But some dreams, they last. They take root in the soul and hold strong against the tide. The nightmares that survive, the ones that come from the darkest places of your heart and refuse to fade away, they have to go somewhere. So they end up here, cast out like the trash, dumped where no one knows where to look, in the dark space beneath your bed. Well, we are where the nightmares go. That’s us. That’s this place. Right now you’re just a dream. Be careful that you don’t become a nightmare; otherwise you might never leave.”

“Like you?”

“Like me,” said the clown, head bobbing comically.

“You’re a nightmare?”

“I am.”

“Were you always a nightmare?”

“A nightmare isn’t how a dream begins, but how it ends. Some of the worst nightmares I’ve ever known started with the best of intentions, with bright smiles and twinkling eyes. Bluebonnets and picnic baskets. I like to think that I started out that way. But that’s not how I ended up. And by the time the dreamer who made me woke up, I was the awful thing you see before you. The thing that would like to eat you now. The thing that can smell how tasty you really are.”

“You . . . you want to eat me?” asked the little girl, suddenly very frightened.

“Of course I do. You look delicious. I can’t help it. This is how someone dreamed me, so this is how I am.”

“You’re going to eat me!”

“No, no, no. I won’t eat you; I just want to. It can’t be helped.”

“How do I know you won’t eat me?”

“Do you wanna know a secret?”

“Yes,” said the little girl warily.

“Nightmares have rules.”

“The rules are a secret?”

“Of course they are. Has anyone ever told you the rules to a nightmare before?”

The little girl thought for a moment. “No,” she said, “I guess they haven’t.”

For a few seconds, staticky light flickered across his face and his body squished into a horizontal line before popping back into shape. He cocked his head to the side as if nothing had happened, and continued. “Rule number one: You can’t change the lighting. Flip a switch, it won’t come on. Turn on a flashlight, it’ll flicker before sputtering off. The light is the light and you best get used to it, because this is all the light there is. Rule number two: A nightmare can hurt you only if you let it. It can scare you only if you let it. It can get you only if you let it. A nightmare can’t do anything without your permission.”

“So if I don’t let you eat me—”

“I can’t eat you.”

“And that man who was here before?”

“What man?” asked the clown. “There are no men where the nightmares go. Only boys. Only girls. We’re all just children here.”

“The one with the blue eyes and the bushy beard.”

“Oh! You mean The Thing on the Other Side of the Door!”

“I guess.”

“Oh, he’s not a man at all.”

“So The Thing on the Other Side of the Door is just a nightmare?”

“Oh no, he is something else entirely. Something terrifying. I dare not discuss him at all, for if he hears even a whisper about him, he’ll do such awful, awful things.”

“He told me if I walk in any direction, I’ll find the way out.”

“He never lies,” said the clown. “He just doesn’t always tell the truth.”

“So the way out isn’t in any direction?”

“Oh, it is! But you don’t want to go in any direction. You want to go in the best direction.”

“Which direction is that?” asked the little girl, eyes wide and hopeful.

“I don’t know,” the clown said, flickering.

“So you can’t get out of here either?”

“Why would I get out? I belong here. I’m a nightmare, and we are—”

“Where the nightmares go.”

“Exactly! So are you picking me?”

“For what?”

“To be your clown.”

“My clown?”

“Every child gets a clown.”

“Why does every child get a clown?”

“Probably because there are so many of us here. They have to do something with us. So we help the children find their way out.”

“Oh yes!” said the little girl. “Please help me find my way out.”

The clown smiled wide, all sixty-four of his shark teeth showing at once. “Okay,” he said. “But no take-backsies. I’m your clown for good and for all.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Shake on it?” He spit in his hand and held it out. He flickered in and out.

“Shake on it,” she said, spitting in her own hand and shaking his.

She looked down at their hands, disappointed. “I thought there would be a buzzer.”

The clown lost his smile, shoulders drooping. “I wasn’t dreamed with one.”

“Were you dreamed with a name?”

The clown shook his head sadly. “No. Most clowns don’t have names.”

“Would you like one?”

“Yes!” he said excitedly, flickering.

“I’ll trade you.”

“For what? Anything. I’ll do anything for a name.”

“You have to tell me rule number three.”

“Oh,” he said, “most children don’t ask about rule number three. And rule number three is the best rule of all.”

“What is it?”

“What’s my name?”

“You get the name after the rule.”

“No take-backs?”

“No take-backs.”

“Rule number three is that you don’t have to do any of the boring stuff.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“It means you don’t have to walk the whole way. You can just skip to the next interesting bit.”

“Skip?”

“It’s a dream. We are in a nightmare, and a nightmare doesn’t have to make sense and it doesn’t have to obey any rules but its own. A nightmare can just happen. So what’s my name?”

The little girl thought for a moment, hands on her hips. She looked up. “Siegfried,” she said. “You look like a Siegfried.”

“Oooh, I like Siegfried,” he said. “I like Siegfried a lot.”

“What’s the fourth rule?”

“There are only three rules.”

“Good. So can we skip ahead to the next part?”

“Turn around,” he said with a flicker, almost completely winking out as he did.

The little girl turned, and behind her in the distance was a vast amusement park, its rides broken down and still, its lights flickering, dimming in and out. Most of the park was dark, save for a tiny strip of games, filled with kids.

She ran toward the games. “The other kids must know how to get out of here,” she said.

Siegfried chased after her. “No, they don’t,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because they’re all still here.”

The little girl slowed down, then came to a stop. “You mean I might not get out of here?”

“Most children don’t.”

She looked up at her clown. “They don’t?”

“Didn’t The Thing on the Other Side of the Door tell you that?”

“Yeah, but I thought he was just trying to scare me.”

“I told you, he doesn’t lie. He never lies. A lie in a nightmare simply becomes the truth, so a lie is just another way of looking at the dream.”

The little girl narrowed her eyes. “I am going to get out of here.”

“You’ll have to do whatever it takes.”

“I can do whatever it takes.”

“Whatever it takes is always harder than you think.”

“I’m going home. And if I can’t lie, then that must be the truth.”

“Well, find your way out of here, hotshot.”

She looked around. Everything but the games was draped in darkness, all seeming to shout GO AWAY! The little girl pointed to the well-lit arcade alley. “Let’s try there first.”

As they approached, they could hear carnival barkers hawking their amusements. “Step right up!” they yelled. “Right this way! Strike the bell!” or “Toss a ring onto the milk bottle!” or “Knock down all the cups!” or “Spin the wheel! Win a prize!”

The little girl eyed them all suspiciously. “My daddy says these games are rigged.”

“Of course they are,” said Siegfried. “That’s the point.”

“That they’re rigged?”

“You have to know the trick to them. Everything’s rigged. Once you figure out how, then you can learn how to win. What fun would they be if you just walked up and won them?”

The little girl looked for a carnival game she thought she could win. She didn’t like the ring toss, wasn’t strong enough to swing a hammer, hated that game with the gophers where they all jumped up at once. But then she saw the shooting gallery. Point and shoot. That seemed easy enough.

A carnival barker clown stood behind a counter that had half a dozen rifles sitting on it. “Step right up,” he said, through a thick, well-chewed cigar. “Hit a clown, any clown, and win a prize.”

“What’s the prize?” she asked.

“A ticket out of the carnival,” he said.

“What kind of prize is that?”

“The only prize here worth winning.”

She picked up a rifle and stared down the range. Six clowns cowered atop rickety barstools twenty feet away, each shaking and frightened. Their eyes begged her not to shoot them. They were so close they were impossible to miss. “That’s it?” she asked. “Just hit a clown?”

“That’s it. You get three shots.”

She smiled. This was too easy.

The little girl raised the rifle, aimed carefully, then squeezed the trigger. Bang! The bullet veered up and hit the roof. The clowns each sighed with relief.

“Wait a second! That’s not where I was aiming!”

“Hit a clown, win a prize. Never said the rifles shot straight.”

“But that’s cheating.”

“No. That’s the game.” The carnival barker clown pulled the gooey cigar out from his mouth and smiled with yellow teeth, blowing several lungsful of smoke into her face.

She furrowed her brow with determination, raised the rifle, aimed really low—well below the clown she wanted to hit—and pulled the trigger.

The clown winced, shivering in fear.

The shot veered to the right, missing all the clowns completely.

“This is rigged!” she yelled.

“Only one more shot,” said the clown.

“What happens then?”

“Then you stay here forever. You only get three shots.”

“I can’t stay here forever!” she cried.

“Then you better hit a clown,” he said, smiling.

She thought for a second. The first shot had gone too high. The second shot went high and to the right. She tried to do the math in her head where it would go this time. And then she figured it out.

The little girl raised her rifle and said, “I’m sorry, Siegfried.”

Then she turned the rifle on her clown, pressed the muzzle against his arm, and pulled the trigger.

Siegfried jumped and cried out in pain, grabbing his bloody bicep. “Ow! You shot me!”

She looked at the carnival barker clown, who angrily stubbed out his cigar in a cheap tin ashtray. “You said any clown.”

He tore off a ticket with a sneer and handed it to her, pointing a stern finger at the other end of the game alley. “Way out is that way.”

The little girl took the ticket, smiled, and ran off, Siegfried close behind.

“I can’t believe you shot me!”

She stopped for a moment, turned to Siegfried, and took him by the hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t want to be trapped here forever.”

“Neither do I,” he said.

“Do you want to find the way out with me?”

He nodded excitedly. “I’ve never seen it.”

“Well, we’ll find it.”

And together they ran off to the exit, where she turned in her ticket and was allowed out back onto the path.

The path was dark, a poorly lit street in a bad neighborhood with monsters and angels lurking in every shadow. The little girl peered into the shadows as she passed, but could never quite make anything out.

“What are those things?” she asked.

“Those? Those are the nightmares no one ever sees—the things they know are there but are afraid to see what they look like.”

“I want to see them!”

“No you don’t,” said a frighteningly familiar voice.

From one of the shadows stepped The Thing on the Other Side of the Door, his blue eyes glaring at her. Siegfried hid behind her, shaking.

“Who’s this?” asked The Thing on the Other Side of the Door.

“Siegfried,” she said.

“You gave it a name?”

“Yes. Everyone deserves a name.”

“Everyone, yes. But not everything.”

“Well, Siegfried is helping me find the way out, so he gets a name.”

“No he isn’t.”

“Yes he is.”

“You beat the park. Few children ever beat the park. Did you tell her how to beat the park, Siegfried?”

“No!” said the clown. “I swear I didn’t. I SWEAR!”

“Good. Because if I found out that you had . . .”

“He can’t help me?” asked the little girl.

“No, he can help you. He just can’t tell you.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“You’ll see,” he said. “Maybe.”

And once again The Thing on the Other Side of the Door disappeared, leaving the little girl and Siegfried alone on the dark street.

“What now?” she asked.

“Now we get to the next part.”

“And where is that?”

“Turn around,” Siegfried said with a razor-sharp smile.

Before them lay a wide field of towering brown bramble bushes, each with branches twenty feet high and thorns two feet long. The bushes formed a maze and the maze went on seemingly for miles.

“Do we have to go this way?” asked the little girl.

“Of course we do,” said Siegfried. “This way is forward, and we always have to go forward.”

An eyeless clown sat at a cheap folding card table, atop of which sat a jar of eyeballs and a card that read ADMISSION—2 EYES. Blood trickled from his empty sockets and he scowled as he heard them approach the bramble maze.

“Admission: two eyes!” he demanded.

“Do I have to give you my eyes?” asked the little girl.

“Of course you do! It’s the price of admission! If you want to go into the maze, you have to give me your eyes!”

The little girl took Siegfried by the hand and pulled him out of earshot of the eyeless clown. “I can’t give him my eyes,” she said. “I won’t be able to find my way through the maze.”

“Well, you can’t get into the maze without giving him your eyes.”

She thought for a second. “I can give him yours.”

“No,” said Siegfried. “I need my eyes.”

“I need your eyes. Do you want to see the end or not?”

“I won’t be able to see it without my eyes.”

“Give me your eyes,” she said. “We’ll dream them back for you later.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Then I’ll have to leave you here.”

Siegfried looked sadly down at the little girl. He sighed, nodding. “All right.” He dug his fingers into his sockets, so far back his fingernails almost scraped against brain, and then he plucked his eyes out in a single painful tug. Blood poured down his cheeks in scarlet rivulets. Blind, he clumsily handed her both his eyes. Then she took him by the hand and they returned to the clown at the card table.

“Here are my eyes,” she said.

“Give ’em here,” said the eyeless clown, holding out a greedy hand.

The little girl pretended to fumble about, placing both eyes in his palm. He examined them closely with his fingers, then stuck each of them, one by one, into his mouth to make sure they were real. Then he spit them each into the jar and waved the little girl into the maze.

“You may enter,” he said.

“How do you get through the maze?” the little girl asked.

“You walk!”

“Yeah, but how do you find your way out?”

“You walk!” he said again.

She thought for a second. “Are there any rules?”

The eyeless clown leaned back in his chair. “No one’s thought to ask that before.”

“Are there?”

“Yes!”

“What are they?”

“Only you can find your way out. No one can help you. And you’re not allowed to break any other rules.”

“That’s it?” asked the little girl.

“Is that it?” mocked the clown. “That’s everything.”

“Thank you,” she said.

Then he laughed. “Good luck!”

The little girl took hold of Siegfried’s sleeve and led him into the bramble maze. Inside, the walls seemed higher, the bushes thicker, the thorns sharper than they appeared from without. The two hadn’t walked but a few minutes before seeing a young boy, no older than seven, sitting on the ground, crying, eye sockets empty, hands stained with blood.

“I can’t find my way out,” he cried. “I can’t find my way out!”

The boy’s clown sat beside him, as lost and confused as he was.

“Can’t your clown show you the way out?” she asked the boy.

“We don’t know the way out,” said Siegfried.

The boy wailed, but the little girl remembered the rules. No one can help you. She put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Just keep going forward. I’m sure you’ll find your way out.”

“No! Please don’t leave me here!” begged the child.

“I have to,” said the little girl. “Or else I can’t get out of here either.”

The little girl pulled Siegfried by his sleeve and they hurried down the corridor of the maze as quickly as they could. It wasn’t long before they ran across another eyeless child, sitting in the mud, also crying and lost. This one looked up, hearing them coming. “Is somebody there?” the child asked.

The little girl put a single finger over Siegfried’s lips, signaling to him to keep very, very quiet. He smiled, nodding, and together they snuck past the child, the child’s clown looking up sadly at them as they passed, but not saying a word.

By the time the little girl and Siegfried ran across and slipped past a third eyeless child, it was clear they were hopelessly lost. They had walked for what felt like hours and the gargantuan brambles seemed to go on forever in every direction.

“How are we supposed to get out of here?” she asked, stamping her foot in the dirt.

“I told you, we don’t know,” said Siegfried.

The little girl thought for a moment, then pointed a finger at her clown. “Wait a minute,” she said. “He said I couldn’t break any of the rules.”

“That’s right,” said Siegfried. “You can’t.”

“But the rules aren’t for me.”

“Yes they are. They’re for everyone.”

“No. The rules are that no one can change the light, nothing can hurt me if I don’t let it, and I don’t have to do the boring parts.”

“Right.”

“This maze is boring. I want to skip to the end.”

Siegfried smiled. “Turn around,” he said.

She turned and saw the exit to the maze, quickly making her way out of it, dragging Siegfried along by the hand.

“You got through the maze,” said the frightfully familiar voice from out of the shadows.

The little girl turned to face The Thing on the Other Side of the Door. “I’m not afraid of you!” she said.

“Who said you should be afraid of me?”

She turned and pointed to the clown cowering behind her.

The Thing on the Other Side of the Door shook its head. “He’s nothing but a nightmare. He has everything to fear because he is made of nothing but. But not you. You still have your eyes.”

She smiled wickedly with her hands on her hips. “Yes I do. And I’m going to find the door out.”

“We’ll see,” The Thing said, slowly fading away. “Your clown may not be able to, but you and I shall see.”

The little girl looked around and saw nothing but darkness. “Where are we?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Siegfried. “You took my eyes.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“Neither can I!”

“No, I mean—” She stopped and listened close. She could hear sloshing water and the rhythmic breaking of waves. “Water!” As she focused, she could delineate between the inky black waves and a velvety starless sky. Then she saw it, a few hundred yards out in the water, a square concrete building rising out of the surf. “Can you swim?” she asked Siegfried.

“Yes, I think so,” he said nervously.

“I’ll be your eyes,” she said. “There’s a building out there. We have to get to it.”

Siegfried swallowed hard. “Okay,” he said. “Anything to get to the end.” He knelt down and the little girl climbed onto his back. Then he waded out into the tide and began to swim.

His clothing grew heavy, weighing him down, but he swam hard, struggling to keep his head above water with the extra weight of the little girl on his back. “How much farther?” he asked.

“Not much,” she said. “Just keep swimming.”

His legs pumped, his arms splashed, and his clothing grew even heavier. “How much farther?” he asked again, choking on salty seawater.

“Not much,” she said again, seeing the lights of the concrete box growing closer by the second.

So he swam harder, giving it everything he had, swallowing mouthful after mouthful of seawater, taking care to keep the little girl above water. “How much farther?” he asked one last time.

“We’re almost there. Swim. Swim!”

And Siegfried slipped below the waves.

The little girl let go, pumping her own legs, dogpaddling the last few feet. She reached out, grabbing a ladder at the base of the building, and held on for dear life. She looked out into the water, but saw nothing but black. “Siegfried!” she shouted. “Siegfried?”

There was no answer but the sound of waves slapping against the building.

“Goodbye, Siegfried,” she said. “I’d have liked you to see what the end looked like.” Then she slowly climbed the ladder, the weight of the water in her clothes like a sack of rocks strapped to her back. She climbed and she climbed and she climbed some more for what seemed like days, until she reached the top of the ladder and found there a metal door, covered in rust.

The little girl turned the handle, pushed open the door, and fell inside.

The Thing on the Other Side of the Door stood in the center of a windowless room, arms behind his back, head cocked, eyes trained on the little girl. “You’re here,” he said.

“Yes,” said the little girl, terrified.

“Where’s your clown?”

She looked down at the ground, scuffing her feet. “He didn’t . . . he didn’t make it.”

“You used him to get all the way through, didn’t you?”

She nodded, ashamed.

“Good. Good!” He smiled. “Loathsome creatures. He would have eaten you, given the chance.” He began to pace around, excited. “I had hopes for you. I really did. I could see it in your eyes. You weren’t going to let this place beat you. Some children you can tell right away won’t make it. Others I’m not so sure. But you figured it out, didn’t you?”

“Why did you bring me here?” she demanded.

“I didn’t bring you here,” he said. “No one brought you here. You came here.”

“You tricked me.”

“Into what?”

“Into going through the door beneath my bed!”

He shook his head. “On nights when there is no moon and the stars are the only light to see by, a door appears beneath the bed of a child—always a child, one just old enough to still believe in such things, and never beneath the same child twice. That child is roused by a clatter that makes no sound at all and tempted by a light that streams from a crack beneath the door. Only the bravest and most adventurous open the door and crawl through. The rest go back to sleep, think it nothing but a dream, and spend the rest of their lives fearing what might lurk under their bed. You chose to go through the door. Just as I did.”

“You came through the door?”

“A long time ago, when I was your age.”

“But you’re old!”

“Very,” he said. “It took a long time for another child to make it through. Like I said, I’ve never seen a child get here. Now I have.” He smiled big and broad. “Finally I get to go home.”

“We’re going home together?”

He laughed. “No. There always has to be someone here to care for the nightmares. They have nowhere else to go. And it has to be someone who understands what they are. They are things to overcome, to be destroyed, to be sacrificed. They’re what make us brave; they’re what help us face the world. We trap them here so they can’t infect the rest of the world. The rest of who we are. That clown wasn’t your friend. He didn’t want to help you. He used you to try and find his way out, to try and become a dream again. But he would only have gotten worse, would only have terrified other children. He was a nightmare that needed to be relegated to the dustbin of the universe.

“We are where the nightmares go. And where they were meant to stay. Not just anyone can look after them; it has to be someone capable of being as awful as a nightmare, someone unafraid to do terrible things, someone who can dream up such awful challenges to keep those damned clowns stuck in here forever.”

“This is about the clowns?” asked the little girl.

“And all the other awfulness you saw. And all the awfulness you haven’t yet seen. But you’ll have time. There are so many nightmares and only one child a month to pin your hopes on. Maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe one of the first ones will find their way through; maybe they’ll figure out what the clowns are for. But look at me. Look at how long it took this time.”

“But you said you’d show me the way out!”

“Yes!” he said, shaking his head. “And I did! I told you how to find the door. You were my door. I get to go home now. Through you. And if you want to leave, then you have to find your door.”

“But this is the end! You said the door was at the end!”

“Who said this was the end? We are where the nightmares go, and where they go, there is no end.”

“So I’m stuck here forever?”

“No. All those children out there are stuck here forever. Their bodies are at home or in institutions, staring into space, no one around them aware of the nightmares they see. You get to leave. Eventually. When the right child shows up.”

“What do I do until then?”

The Thing on the Other Side of the Door smiled. “Skip the boring bits. And don’t let the clowns out.” Then he hugged her, and he began to glow and expand until he popped out of existence. He returned to a body that had lain asleep for longer than he cared to think about.

And the little girl was a little girl no longer.

She had done whatever it took.

She had killed her clown.

She had become a thing worse than a nightmare.

She had become The Thing on the Other Side of the Door.

©2018 by Fellaheen Productions. Originally published in We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C. Robert Cargill is a novelist, former film critic, and a screenwriter on Marvel’s Doctor Strange and both of the Sinister films. His novel Sea of Rust was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He lives and works here in Austin, Texas.

Destinations of Love

Alexander Weinstein | 2741 words

From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide

Your guidebook writers are—alas—very familiar with booking tickets in search of love. How many of us haven’t packed our bags for the new continent with this foolish goal in mind? We’ve stumbled through our travels, searching cities and villages for romance. In cafés, opera houses, and hotel rooms, we felt acutely alone. Why, even the most exquisite restaurants were dulled by the empty chair across from us. And when the city became illuminated with music and lights, and glowing boats sailed across a moonlit lake, we saw couples kissing and our hearts ached.

Of course, there are some who travel to escape love. And while they easily find themselves kissed by strangers in foreign cities, they quickly wrestle themselves free, as though love was a beast intent on suffocating them. For such travelers, the balconies where their new lovers serve them coffee are closer to cafés than homes, and their newfound trysts are nothing more than layovers. They leave only the souvenirs of their stay behind them: a barrette on a bedside table, a t-shirt beneath a couch, a note on a kitchen counter, and the residue of solitude in every bed they share.

This is not to dismiss lust—for which many tourists have packed their bags—and there’s certainly no shortage of it amid the destinations we’ve visited. Lust calls from every discotheque and bar in all the cities of the Eighth continent; you can easily book your reservation for it. Love, on the other hand, proves much harder to find.

Of course, you may discover love in one of the following destinations, or awaiting you in a library, or perhaps even as you approach the counter in a coffee shop to order your espresso. As for your guidebook writers, we’ve learned to comfort ourselves with the mystery of its sudden appearance, and while we cannot provide you with its coordinates, we can offer you our advice. When the time comes, and you’re fortunate enough to stumble across the place where love resides, we highly suggest you unpack your bags, sell your suitcase, and make it your new home.

The City of Ísbraug

There are destinations which one can’t help but fall in love with. Such is the case with the city of Ísbraug. For decades, the city had been a sleepy one, visited by few—no one was interested in its bookstores or asked its hotels about vacancies—until a group of backpackers discovered it. And soon, one by one, the visitors came, until tourists were arriving by the planeload. How happy Ísbraug was then! The city welcomed travelers as warmly as newfound sweethearts. It showed them its cobblestone streets, its blue painted houses and candlelit restaurants; it turned spare bedrooms into guesthouses, opened its doors wide, and awoke travelers in the morning with hot cocoa and scones.

For those of us who visited the city during its heyday, our memories of past vacations faded quickly. Sure, we’d enjoyed those other travels, but they’d been minor preludes, layovers on our way to this city whose company we never again wished to leave. In the following years, we returned again and again, spending our savings on plane tickets, filling our albums with its photos, and counting the hours until we were back in its embrace.

But, alas, even cities can fall out of love with us. We could feel Ísbraug growing distant as we walked its streets, our lungs full of its air, our bodies warm from its nighttime duvets. The citizens began to shut their doors and roll down their shades; museums closed earlier; storekeepers no longer greeted us; and restaurants told us there was an hour-long wait, though locals were seated immediately. And then, finally, Ísbraug left us for good. Its tourist bureau closed, its border control wouldn’t stamp our passports, and its bureau of immigration no longer returned our calls.

Being dumped by a city hasn’t been easy. The most resilient of your guidebook writers remember warm days of sunshine when Ísbraug’s beer gardens were open and servers brought us mugs of elderflower ale. Others, whose hearts still ache, recall Ísbraug as a city of betrayal, a destination they once loved who they never want to see again. What can we do? We can write the country letters, but they go unanswered. We can send desperate emails to the tourist board, but they only solidify Ísbraug’s wish for distance. We look at the magnets on our fridge or the woolen blankets we brought back with us and spend a last moment recalling the city’s embrace. Then we pack up our souvenirs and donate them to the local thrift store. And like we’ve had to do so many times before, we book our travels elsewhere.

The Hotel Aulaun

Have you been spurned or betrayed, cuckolded or deceived? Has your heart craved love but only found rejection? If so, come at once to The Hotel Aulaun, where even the most jaded hearts are healed. Here, bickering couples will find they’re unable to access the bitter tongues they were once fluent in. Instead, they recall the movement of a partner’s body across an apartment where they first lived, or a checkered shirt their spouse used to wear—and suddenly the closed fist of their heart opens and they wish only to seize their partners and ravage them behind the closed doors of the hotel’s bedrooms.

So it goes at The Hotel Aulaun, where everyone is in love. In all of its rooms, only the most sacred rituals are practiced: the wetting of lips, the kissing of necks, sheets wrapped around ankles, comforters flung to the floor—and, always, the request for more, more, and more.

As for the city itself, we’re afraid not much can be reported. Not a single one of your guidebook writers has seen anything other than the hotel’s bedrooms. We could, I suppose, tell you of sweat on a forearm, the glint of candlelight on a belly, pillows positioned every which way except for sleeping—but such details are too intimate an affair to write about in a travel guide. Are there museums and monuments? Well . . . yes . . . most likely. Restaurants? We imagine so. However, all we ever saw were glimpses of the city through our bedroom window. We watched the sky grow dark, the outline of roofs illuminated by moonlight, and once we saw a woman on a distant balcony smoking a cigarette. But more often than not, the curtains were drawn, and a light wind cooled our bodies before we were taken again, clothing tossed hither-thither, rolled and rubbed and pleasured forever.

What can we say? As your guidebook writers, we apologize.

We do, however, feel it necessary to note an important detail which any traveler checking into the hotel should know: The spell of love is broken the moment one checks out—and upon returning the keys, bickering couples find themselves bickering again; passionate lovers scold one another for the delays which their morning lovemaking caused; and everyone finds the world outside just as unpleasant as they’d left it.

But don’t lose all hope. There are those travelers—far wiser than us—who never officially check out. They escape through their hotel room windows on knotted bed sheets; they build makeshift hang-gliders from curtain rods and set sail across rooftops; and they return to their hometowns while remaining checked-in to the hotel so far away. Everyone has seen them in our cities. Across the restaurant where we sit, they lean toward one another, their fingers entwined by the candlelight which burns with the glow of the hotel’s bedrooms. We pass them pressed in embrace against the doorways of art galleries, and we hear them making love through the walls of our apartments. And if our hearts bristle upon hearing these sounds, if we curse our bad luck and turn up the music to drown out their moans, let us remember one thing: The Hotel Aulaun is always awaiting our reservations; we were the ones who choose to check out.

The Museum of Heartbreak

At The Museum of Heartbreak, visitors will experience a wide collection of exhibits which are bound to shatter our hearts forever. Admission is paid at the museum’s entrance, where one encounters a ticket seller so stunning that it leaves you tongue-tied. Many visitors end up silently chastising themselves for lacking the courage to even ask for a name. They stumble toward the galleries and wander exhibits rehearsing lines to say, but on exiting find only a dour employee frowning at them. Worse are the patrons who muster the courage to suggest a date when purchasing tickets. To this, the ticket seller will look up, the shine of their eyes suddenly dull. How kind of us, they say with the distance of a school teacher, but they only date people far younger, smarter, skinnier, or sexier.

In the first floor’s photography gallery, visitors will discover a wide selection of erotic black and white photos of recent exes with their new lovers. Picking up the attached headphones, we can listen to post-coital pillow talk as they describe our deficiencies to their new partners. Along the far wall are complimentary pens, paper, and envelopes with which to write long impassioned letters that will never be answered.

Passing through to the main hall, we encounter our first true love, the one we’d hoped to marry. We’d almost moved in together, had gotten rid of one set of pot holders, duplicates of books; had spoken in excited terms to friends and family using words like eternity. Our ex is wandering the museum with their fiancé. They both shake our hand. They just bought a house together, they tell us. Our ex is certain we’ll meet the right person someday.

Those visiting the museum with romantic partners are certain to never forget the third-floor gallery, where beneath the bright lights of its many displays, partners will finally make up their minds to leave us forever. By bronzed statues of goddesses, husbands will reveal decade-long affairs and wives will admit to scores of infidelities. In the darkness of the video display room, one first hears about divorce lawyers. At the central podium is a collection of text messages between our husbands and wives and the people they’ve cheated on us with.

Wherever one goes, from the sculpture garden to the rooftop patio, the museum is filled with emotional pains that will wound us forever. Many patrons can be found sitting in the lobby, openly weeping, and everyone stumbles from the museum’s exit, dazed and blinking in the daylight. Why, we wonder, did we ever visit the museum in the first place? All we wanted was a little bit of joy, a moment of delight—every one of us clueless to the suffering our tickets would provide.

The Quzetch Parasite

For those planning to travel to Quzetch, we must warn you about a common parasite found regularly in both the cities and countryside of this otherwise lovely country. Many tourists acquire the bug from bathing in populated rivers or visiting beachside resorts, though one can find it in bus and rail stations, art galleries, and singles bars. And while the creature’s initial size is no larger than a poppy seed, it quickly burrows beneath skin, subsisting off the host’s blood, and becoming increasingly engorged over several months.

The most notable symptom is that those infected will begin to speak effusively of love. Over coffee, the infected tell stories which revolve entirely around themselves, their eyes glassy as they harangue innocent family members with confessions of how happy they are. When asked for a name or a description, they often avoid answering, stating that it’s too new to say, before returning to how their hearts can barely keep from bursting.

It’s this very symptom that leads others to ignore the early warning signs. One can only bear to suffer a few encounters with the newly infected before avoiding contact completely. It’s often months later when those closest to the victim realize the person has disappeared from all social gatherings. And so the clear signs of infection go untreated as the parasite grows.

For, unlike the common tick, which eventually detaches itself once fully engorged, the Quzetch Parasite continues to feed—growing over time to the size of a golf ball, then a grapefruit, and eventually surpassing the size of a watermelon, impeding the host’s mobility and desire to engage in any activities which previously gave them joy. They’re never seen going to the movies, cannot be found staying after work for drinks, nor donating time to the local charities where they once were active. They can reluctantly be found attending to work duties, or on intense prodding will appear at a best friend’s birthday—but one finds them dragging along their growth and staying just long enough to have the requisite drink before making excuses for an early departure.

By the time the parasite has grown to the size of a bicycle tire, its symptoms have become evident to everyone except its host. The infected person appears lethargic, their eyes ringed with sleeplessness, and their voice reveals an absence of joy. When witnessed by friends or family, they appear distant from conversation, interested only in stroking their growth as manically as some check cellphones for text messages. The infected will refuse to listen to advice from concerned acquaintances or medical professionals who insist they get the parasite removed. In fact, such suggestions result in anger and further separation, the host refusing to seek treatment, and ultimately choosing to isolate themselves completely from family and coworkers. Best friends are unfriended on social media, family members are blocked, and the host moves apartments, telling no one of their new address, happy to finally be alone with their growth. For many, there’s little hope once infected. They spend their last hours alone in bed, stroking the parasite beneath their skin, whispering to it, over and over, I love you so much.

The City of Rouxman

The city of Rouxman has grown tired of tourists who arrive with their insatiable appetites wishing for a short-lived romp. And while it’s difficult to believe a city might actively dislike its visitors, there’s little else to conclude when encountering its dark streets. For the city hisses at new arrivals with thunderstorms, and shows the claws of its pickpockets and rabid cats. Whether traveling for business or vacation, you’ll always arrive late, and the taxi driver will leave you at the far end of town where the streetlights are busted and the cobblestones are crooked. There are no hotels here, only shuttered windows, and if you’re fortunate enough to find an open restaurant, your meal is bound to be cold.

There are few words to accurately describe the despair of the first nights in Rouxman. You’d looked forward to this layover; had told friends and family of your plans; had watered the plants; held the mail; packed your best clothes, only to arrive to this? A godawful town where no one asks your name and your clothes are soaked by downpour. Many tourists soon fill outboxes with outraged messages. Awful time in Rouxman. Horrible city! Never coming back! In fact, it’s so miserable that on encountering the third day of rain most travelers rebook tickets to nearby cities.

And yet, for those who quiet their complaints, swallow their pride, and relent to the rain, Rouxman begins to soften. It slinks on cautious paws from the doorstep and crosses the cobblestones, allows its face to caress our palm, flicks its tail against our shins, and then, with a contented purr, rolls out its sunshine and birdsong. And suddenly the streets are alive with children and bicycles; sunflowers stretch lazily against brick walls; at taverns, women sing beautiful ballads; and the local café serves warm biscuits slathered with homemade jam.

Yes, for those of us patient enough to wait, we’ve come to love the city. Thank goodness we didn’t listen to our buffoonish coworkers, foolish travelers embittered from overnight visits to a city which treated them with the same indifference they’d shown it. Thank goodness we gave the city a chance. Like anyone, Rouxman merely wanted to know we’d stay long enough to make it through its dark clouds, its passing showers, its momentary darkness.

©2020 by Alexander Weinstein.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Weinstein is the author of the short story collections, Universal Love (2020) and Children of the New World, which was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times, NPR and Electric Literature. He is a recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his stories and interviews have appeared in Rolling Stone, World Literature Today, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best American Experimental Writing. He is the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and an associate professor of creative writing at Siena Heights University.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

EXCERPT: Creatures of Charm and Hunger (JJA Books)

Molly Tanzer | 4799 words

Two young witches, once inseparable, are set at odds by secrets and wildly dangerous magic.

In the waning days of World War II, tucked into the sleepy Cumbrian countryside in the north of England, lies the Library: the repository of all occult knowledge for the Société des Éclairées, an international organization of diabolists. There, with a victory for the Allies hanging in the balance, best friends Jane Blackwood and Miriam Cantor begin to contemplate their futures as diabolists.

But when Miriam learns her missing parents are suspected of betraying the Société to the Nazis, she embarks upon a desperate, dangerous gambit to clear their names. Meanwhile Jane, fearing her life might be at stake, embraces a forbidden use of the Art that puts everyone she loves in danger.

As their friendship buckles under the stress of too many secrets, Jane and Miriam will come face to face with unexpected truths that change everything they know about the war, the world, and most of all themselves. After all, some choices cannot be unmade—and a sacrifice done with the most noble of intentions might end up creating a monster.

Available Now
from John Joseph Adams Books @ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

PROLOGUE

Edith Blackwood carefully selected one of the cut-crystal perfume atomizers from the narrow table by her front door. Holding it in her palm for a long moment warmed the pink fluid within—just a touch; just as she needed.

I hate London, complained the demon Mercurialis in a voice only Edith could hear. Decades of familiarity with her constant, invisible companion meant she understood it in words, but its speech registered more to her mind as a series of plucks and whirs and chirps, as well as the occasional chime.

“I know,” she said aloud to the silence of her Paris flat. “I don’t like England either, but go we must. Jane Blackwood is my only niece, and I will not miss her Test. Nor could I! I agreed to give it to her and to her friend Miriam. But even more than that, I want to be there to see her progress beyond her apprenticeship. She’ll celebrate in style even if it means I must sojourn to the northern wilds of England. Otherwise, my sister will likely just let Jane stay up half an hour late as a treat. She deserves more for taking such an important step along the path to becoming a Master diabolist.” Edith’s demon agreed wholeheartedly with all of this. “And it will be good to be somewhere quiet for a few days. It’s been months since we went out without always looking over our shoulder.”

Mercurialis conceded this point too. The Occupation might be over, but the war was not; the streets of Paris were not yet safe. They hadn’t won until they’d won—and they hadn’t won. Not yet.

Edith misted herself with a few spritzes from the warmed bottle, then set it aside, picking up a long silver needle. She pricked her finger with it. As the blood beaded up, she took hold of her valise in her other hand and stepped within a slate circle set into the marble floor of her foyer. She let the welling blood drip down, and as soon as it hit the floor, pale blue electricity began to crackle all along her body, currents of lightning running up her legs, encasing her like bright vines. After a moment, they receded, save for a few extra flashes along the jet beadwork of her black dress and the black fur collar of her cape . . .

And she was somewhere else entirely: a disused kitchen in a shabby London boarding house, standing upon a slate circle similar to the one in her own apartment. The morning sunlight filtering through the dirty windows was dreary and watery, wintery and unmistakably English.

The demonic sigh in Edith’s mind sounded more like the twittering of a distant bird, but its point was clear and inarguable.

Edith was surrounded by a column of woven golden mesh that ran from floor to ceiling. Through the fine holes she could see the shape of a man sitting in a chair. She could also see the glint of the gun he had trained on her.

She had come here expecting such a welcome. Edith was a spy, and this was a spy’s gate into the UK. Protecting it was of utmost importance.

“Swift wings, swift victory,” said Edith.

“Swifter wings, swifter victory,” said the man with the gun.

Edith stepped through the door of the mesh cage, set down her valise, and rucked up the sleeve of her dress to reveal a tattoo on her forearm: a stark white equilateral triangle and, within that, a talaria—the winged sandal of Hermes. The brightness of the white ink against her black skin was itself evidence of the mark’s diabolic nature, but the group she was part of—the Young Talarians—hadn’t gotten as far as they had by cutting corners when it came to security.

The man with the gun used his teeth to pull the cork out of a phial and dribbled an oily fluid upon her tattoo. It fizzed and popped and sizzled away into silver smoke, at which point he curtly nodded once.

Edith, like most diabolists, was also a member of an international organization known as the Société des Éclairées. While the Société had long ago denounced the Nazis, their sympathizers, and their ideology, due to its worldwide nature it could not be aggressively political without causing internal problems. The Young Talarians—the group to which Edith belonged—were technically independent . . . but not forbidden from using the Société’s resources.

It was impossible to say how much the Young Talarians had done for the Allies over the course of the war. Their help had been as invisible as it was invaluable. The Nazis, of course, had their own diabolists.

Edith had been a founding member of the Young Talarians, along with a few of her closest friends—Maja Znidarcic, Zelda Lizman, and Saul Zeitz. She could not sit idly by, not being who she was. Edith had been a small child when the Blackwoods adopted her, taking her from her West African homeland after her parents had died, to travel the world with them and their daughter, Nancy—but Edith had never forgotten her roots.

“Welcome to London, Edith,” said George, lowering his Webley and holstering it. “You’re right on time.”

“Is my car waiting for me?” she asked, readjusting her sleeve. She wasn’t late, but she’d need to get moving if she wanted to arrive in Hawkshead by the afternoon, given the distance and uncertain state of the roads.

“At the garage on St. Mark’s,” he said. And then, with a complete shift in his manners, he grinned. “Good luck to the young hopefuls, too.”

Edith cocked a manicured eyebrow at George. “Young hopefuls?” she asked, conveying with her tone that it was an improper thing for him to have said. “To whom are you referring?”

George straightened up. “Sorry. It’s only that Monsieur Durand had mentioned Jane and Miriam were to undergo their Test.”

Of course it had been Patrice Durand who had blabbed! Edith frowned at George as Mercurialis quietly chuckled to itself over her consternation. When an apprentice diabolist underwent their Test, it was supposed to be a private affair. Patrice Durand and his former lover, Edith’s sister Nancy Blackwood, were estranged, yes, but he knew that Nancy had always been a stickler for the rules.

“What else did Patrice have to say about my niece, my sister, and her ward?” asked Edith, her tone icier than the streets beyond the windows of the kitchen.

“Nothing,” said George, blushing now. All his earlier cool had left him. Edith sighed—new recruits were always a bit jumpy.

“Let’s forget we had this conversation,” she said. This new evidence that Patrice had not changed, in spite of his claims to the contrary, cast quite a shadow over another reason for Edith’s visit: Edith had finally resolved to at last tell Jane who her father was, even though this was explicitly against her mother’s wishes. Jane had always longed to know, and as she had just turned sixteen a month ago, Edith had thought to give this knowledge to her as a belated birthday gift. Now, she was even less certain this was a good idea.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just use the ladies’ before I depart,” said Edith. George nodded and Edith swished by him, her heels clicking on the tile.

In the washroom she opened up her makeup bag and applied a light dusting of powder to her cheeks and some mascara to her dark lashes. Both cosmetics were specially formulated with diabolic essences to conceal her appearance. Glamour, indeed! Now, anyone who looked at Edith would see a white woman . . . unless they took a careful second look. For anyone who did, she put on a black hat with a little veil. No one wanted to look at a widow for too long—at least not here in England.

If she’d needed a better disguise, she would have drawn on the power of her demon. Mercurialis lent its host unusual power over many amusing types of illusion, changing one’s appearance being one of them. But for just a short walk along busy streets, Edith did not need to tax her resources in that manner.

George looked a bit surprised when she emerged, but then quickly recovered. “When will you be returning?”

“Within a week. Do you need a specific date and time?”

“No, ma’am. I’ll be here.”

“I promise to be in at a decent hour.” She favored him with a smile.

He returned it. “It’s not that; the gate just takes a moment or two to set up, and I wouldn’t like to make you wait.”

“It’s still faster than the Night Ferry!”

Edith was in a good mood. She was pleased to have a little shopping to do and then a nice long unbroken drive ahead of her, two things almost impossible in Paris.

Edith peeked out the door to find a light drizzle falling upon the gray paving stones of the street. She claimed an umbrella, black of course, from the umbrella stand.

“I promise I’ll return it,” she said, before stepping out into the morning gloom. Her foot immediately found a puddle.

Mercurialis sighed.

1

It was a cold morning in early February, but outside the windows of the old farmhouse, the world was still cloaked in blackest night. Not even the sliver of a moon silvered the frost and snow crusting the yard and the rock-strewn hills beyond. Only the pale starlight showed Miriam Cantor the barn where she must go to feed the geese and the ducks.

She hesitated before opening the back door and venturing forth into the profound stillness only found just before the dawn in deep winter. But it was not the silence that made her hesitate, nor the darkness, nor the chill—nor was it fear of what predators might be between her and the barn. At least, not animal ones. Foxes and weasels did not frighten her; it was the threat of who might be out there, not what, that caused sweat to prick at her neck and under her arms even in the raw predawn.

Her worry was absurd, she knew it was. There were no Nazis prowling through the frigid gloom. There were no Nazis anywhere nearby, not down the lane in the picturesque village of Hawkshead, not in the houses of their distant neighbors. Here in the north of England, she was safe—and yet every morning, Miriam had to remind herself of that before she could pick her way along the path that wound its way through the hoary remains of last year’s victory garden.

“Who’s the real goose here?” muttered Miriam as she let herself into the barn. The truth was, if Nazis ever did intrude upon their privacy, her “aunt” Nancy, whose treasured flock impatiently pecked at Miriam’s shoes, would know. Mrs. Nancy Blackwood was no mere widow living quietly with her daughter and ward on a farm in England. Nancy Blackwood was a diabolist—a natural scientist who had summoned a demon and worked with it and its essences rather than more traditional chemicals or creatures. Her demon lent her certain unusual abilities in exchange for sharing her experiences and her body.

Nancy was also the official Librarian for the Société des Éclairées, the current worldwide organization of diabolists. The Société formally oversaw the education of individuals interested in working with demons—or rather, the powerful, ineffable beings they called demons. That meant Nancy had more methods of protecting herself than the average widow—more than the average diabolist, even—to protect her home and the books within the Library beneath it.

It was also true that Miriam, as Nancy’s apprentice, was not entirely helpless. Even so, she was only fifteen and had not yet passed her Test.

Miriam rubbed at her numb and dripping nose before starting to scoop grain onto the ground. She, like most apprentices, spent a lot of time pondering demons and their abilities, but actually summoning one was something only Master diabolists were allowed to do. As an apprentice, she was limited to minor works of diablerie, such as concocting armamentaria—the diabolical potions, pills, and powders that were the essence of the Art. Before she advanced beyond that, Miriam would need to pass her Test, and then submit the results of her Practical for judgment by the Société before she would be deemed qualified.

Even an apprentice diabolist could do much without actually summoning a demon, however. For instance, by using diabolic essences culled from plants and minerals, Miriam had created a potion that let her assess an opponent’s weaknesses if she had to strike out with fist or knife, and a pastille that granted her increased strength and speed. Keeping a phial of the former and a small tin of the latter in her pocket helped Miriam stay calm when she needed to venture into the village.

The trouble was that the effects of apprentice armamentaria did not last long. Creating them was a process intended to educate, not endure. But once Miriam had summoned her own demon, she, like Nancy, would be a powerful diabolist, capable of ever so much more.

As she scattered grain on the ground, Miriam’s mind strayed to a different farm, in a different country, where she’d fed different ducks. Her aunt—a real aunt, her father’s sister Rivka, whose farm outside of Weimar had been seized by the Nazis—had also kept poultry, and goats too.

They’d stopped visiting her long before that, when the laws had made it difficult for their family to do much of anything without being harassed. The last time they all went out as a family, a boy had thrown a stone. A policeman had laughed when it hit Miriam’s father in the back. That was when Miriam’s mother and father had written to Nancy to ask if their daughter could live with her, in England . . .

No—she could not think on that now. Miriam pushed the memories away, shoving them down inside a shadowed place deep within her that served as a repository for her fear, her rage, and her disappointment. That silent shadowed hollow never judged, never rejected, never asked questions—it just took what she offered it, and absorbed it, and made it go away.

“All that happened a long time ago,” Miriam said to the ducks and the geese as they nibbled at the grain. She couldn’t let her mind wander away down those unpleasant paths—there was too much to do today in anticipation of the arrival of another “aunt”: Aunt Edith.

Edith was Nancy’s sister. She, too, was part of the Société, though, unlike Nancy, she was not an elected official. The position of Librarian meant living in the Library, which was here, in rural Hawkshead. Why the Library was in Hawkshead no one knew, but it had been there in various forms since the Middle Ages—long before the Société formed in Paris, a hundred years ago—and there it would remain after the Société gave way to some new organization, whenever it inevitably did.

Once she had finished feeding the poultry, Miriam returned to the farmhouse. Nancy was awake and in the kitchen, frying a bit of their weekly ration of bacon in a skillet on the cooktop of her ancient beloved AGA. The smell of it was mouthwatering and, even after all this time, a little guilt-inducing. But hunger was hunger, and rationing was rationing.

“How are they this morning?” asked Nancy, as Miriam shrugged out of her coat.

“Snug and warm and fed.” Miriam tied her apron around her waist with a satisfied tug. It was a relief to once again be within four walls and under a sturdy roof.

“I wish I could say the same,” said Nancy’s daughter, Jane, as she bustled into the kitchen to put on her own apron. “I’m starving!”

Miriam’s “cousin” had obviously gotten up early to set herself to rights. Jane’s hair was coiffed and shining, and she was already dressed, nicely, in a dark gray skirt and a fashionably stark white blouse. The cardigan she wore over it was also gray, but the color of smoke rather than charcoal.

Miriam unconsciously glanced down at her tweedy ankle-length skirt. It was one of Nancy’s hemmed and patched-up hand-me-downs, lumpy and too large but suitable for keeping her calves free of muck when she went out to the barns or her legs warm as she worked in the lab and Library. She’d not thought of dressing for Edith’s arrival; perhaps she should have.

“Is it ready?” asked Jane, reaching for the tea before she even really sat down. “I think I shall starve to death if I have to wait any longer!”

“Must you be so dramatic?” said Nancy, turning around with a tray full of bacon and toast, which she set down in the center of the scarred wooden kitchen table alongside the small pat of butter they must share. Jane scowled at the word dramatic and slurped her tea.

“A lady is as a lady does,” remarked Nancy airily, as if this wisdom had just come to her mind unprovoked. At last she sat down and poured herself a cup of tea. Then, from a pocket in her apron, she withdrew a little dropper bottle of smoked glass. She squeezed a bit of clear fluid into her tea before taking her first sip, doctoring the beverage not with milk and sugar, as Miriam liked it, but with a distillate of the essence of her demon, the Patron of Curiosity.

In order for diabolists to comfortably maintain contact with their demons, they had to regularly consume their essences. Every diabolist had their preferred way of doing so, some more elaborate or decadent than others. Nancy, being a no-muss, no-fuss sort of woman, produced a tincture from the unusually beautiful and robust chives she cultivated in pots on her sunniest windowsill.

“And speaking of dressing nicely,” said Nancy, after taking a sip, “I don’t know why you’ve done that so early. You still have to dust and sweep, you know! I won’t have you begging off smartening up the house just because you’ve already smartened up yourself.”

“But I dusted and swept yesterday!” cried Jane.

“It could do with another going-over. This time, use the dust rag on the woodwork instead of talking to it like it’s Clark Gable.”

For a while now it had been Jane’s joy to go see every picture she could at the theatre in Ambleside. She talked endlessly to Miriam about the sophistication and beauty of the women on the silver screen, but Miriam had only Jane’s word for how wonderful they were. She had never gone. It was five miles to Ambleside, and the thought of the bus made Miriam dizzy. In a way, though, she felt she’d seen Meet Me in St. Louis, Cover Girl, and other films; Jane liked to talk over the plots after she got back, doing impressions of the actresses Miriam knew only from still photographs in Jane’s magazines.

Jane was good at impressions—so good she’d managed to incorporate a few little turns of speech and gestures into her everyday manners. And as they were at that age where it was common for girls to quickly become young ladies, only Miriam was pained by her friend growing up.

Nancy, for her part, seemed to find it amusing.

“Edith won’t arrive until around two, so you’ve plenty of time to do your chores and reapply that lipstick before we leave if it gets smudged. Yes, I noticed,” said Nancy, who disapproved of cosmetics. Miriam thought that a bit funny, given that Nancy was a Master diabolist; most people would likely see trafficking with demons as a far greater offense against nature than a bit of mascara.

Jane looked like a little girl as she sullenly poked at her breakfast.

“You’ll trip over that lip if you don’t pick it up,” said Nancy, but her teasing did little to mollify her daughter. “Oh, come now. What would your beloved Edith have to say if she saw you like that?”

“Mother!”

That was another change—Jane had always called her mother “Mum” until lately.

“Oh, come now. If you’d known Edie as long as I have, you wouldn’t feel there was some great need to make yourself up for her,” said Nancy. “She was once your age, you know—and a lot wilder and more scabby-kneed than either of you.”

“Scabby-kneed!”

Miriam was now the sullen one as she stared at her plate. Jane’s affected horror at this information exasperated her. Why should it surprise Jane that Edith had had to put away childish things, just like anyone else? Did Jane really believe her aunt had sprung forth into the world as a stylish adult?

And anyway, squeamishness was not for the ambitious when it came to the Art. Master diabolists saved their hair trimmings, their nail clippings, their scabs, sometimes even their menstrual fluid—anything that could become infused with the essences that diabolists regularly consumed to maintain their connection with their demons. Some diabolists had been known to harvest permanent parts of their own bodies in the service of empowering a particularly powerful preparation—such things could be rendered down to enhance the overall potency of diabolic armamentaria. Scabby knees weren’t a patch on, say, extracting one’s own perfectly healthy molar.

But Miriam didn’t say any of this. She took a discreet, calming breath and pushed her annoyance and anger down inside her, where the shadow within her welcomed her feelings with open arms.

“Edie played rugby with our brothers until the day she moved away,” said Nancy.

“And yet she seems so civilized. I suppose there’s hope for me yet,” said Jane, before finally stabbing a piece of bacon with her fork.

“Oh, no,” said Nancy, with an appraising look at her daughter. “There’s no hope for you—or there won’t be if you don’t finish your breakfast and your chores.”

Jane’s childish, long-suffering sigh made Miriam smile to herself, but she quickly sobered when her aunt turned her attention to her.

“Aren’t you excited about Edith’s visit, Miriam?”

Nancy’s question caught her off guard.

“Of course I’m excited,” she said, but when that sounded a bit flabby even to her own ears, Miriam added, “I’ve been wanting to ask Edith about her research into diabolically enhanced cosmetics. I think it might help me understand the theory behind the Fifth Transmutation.”

This was all true. The only lie was in what she’d omitted.

“Oh, I’d like to hear that too.” Jane wasn’t pouting now. She was bright, alert, and focused: the Jane that Miriam liked.

Jane was also an apprentice diabolist. They’d learned side by side since Miriam had come to stay, but they couldn’t be more different. Where Miriam was pleased to think through the theoretical aspects of an act of diablerie before attempting it, Jane jumped right in to learn how deep the water was.

“The Fifth Transmutation is necessary when attempting Campanella’s Substantive Exchange,” said Jane. Jane was currently working her way through the Twelve Transmutations, a set of practical exercises. “I can’t quite parse it, and I’d like to see a practical demonstration. The Grimoire Italien says that demonic vapors and their impure properties are beneficial, but it’s not clear if it means for the demon or the diabolist.”

“The Grimoire Italien? Are you using the French translation of Trasformazioni della Materia?” asked Miriam. Jane nodded. “Oh!” said Miriam. “In the original medieval Italian, that passage is a bit clearer. The demon benefits, but there’s also a chance that . . .” Miriam trailed off as she saw Jane blushing angrily.

Miriam winced. The learning of ancient languages was not among Jane’s talents—which was nothing to be ashamed of, in Miriam’s opinion. Still, she should have remembered how sensitive Jane was about it.

“Miriam, as usual you’re not only correct, but your scholarship is impressively thorough,” said Nancy.

Nancy’s notice always thrilled Miriam, but it was hard for her to accept the compliment with Jane looking so unhappy and embarrassed.

“I wish I’d known you were reading that,” said Miriam. “The modern Italian translation is better, and I have it in my room to compare with the medieval, since the medieval is a bother to read. It’s barely even Italian, really—just a dog’s breakfast of medieval Venetian vernacular mixed with Latin.”

“Thank you,” said Jane, with the sort of formality and poise she usually reserved for impressions of her favorite actresses. “I’d be pleased to look at it when you can spare it.”

“Later,” said Nancy, with a tone that conveyed exactly what the girls ought to be doing just then.

Miriam began to clear the dishes, as keeping the kitchen tidy was one of her responsibilities. Jane, too, stood up from the table, but as she did, a great yowl split the air and a soft gray blur of wounded dignity streaked out the kitchen, the bell of his collar jangling merrily.

“Poor Smudge!” Jane, dismayed, hurried after the cat to check on him.

“You’d think one day he’d learn that sitting behind Jane’s chair will only get him a pinched tail,” said Miriam.

“Perhaps he enjoys the attention,” said Nancy, as she wrapped the remaining bread in a cloth. “I’m off to the stacks, my dear.”

“All right.”

“I hope you’ll join us when we walk into the village? I think it’ll be a lovely day in spite of the cold, and a merry party once Edie arrives.”

Miriam managed a smile even as her stomach churned at the thought of the long walk away from their safe, quiet home into the relative chaos that was Hawkshead. But she loved Nancy very much and wanted to please her—no, more than that: she wanted to be the sort of person who pleased Nancy.

“Of course!”

Miriam was rewarded with a smile. “I’m very glad,” said Nancy. “Now, I must see to a few things before my sister takes up all my waking hours. Ciao!” And with that, Nancy swept out of the room with more flair than was strictly necessary.

For all she was hard on Jane for being “dramatic,” Nancy, too, had a bit of the theatrical about her. And as with Jane, it came out even more when Edith visited.

Copyright © 2020 by Molly Tanzer. Excerpted from Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer. Published by permission of the author and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Molly Tanzer is the author of the novels Creatures of Will and Temper and Creatures of Want and Ruin, as well as Vermilion, The Pleasure Merchant, and the British Fantasy and Wonderland Book Award-nominated collection-cum-mosaic novel A Pretty Mouth. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, The Lovecraft eZine, and Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender and Genderqueer Speculative Fiction, as well as many other locations. Her editorial projects include co-editing Swords v Cthulhu (with Jesse Bullington) and Mixed Up! (with Nick Mamatas). She lives in Boulder, CO. Learn more at mollytanzer.com.

Book Reviews: May 2020

LaShawn M. Wanak | 1596 words

Weave the Lightning
Corry L. Lee
Paper / Ebook
ISBN: 9781781087909
Solaris, April 2020, 518 pages

Corry L. Lee’s novel Weave the Lightning is an electrifying debut (pardon the pun) that infuses magical resistance with a Russian flair.

Celka works as a tightrope walker with her grandparents and cousins in a traveling circus. It’s good work that provides cover for their real occupation—aiding resistance fighters against the Tayemstroy, the Secret Police working for the state of Bourshkanya and its Supreme-General, the Stormhawk.

Gerrit is the son of the Supreme-General. He is part of the Stormguard—an elite fighting troop of weather mages who draw their magic from unique red-tinted lightning storms called bozhskyeh—God’s Breath. Being struck by this lightning is dangerous, but if a mage captures it correctly, its power can be imbued into any object or person. Weapons become more powerful. People can be healed. For many years, the Stormhawk has made it known that only the Stormguard can call on the bozhskyeh. Thus, at the beginning of the book, we see Gerrit training to get strong enough to survive the God’s Breath and please his father’s wishes.

But he has not met Celka, who is a secret mage and is also learning how to call the lightning to help the Resistance on her end.

To help them focus, the mages enter a trance called sousednia, a layer of reality that can reflect the mage’s state of mind or personality. For mages, there is a danger of becoming lost in one’s own sousednia, descending into madness. When this happens to one of Gerrit’s friends due to overzealous training by a sadistic general, Gerrit starts to unravel a layer of false truths wound tight around him, and even as he goes to train on his own, begins to learn that the war he is training for is not the real truth.

In fact, this whole book shows people living in multiple layers of reality. Under the police state, ordinary conversations can be charged with meaning. An innocent chat about coffee could have a double meaning of creating false identification for those fleeing the state. This means that trust does not come easily, and when Gerrit eventually meets Celka, they must learn how to unpeel those layers of distrust and disinformation.

Lee does a good job of showing their relationship, and although there is a moment that threatens to spill over to a standard love triangle, it doesn’t happen. She also has created a world that had me fearing for everyone—even the so-called “enemies.” And of course, right when the story really starts getting good, it ends, so you bet I’ll be reading the sequel when it comes out.

Goldilocks
Laura Lam
Hardcover / Audio / Ebook
ISBN: 9780316462860
Orbit, May 2020, 352 pages

Laura Lam’s Goldilocks is another story that could easily become possible within the next few decades if our world continues on its trajectory of annihilation at our own hands. It also shows that the world’s salvation rests on the choices people make, small or large.

Naomi Black is part of an all-female team of astronauts that steals a government rocketship to head towards a far-off planet deemed hospitable for human conditions. The reason for this theft is survival of the human race, who live on a planet that has become increasingly hostile and environmentally barren. But the women’s theft is also personal—as the world’s resources shrink, the men-led conservative government begins to strip women of leadership positions and also harassing others who refuse to step down.

Valerie Black, Naomi’s mentor and surrogate mother, is one of those women. It was her idea to steal the spaceship, and she who picked the all-female crew, including Naomi. Now they must race to get the spaceship to the new planet before the government stops their plans.

While Goldilocks is described as a thriller, I found it to be an intimate character study of two women who are not related by blood trying to save the world, but on their own terms. Naomi holds Valerie in the highest esteem and yet is trying to make a name for herself out from under Valerie’s shadow. And as they get further away from Earth, Naomi soon learns that even their idyllic crew can be torn apart by secrets and distrust.

Some reviewers are also comparing it to The Handmaid’s Tale in a spaceship, and while there are some elements of that, such as women being removed from positions of power, I didn’t feel there was a cultish vibe going on. The few men in the book—such as Valerie’s biological son—seem to be helping Naomi and Valerie. I also felt like some of the tense situations in the book became resolved a little too neatly. But I enjoyed the revealing of secrets, the ethical quagmires Naomi faced, and the overall tone of the book, which was that it is possible to save our world if we have care and empathy for not just ourselves, but for others who are not like us, and even for those who we would see as enemies.

A Song Below Water
Bethany C. Morrow
Hardcover / Audio / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250315328
Tor Teen, June 2020, 288 pages

If there was ever a book that I would somehow put in a reverse time capsule to send to my thirteen-year-old self, A Song Below Water would be in that pile (along with a bunch of Steven Universe VHS tapes and everything written by N.K. Jemisin).

Tavia and Effie are playsisters—friends who are so close they may as well be sisters—who live in a world where fae powers are real. Tavia is a siren—a human being with the power to control people with her voice. The power only appears in black women, whom the world perceives as a threat. So Tavia must hide who she is, or risk having to wear a siren-prevention collar.

At the same time, there are signs that a traumatic incident from Effie’s past could happen again. Odd things happen, from Effie experiencing blackouts to a gargoyle perching uninvited on the roof of their home. And both Tavia and Effie are dealing with all of these things while trying to navigate high school.

I loved this book. It has mysterious gargoyles and mischievous sprites. It has resistance rallies and a Renaissance Faire (though it’s interesting a Faire exists when actual magical creatures also exist in this world). Bethany C. Morrow does an excellent job of dealing with dorky teenage awkwardness, from the discomfort of being talked about and wishing you were brave enough to talk back, to the body horror that comes from dealing with eczema, and in Effie’s case, her hair moving on its own. It is also unashamedly, unabashedly black. I resonated so much with many black culture shoutouts—from the hair culture (Yes, twists! Yes, headwraps!), to the games (I remember playing Red Rover as a kid), to the fear of being pulled over by the police.

Morrow manages to convey the fear and risk of black women being too outspoken in having all sirens be black women, and how people are threatened by their mere presence. A popular internet celebrity known for her hair tutorials reveals herself to be a siren, and the fallout from that is sobering. Woven throughout the book is not just fae mythos, but also Central African folklore in the form of elokos—people who appear to be super lucky and are able to charm people with a unique trill in their voice. Unlike sirens, they are not shunned for their powers, but are highly valued. Why aren’t elokos seen as a threat? Morrow does not offer an answer.

What she does include is a rich community of parents and grandparents who are looking out for Tavia and Effie. I also appreciated that these were not wise adults—there is a movement in this book to silence sirens—but there’s also another type of silence born from generational trauma, where the adults do not tell the kids history out of fear. The adults can be just as stupid as the kids, and that was a refreshing thing to see.

And yet, despite all this, this is a YA book, which means that yes, the world is falling apart, but there are priorities such as junior prom. As I write these words, we are entering a state of emergency in the country due to the coronavirus. It’s a scary time, but reading A Song Below Water showed me that there will be times when life feels out of control, but those times don’t last forever. And sometimes the unknown can be transformed into beauty that can change the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak is a graduate of the 2011 class of Viable Paradise. Her fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Ideomancer. She served as Associate Editor at Podcastle, and has written nonfiction for Fantasy Magazine, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the anthology Invisible 2.

Media Review: May 2020

Jeremiah Tolbert and Matthew Tolbert | 2229 words

Dungeons and Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guide Series
Published by Ten Speed Press
Written by Jim Zub, with Stacy King and Andrew Wheeler

Dungeons & Dragons is my oldest friend. I owe almost everything good in my life to it, and nearly every life-long friendship I have forged in my forty-three years has arisen because of our shared interest in it. It’s difficult to convey just how important it has been to me without sounding grandiose to those who didn’t have similar experiences in their own childhood. There are many of us that had similar experiences, and now we are parents, training a whole new generation in a hobby that was born in our lifetimes. To understand the role these books play in today’s market, I want to describe what it was like in the D&D Stone Age.

I was a geeky kid in the early ’80s, mostly ostracized by kids my own age for being a bit odd and very much a know-it-all. I didn’t have many friends, but that changed when a neighbor kid a few years older than me offered to teach me how to play Dungeons & Dragons, starting with the Basic or “red box” edition. We met in the afternoons a few times a week and he acted as my first Dungeon Master, leading me on journeys as my very first character, Dorwick Silverblade, an elven adventurer deft with sword and spell.

My own parents were completely baffled by this new form of game, but they were happy that I suddenly had a friend. For my next birthday, I received my own brand-new red box edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons. I spent nearly all my time after school drawing maps on graph paper, rolling up characters, and playing through the solo adventure included in those rulebooks. This was uncharted parenting territory, but my parents could clearly see how happy the game made me. They never steered me away from it despite the Satanic Panic that put D&D in its sights later in the decade.

After about a year of play, my first Dungeon Master moved away. I was despondent, but at least I had my own books. Soon, a group of middle school kids in our apartment complex learned that I played. I was quickly recruited to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the more complex version of the game and one that my nerdy brain took to immediately. From then on, my primary hobby was playing role-playing games, weaving adventures and stories collaboratively with friends. The hobby continued through college and well into adulthood. Even when living in Wyoming after college, at a loss for how to make friends in the real world, I stalked the local bookstore’s meager selection of game manuals, hoping to meet someone who played (and I did!).

The systems and games changed over the years to Shadowrun, Rifts, and World of Darkness, but always, with each new edition, I found myself returning to the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons. No matter where I lived in the country, I could make friends through our shared interest in the game.

Parenthood proved to be the latest challenge to my passion for the game (after Satanic Panic ostracism and living in a state with more sheep than people). I had little time to gather with friends. When I got in a game at all, it was a simpler board game because my sleep-deprived brain could handle little else. My wife also plays, and we tried to play here and there, but the new responsibilities of a whole human’s wellbeing made it difficult to say the least. A baby or toddler makes a very poor companion in a role-playing game, we soon found. Still, our house was littered with games, the detritus of our youth. I despaired of ever playing again. Perhaps it was inevitable that my son Matty would take in interest in the games, surrounded as he was by them. I certainly wasn’t going to discourage his interest.

As he grew older, we began to introduce him to children’s board games, and then finally, a friend asked me to teach her children how to play D&D. Since I had last played, the hobby had exploded in popularity thanks to television shows like Stranger Things and video streams like Critical Role. After some planning, I ran my first game for a table full of children ranging in age from three to sixteen.

Previously I had found the game fun, but this experience was utterly delightful. I witnessed the game once more through young eyes, and my passion was renewed. As of today, I run that irregular game for those same kids as well as three other online games for friends around the world using online tools such as Roll20.net. D&D is my primary means of socializing with my closest friends, and I expect it may be for many years to come.

Sometimes I wonder how I would have felt if my son had shown no interest for the things I love. I know I would have loved him just as much, but I would have missed out on something marvelous. The greatest joy I have felt as a parent has been watching my son’s own interest in the hobby blossom.

I believe every parent wants to connect their children with their own passions, to pass on the good experiences just as we try to protect them from our past hurts. In truth, I might not have been so keen on my son playing if the game didn’t have such mainstream acceptance today; the ’80s were a darker time for gamers, and I had several notable conflicts with religious family members. To tell someone you played D&D in the ’80s was a risky endeavor, and this mainstream attitude kept it in the basement far too long. No longer is it something played by “greasy nerds”; now the public perception is of famous people adopting ridiculous voices and rolling dice for public amusement. D&D is finally, mostly, seen as harmless, even a good thing. Many educators have begun to see the value of it, and D&D clubs are springing up at schools around the world. I could rest easy knowing I was giving my son a life skill by teaching him how to play—one with little downside.

After his first game, Matty began asking me often when we would play again, and in his spare time, he took to writing up his own scribbly character sheets and drawing grand maps for his own games. We often get out my dungeon terrain and build dungeons together, even if we don’t always have time to actually sit down and play the game. Nothing pained me more than to tell him with regularity, “Sorry, I don’t have time to run D&D for you today.”

So when editor John Joseph Adams asked me if I would like to receive his review copies of the Young Adventurer’s Guide series for my now five-year-old son, I was hesitant. A quick Google search revealed an interesting set of books aimed at introducing the mega-blockbuster RPG series to younger audiences, but they seemed targeted at older children—ages eight and older. But Matty had already begun playing, and I wasn’t sure he would get much out of them. Still, I accepted the offer, and when they arrived, I explained to him what they were and handed them over. I half-expected that he would flip through them to look at the pictures and toss them aside. He already knew D&D . . . or so I thought.

Instead, he carried them with him on every car ride he took for the next several weeks. From his seat in the back of the minivan, we were peppered with facts about monsters and D&D classes.

“Did you know carrion crawlers can smell blood from a mile away?”

“Elves are a little shorter than humans!”

And on and on. And despite having played D&D for about thirty-five years, I learned a few new things myself!

Most five-year-olds would likely have the reaction that I expected, but to put on my proud parent hat for a moment, Matty reads at above a third-grade reading level, so as far as reading skills, he falls right inside the target audience.

To help write this review, I asked him some questions about the books to learn what he would like to share with people. Here is an excerpt of our discussion:

Dad: Do you think the books help you understand how to play D&D better?

Matty: Um . . . yeah.

Dad: Would you recommend that people buy these books for their kids, and why?

Matty: Yeah, because they would love them because of all the cool stuff in them.

Dad: Do you want to read more of them?

Matty: Yup!

Dad: What do you love most about D&D?

Matty: I like charging into battle!

So far, four books have been released in the series, breaking up discussion into topics such as locations, types of creatures, and groupings of character classes based on their magical or martial prowess. Each is a slim, sturdy hardback with glossy pages, filled to the brim with beautiful artwork and easy-to-read descriptions.

In particular, Matty was entranced by the design approach of these books. Unlike the red box Basic Dungeons & Dragons set that I started with in the early ’80s, these books are merely setting and description, laid out and presented in a way that’s friendly to younger readers. The information rarely feels watered down for children—monsters are still monsters and fighting them is still central to the game, but at the same time, the material doesn’t feel overly adult in nature. Very little seems sacrificed in the name of reaching a younger audience, which surprised me, but it shouldn’t have; after all, I started in the hobby at their target age. The material is simply a lovely introduction to the experience of playing and all the background knowledge we life-long players have absorbed. It serves to help the imagination, and not the mechanics of playing. One of Matty’s favorite features are the silhouettes that appear alongside creature and character races demonstrating how large or small something is in relation to a normal-sized person.

I would wager that these books would be good primers for any age reader on the nature of the world’s most popular role-playing game. I highly recommend them to any parent or person interested in learning more about the world-building of Dungeons & Dragons. The only caveat I offer is that these are not substitutes for the Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual, and Player’s Handbook. People interested in playing the game will still need to purchase the rulebooks, some dice, pencils, and paper. Instead, these books introduce one to the kind of cultural knowledge that comes along with playing the game for many years. Just how tall is an elf? How dangerous is a “carrion crawler” and what even is one? Anyone who wants to know the answers to these questions would appreciate these books.

The Young Adventurer’s Guide series is designed as a kind of doorway, a “gateway drug” into the hobby of role-playing games and the game system of Dungeons & Dragons in particular. I was at first a little disappointed that the books didn’t contain a game that was the modern equivalent of the Basic that I first loved. The modern approach to hooking younger players is streamlined, more efficient, and doesn’t underestimate the intelligence of crafty youngsters that want to play out their own stories. Sometimes, D&D even feels a little bit too slick and corporate, what with Hasbro now owning Wizards of the Coast, which publishes the core game. None of that detracts from the core experience of using your imagination to tell an adventurous story with your friends and family. Do these books help introduce that experience? Certainly.

My son may not have needed them to get hooked, but they didn’t hurt, and if I’d had them a year or two earlier, they would have played an even more fundamental role. If you’re looking to bring children to the gaming table, you could do a lot worse than introducing them to these tomes. My advice to all parents is this: Teach your kids to play roleplaying games; they will never want for a friend in life.

And if you want them never to have money for drugs, get them hooked on Warhammer or Magic: The Gathering. That’s my plan.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jeremiah Tolbert has published fiction in Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Shimmer, as well as in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Seeds of Change, Federations, Polyphony 4, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. He’s also been featured several times on the Escape Pod and PodCastle podcasts, and his story “The West Topeka Triangle” was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. In addition to being a writer, he is a web designer, photographer, and graphic artist. He lives in Kansas, with his wife and son.

Matthew Tolbert lives with his parents and cat in Northeast Kansas. He attends elementary school and practices the ninja arts in his spare time.  When he grows up, he wants to make games and be a scientist–probably a NASA engineer.

Interview: Stephen Graham Jones

Christian A. Coleman | 3537 words

Stephen Graham Jones is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, a Bram Stoker Award, four This Is Horror Awards, and he’s been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. By day, he is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.

To begin, I want to ask how it feels, at this stage in your career, to be called the Jordan Peele of horror literature.

An honor, of course, though I think he’s probably funnier than I am. Too, though? Have you noticed that comedy people are turning out to be really good with horror? I think a lot of that has to do with how you structure a joke. There’s tension, tension, then—surprise!—the punchline or gag you didn’t see coming. That’s exactly how horror works. I read somewhere years ago that, physiologically, a laugh and a scream are indistinguishable until the moment of eruption. The best horror capitalizes on that, I think.

Your latest novel, The Only Good Indians, sure does! This one’s a slasher about an elk demon that, in retaliation for a decades-old hunt, violently tracks down four Blackfeet Nation childhood friends—Rick, Lewis, Gabe, and Cass—in all-out “I Know What You Did Last Thanksgiving” mode. How did the premise come together for you?

Man, I love that, “I Know What You Did Last Thanksgiving.” My variation, which my editor tells me probably won’t fly as a title, is “A Nightmare on Elk Street.” But, as for the premise, the build, I just started with a husband and wife in a new rental house, one that’s actually the house I’m living in now, and then I needed to figure out what was in that house with them, and then I had to figure out why, and then the whole thing opened up. That’s how it always happens for me. One thing leads to another, and then another. I mean, if you give a mouse a cookie, then that opens the gate, man, and before too long you’re in crazyland. And, with novels, crazyland’s the only place to be.

The title comes from the taunting chant Gabe’s daughter, Denorah, hears at her basketball games: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” When I got to that part of the novel, I thought: Well, damn! That cuts close to the bone! Is the title from the Elk Head Woman’s point of view? From the point of view of this country’s founding on settler colonialism? A mixture of both?

I’d never thought of that, that the title might be hers. Very cool. Thanks. For me, yeah, it’s Denorah pushing back against that Teddy Roosevelt thing—if horses had bumper stickers, “The Good Indian is a Dead Indian” would have been on the hind-end of a lot of horses in the nineteenth century—but, too, it’s plural because I wanted to dig into what it means to be a “good Indian” today. Does it mean adhering strictly to old ways? Does it mean coming up with new ones? How do you gauge things when success in one world is failure or betrayal in another? It’s all kinds of complicated—thus the plural. Because there isn’t just one way to be a “good Indian” today. There’s seven million ways. And growing.

There’s a part where Lewis’s USPS coworker, Shaney, who’s Crow, says, “We’re from where we’re from. Scars are part of the deal, aren’t they?” Does that figure somehow into what you’re saying about the many ways of being a “good Indian”? Because it got me thinking that the scars these four guys have are their struggle to hold on to their traditions (the scene where Gabe and Cass talk about how to hold a proper sweat lodge comes to mind) while surviving an oppressive society that doesn’t look out for them (and here, the scene where Lewis deals with white cops and remarks on not wanting to become a statistic comes to mind).

There’s some pride there too, when Shaney says it. At least there is for me. Like, yeah, they can cut us, they can mark us, but we’re still here, aren’t we? But yeah, scars are part of the deal. And not all of them are on the skin.

It’s ominous that the guys’ doomed hunt happens around Thanksgiving, a day mired in the harmful and false mythmaking of this country’s founding. Tell us about why you decided to have it happen around this fraught holiday.

Because of just that, yeah. Or, because of how weird it is to see elementary kids walking home wearing construction paper headbands and feathers they made that day in class, and of course not being mad at them—they’re just kids, don’t know any better—but the whole system and world that not only doesn’t question this kind of stuff, but smooths it over, even celebrates it. But, too, a few years back, I was over at somebody’s house for Thanksgiving on the reservation, and news came a bit after lunch that a guy down the road had just died from his car falling on him while he was working on it. Ever since then, I think, Thanksgiving’s been associated with bad things for me. I mean, even worse things than usual. Growing up, what Thanksgiving always meant was going out with my granddad to find a lost cow in the cold—for some reason, a heifer would always go missing that day, and we’d be poking through the frozen brush for hours—so I guess that’s bundled in there somewhere, too. But I suppose the memory’s all tangled now with that cow from James Welch’s Winter in the Blood. My head’s a filing cabinet drawer that somebody’s just been recklessly stuffing random stuff into for years, I don’t know.

Initially, I read Good Indians as a ghost story rather than as a slasher. Your Tor novella Mapping the Interior is also a ghost story about First Nations characters who’ve left the reservation. Would you consider Good Indians to be similar, to be a story you’ve come back to?

The first movement of The Only Good Indians probably owes some stuff to Mapping the Interior, yeah. What it mostly owes is that, once I realized this could go the same direction, I then had to go as opposite a direction I could, so as to not cross territory I’d already been across. So, Mapping made Good Indians veer where it does, yeah.

You mentioned movements in your novel. It’s divided up into a prologue and three parts. Structurally, we spend the briefest amount of time with Rick, who’s the focus of the prologue, that first movement, and more time with Lewis, Gabe, and Cass in the three parts. Was there a specific effect you were going for with this structure?

The book that was in my head, kind of giving me hope this could work, was Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. I don’t know why, but that book had a really big impact on me, once upon a grad school class. I think what it was, was that I saw potential there, structurally. I mean, the deal I made with myself for coming to grad school was that I had to be in ninja mode, sneaking into the academy to spirit away good sentences, stronger narrative, whatever I could to bolster the horror and science fiction and fantasy and westerns and comic books that had been saving my life for years. I guess Good Indians is kind of the result of that? Related, I guess: I see a lot of potential in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides.

I love how you use second-person narrative for the voice of the Elk Head Woman. It really gives you the sense that she’s stalking them and their loved ones, one by one. How did you decide to use second person for her?

Nabbed it from N. Scott Momaday. In House Made of Dawn, he uses second person to deliver some of the protagonist’s backstory. He just sprinkles it in without setting it up, without asking for permission, and just the nerve of that, the, I don’t know, the presumption that we’re just going to go along with it, it was absolutely mesmerizing to me, and still is. So, of course I had to, as Jerry Reed says, “try a little bit of your honor on.”

I also have to say I admire her technique. She’s so good at destabilizing these guys’ sense of reality and driving them toward irrational thinking and madness. How did you devise her plan of attack?

I figured it was too easy if she just broke down their front doors and stomped them to death right off. I mean, yeah, that’s John Landis’s “Deer Woman,” and I can’t just redo Landis, but, really, if that’s what she is, if that’s how she operates, then the story just becomes an arm-wrestling match: whoever’s stronger wins the day. And, to me, that’s not that interesting, finally. The interesting bad guys in stories, to me, are the ones . . . like Lecter in the Hannibal television show. He likes to play with his food before carving in. That’s a lot more fun to write, and to read, I think, than just staging things around who’s stronger.

Much more fun! Let’s talk about slashers and your approach to the genre. For you, the slasher is the truest story. How is it the truest genre for a novel about four men trying to outrun their past?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the slasher is true because it’s the world I so badly want to believe in. In slashers, the pranksters are always punished, and it’s no light wrist slap they’re getting either. It’s so enticing to me, believing in a world where wrong is punished. It’s not the world we live in, I know, but it can be for however long a book lasts, it can be until the movie’s over. And, no, we shouldn’t comport ourselves like slashers, of course, I’d never say put on a mask, grab a machete, and go looking for those people who sprayed ketchup on you in elementary. But in fake-land, in stories, I love that justice is served, and served hard.

These four guys, though, what I wanted to interrogate, I guess, was how much it sucks to be in a world like that when, really, you just screwed up once, right? Do they actually and really deserve all this? I mean, who knows—not for me to say. And I don’t mean to try to be shriving people in this world of their “one mistake” either. Just, it’s all so complicated. Wonderfully complicated, and uncomfortable, and seductive, and we shouldn’t think all the things we think, probably, but sometimes thinking them is the only thing that keeps us sane, too.

You said that with this novel you wanted to write a slasher in a way it hadn’t been done before. It goes against many of the genre’s tropes. For example, teens aren’t the focus. Premarital sex and raunch fests aren’t a prelude to bloodshed. What else were you aiming to do differently?

My big push was against she who I always say should be a model for us all: the final girl. And she is that model. She stands up against bullies, she fights for those who can’t fight for themselves, she stands up against a monster that no way can she bring down. But she does. Only, most of the time, in order to do so, she has to kind of cash in her identity—she has to adopt conventionally “male” characteristics to win this arm-wrestling match of a final battle. Which is to say, she muscles up after some fashion, but it always seems to me, a bit, that the tools and characteristics that she’s already got never really come into play. Which is a roundabout way to say that I wondered what if the final girl used compassion instead of brute force? My model for that, I guess, is Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid. It’s not horror, not really, but I always appreciated how it all comes down to a meaningful conversation, not a lot of slow-motion punching. We need more of that, I think.

I grew to really like Rick, Lewis, Cass, and Gabe. In many ways, they remind me of friends and people I knew growing up in New Mexico. I feel like these poor guys are caught between a rock and a hard place: paying the price for something they did ten years back while adapting to and navigating white spaces where they have to de-Indianize themselves. And at the same time, I kinda get why Elk Head Woman wants them dead. So rather than playing out like a conventional slasher, the novel plays out more like tragedy. Was that another way you wanted to subvert the genre?

Definitely. So thrilled you got that. Like . . . in Friday the 13th, well, all of them past the first. Okay, not counting Five. But, in most of them, Jason’s this big-time killing machine, has a body count like Commando, but, too, I always kind of feel sorry for him. He’s just a little kid who drowned knowing that it didn’t have to be this way. He drowned calling out for his mom, who had always been there for him. He drowned with everyone watching, and jeering. What he does once he gets his height and his machete is terrible, but, too? Dude’s hurting. He can’t get over what happened to him. It’s left him single-minded, sure, and maybe he’s not that selective about who gets the blade, but . . . okay, I’ll say it: I’m in sixth grade, I’m standing at the bus stop out in the country, me and my friend Michael are goofing around, and then we look up, see a station wagon half-in, half-out of the ditch, taking out a line of mailboxes, just popping them up, sending them over the roof of the car. The woman driving corrects, ends up in the other ditch, and she’s coming for us, and we just stand there. When she gets to us she’s back on the blacktop but going so fast still. Too fast for my dog, who catches that front tire. It doesn’t kill her, though. She’s out there yelping and crying, trying to stand, but her back end is mashed to the pavement. And me? I just stood there, like Lewis does in Good Indians. My friend Michael, he runs right out there, scoops her up, and she’s reaching around trying to bite him, and it’s not because she was a bad dog or anything. It’s because she was hurting so much that biting was all she knew anymore.

That’s how I imagine Jason Voorhees. That’s how I imagine a lot of slashers, really, including mine, here. They’re not necessarily evil—they’re on the side of “good,” really, in that they’re balancing the scales of justice—they’re just so damaged, so hurting, that biting’s all they know. And it takes the right kind of final girl to realize that, and do something.

And in the midst of the tragedy and the hurting, you were able to squeeze in one of your favorite things in this novel: basketball. You’d been trying to do this for years. What made Good Indians ideal for basketball?

I’d tried the basketball ending before, with Ledfeather, but it wouldn’t stick, and . . . is this my first novel since Ledfeather to be set on the reservation? It might be, yeah. So, when my pen kind of set foot up there again, it was like I could hear a basketball dribbling out there somewhere. But, when I started writing Good Indians, I had no real intimation it was all headed to a showdown on the court. I thought I’d got enough slashing and driving in with the first part of the novel. I was wrong. Turned out there was a lot more waiting.

Your slasher novel before this one, The Final Last Girl, is a meta take on the genre. How would you say Good Indians differs from it?

In The Last Final Girl, everybody there’s from Kevin Williamson’s forehead, pretty much—they know the genre. Not so in Good Indians. Not that it would have helped them if they did know.

Last year, you spoke on the “Why Does Horror Matter” panel at StokerCon. You talked about how horror can use the empathetic response against you and teach you about yourself in an uncomfortable way, which is one of the best things the genre can do. Was there anything surprising you learned about yourself while writing Good Indians?

I guess I hadn’t realized how deeply that dog thing I answered about above was lodged in me, yeah. Until about three questions ago, I hadn’t realized it, I mean.

Before we wrap up, I want to ask you about the new renaissance of the horror genre happening now. It’s been coming to the fore during the difficult times we’re going through, to say nothing of our current administration. How do you see the renaissance happening? What’s your take on it?

Yeah, horror naturally reflects our current set of anxieties and fears back to us, so we can . . . either temporarily exorcise them, have a breather, or so we can better dissect them, I’m not sure. Maybe both? But, in times of unrest, be they political, financial, environmental, plague-y, whatever, horror’s there to try to make it all make sense. Really? I wonder if the pleasure of horror in times of unrest is that, on the page, on the screen, the horror draws to some manner of a “close,” as in, it goes over, the evil is pushed down, defeated. Which is fantasy, of course, but, when the real baddies in the actual world just keep on keeping on, then engaging the fantasy for a few hours can be pretty appealing . . .

We’re gonna want to engage the fantasy for as long as possible, so we gotta know what upcoming projects of yours we can look forward to! What’s next?

Just revising another slasher novel, Lake Access Only. It’s the most Demon Theory thing I’ve written in years. Just, right now, with this version, I’m trying to expose its beating heart a little better, and give it longer legs, so it can step over more fences.

Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about Good Indians?

I wonder if I even write this book if I don’t read CJ Box’s Open Season, however many years ago that was already. That’s the most amazing novel. Finding it was like . . . it was like stumbling onto Charles McCarry’s The Secret Lovers in a used bookstore, and then falling headlong through the whole Paul Christopher series, wishing it never had to end. And Box has yet to end the Joe Pickett series—happily. I’m reading the current one right now, Long Range. Though, with how game wardens are characterized in Good Indians, I don’t know that Pickett—he’s a game warden himself—would be a reader, so much. So, I should maybe say here that I don’t think all game wardens are bad guys. Even the one in Good Indians, he’s not so bad. He’s just, as I was saying earlier, trying to figure out how to maybe be a good Indian, or the best one he can be, anyway. Finally, that’s all you can really do.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro

Alex Puncekar | 364 words

I really enjoyed this short romp through time in the search for love, especially the character of the Time Traveler. What was the inspiration for this story?

At its heart, this is a genie story. This is the story of the guy who asks a magical figure for a wish and does not get precisely what he asks for. The great power he asked could have been a wizard or a demon, with little rewriting necessary. The story actually began with the anecdote told in its middle about the time traveler commissioning Shakespeare for a love sonnet, and could have been just that, but I wrapped another story around it.

Samael feels like an everyman character, a blue-collar worker who wants to be happy like anybody else. What is it about the everyman character that seems to resonate with so many people, and how was it to write an extravagant, well-traveled character like the Time Traveler alongside Samael?

Samael is more than an everyman; he’s a guy who gives the impression of being a brute, and whose poor communication skills make it unlikely that he will ever find a companion for himself. The Extravagant Time Traveler is of course a well-beloved trope to those of us who watch BBC America, and I will confess that while writing this I occasionally teased myself with the possibility of this being the same Time Traveler. Ultimately, I decided he was not. But I mostly wanted this to be a wise and helpful man, meaning only the best.

The future that the Time Traveler brings Samael to is fascinating, weird, and different, but what interested me was how people could transform into whatever their daily needs required. If you had that ability, what sorts of things would you transform into to suit your daily needs?

I would eliminate chafing.

What’s next for you? Anything in the works you’d like to talk about?

Right now I am working on a couple of pieces that I am not ready to talk about, except to say that they’re awesome.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar is a writer, game designer, and editorial assistant for both Lightspeed and Nightmare. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine. He lives in Cinncinati, Ohio. Follow him on Twitter @AlexPuncekar.

Author Spotlight: Millie Ho

Gordon B. White | 773 words

At the risk of starting with a flame-related pun, given Candice’s condition, what was the spark of inspiration for your story? What was the first image or idea that drew you in, and how did it grow from there?

The first image I had was of a person being so inflamed by her uncontrollable emotions that she literally burns to death—but also comes back to life. The last part is important because it symbolizes the cyclical nature of life: some days are good, other days are bad; the tide goes out, but it always comes back in; a phoenix dies, but gets reborn. In the same way, it’s so easy to get lost in the heat of an intense emotion and think we’ll always feel this way. I wanted to emphasize, through Candice’s condition, that the darkness will pass as surely as it came.

This story places the unexplainable alongside the mundane present day, but the effect it works towards is fascinating. Rather than making the everyday seem painfully banal or making the magical supernaturally grand, in a way—almost like the mood-stabilizing Solven pills Candice takes—it flattens them both (at least for a while). How did you decide on this milieu, and what did it offer you that another one might not have?

Yeah, the mood of the story recreates Candice’s feelings of numbness after she takes Solven to stop her flames. While the pills allow her to stay alive, they also flatten out the joys and sorrows that make life interesting. By removing the contrast between the supernatural and everyday life, I wanted to show that Candice’s flare-ups and subsequent returns from the dead aren’t special occurrences, but something she must deal with on a daily basis. This condition bleeds into every corner of her life, and it’s so familiar to her that it’s almost mundane.

One element I appreciated was how Candice’s struggle to deal with her condition doesn’t fully resolve. Even as she works hard at developing a different treatment plan, her flames never go away, but neither does she ever fully stop taking the medicine. In the end, Candice isn’t “cured” or “normal” (for whatever those words mean), but she does learn to channel who she is and to live in a way that satisfies her. What do you see in her process?

A lot of things in life aren’t black and white, especially when it comes to matters of the mind and heart. In Candice’s case, the pressure to conform to societal and familial definitions of normalcy gave her a belief that there are infallible standards for good and bad—and she’s bad. It’s only when she lets go of that belief that she opens herself up to getting better, and to get better in her own way, not some ideal way prescribed to her by people who overlook her uniqueness as a human being.

I think self-knowledge is key here. It’s only after Candice rediscovers who she is, what she loves and what she’s capable of that she learns not only to manage her condition, but also to channel what was once destructive and terrifying into something productive and even beautiful.

For a while, when Candice seems to be looking for ways to distance herself from Fiona, she latches onto this idea that they’ll never truly connect because of their differences. This is crystallized at one point by Fiona’s misunderstanding of the difference between a fenghuang, which is a bird that never dies, and a phoenix, which dies but is reborn. What sort of difference do you see between the two, especially as they relate to Candice’s journey? At the end, is she more one than the other, or is she something else?

That’s a tough question! I’ll let the reader decide, though I will say that I don’t believe in a One True Myth. The scene you brought up highlights Fiona and Candice’s cultural differences as they interpret the same myth through the lens of their contrasting life experiences, and this nuance is something I want to see more of in fiction and beyond.

Finally, what’s coming up next on your horizon? In addition to any concrete plans, are there any new ideas you’re beginning to explore?

I’m working on a novel! And doodling more comics about cats and their long-suffering food bringers whenever my brain needs a rest.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Gordon B. White is the author of the collection As Summer’s Mask Slips and Other Disruptions (Trepidatio Publishing 2020). A graduate of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, Gordon’s stories have appeared in dozens of venues, including The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 12 and the Bram Stoker Award® winning anthology Borderlands 6. He also contributes reviews and interviews to outlets including Nightmare, Lightspeed, Hellnotes, and The Outer Dark podcast. You can find him online at gordonbwhite.com.

Author Spotlight: Ada Hoffman

Jude Griffin | 1515 words

How did this story come about?

This story takes place in the world of my novel, The Outside (currently a finalist for the Philip K. Dick and Compton Crook awards for 2020). In The Outside, Akavi, Elu, and Enga appear as a team of antagonists. But I love villains and I wanted to spend more time with them from their own perspective. I especially wanted to spend POV time with Enga, who’s a favorite of mine, and who has several dramatic moments in the novel, but don’t allow readers to see anything from her own perspective.

I find Enga fascinating to write because she’s such a badass yet significantly disabled. Obviously she has cyborg limbs and technology in her head, which in some ways help her find workarounds for her impairments, but she’s still impaired; she still faces significant challenges that the other characters don’t and would never be mistaken for an able-bodied person. I’ve always seen her as a character who is deeply angry. She acts on that anger in ways that make her complicit with the power structures that have hurt her and others, but some of her anger is towards those systems, too. She’s more of a wild card than Akavi realizes. And because her own communications, even through text, are so taciturn, we don’t see the full depth or the source of her anger in the novel. I have a soft spot for angry, troubled, messy characters and I wanted to give Enga a story that would more thoroughly explore the role of anger in her life.

We may see more of Enga’s POV in The Fallen, which comes out in 2021, but I’m still drafting that book, so it’s hard to make guarantees. We certainly haven’t seen the last of her.

How did you decide on the names for the angels?

I’m actually terrible at names. When I was little, I named my toys things like “Amacabame” and “Puddluck.” (I tried to conlang in high school and was hilariously bad at it.) I want to give people catchy, memorable names that follow well-thought-out morphological rules, as opposed to being facerolls on the keyboard, but I have trouble with it. I often rely on a tool called Awkwords (bit.ly/2IbHpNS), which allows an author to input different letter combinations and phonotactic rules and then generates a bunch of candidate words based on those rules. A lot of the names still end up hard for readers to pronounce (there’s a minor character in The Outside named Alkipileudjea) but this way there’s a method to the madness.

Right now I have twenty-six separate Awkwords files for names corresponding to different ethnic & national origins in the world of The Outside. Most of these have only ever been used once or twice. Enga, Elu, and Akavi’s names each come from a different one of these files. Angels in this universe come from a variety of cultures on a variety of planets, but all these planets are ruled by the Gods. Then there is the “-of Nemesis” at the end of their names, which denotes the God they belong to now that they’re angels; mortals don’t have these appellations. Higher ranking angels also have their rank as part of their name; so the title “Inquisitor of Nemesis” is part of Akavi’s full name.

There are eleven Gods (plus one failed, demonic proto-God), but only Nemesis, the God of retribution, plays a major role in this story. Arete, a God with a nicer personality, is mentioned very briefly.

The names of the Gods themselves are taken from ancient Greek. In my earliest notes, they all had nonsense Awkwords names like everyone else, but an alpha reader and long-term collaborator of mine suggested naming them after Old Human gods, to underscore the idea of how powerful and different they are. I didn’t want to use the most well-known gods (Nemesis is the least obscure of the twelve) but instead used the Greek names for personifications of concepts. This fits with the way these Gods interact with their world, since each oversees a separate domain of human affairs and claims the souls of a different kind of person.

I laughed when reading how the reality of a spaceship varied from how mortals imagined the ship: Do you have a long list of these kinds of annoying themes in science fiction?

For me, it’s less about anything I’m annoyed by and more about the position of angels in their society. They’re revered and feared, but in their lives are very separate from those of mortals. The mortals in this universe don’t have the ability to load vast amounts of information directly into their heads and they don’t really have access to anything in their everyday life that resembles the technology angels use on a daily basis. So, when representing angels in popular culture, mortals visualize them doing things in ways that are more recognizable and easier to represent on a TV screen. That plus the level of mystique around angels means their public image is in many ways different from the reality.

Can you talk about your Autistic Book Party?

Sure! This is a project I’ve been doing since 2012 in which I write in-depth reviews of autistic speculative fiction books. By “autistic books” I mean books with autistic characters, books with openly autistic authors, or both. This started when I wrote a post criticizing the autism representation in a famous short story, and an author more famous than me reblogged it. I am autistic myself, and suddenly a ton of people wanted to know my opinion on the way autism was portrayed in various different books, most of which I hadn’t read. In the years since this occurred, I’ve learned a lot about the pressures that face marginalized authors and the negative effects of being expected to speak as a cultural expert on your own marginalization. But honestly, at the time I found it really affirming. All these people were genuinely interested in my opinion about something important to me! So I started up the review series.

It’s still going, although I’m often slow with it. My goal is to average a book per month, and I often fall short. It’s also partly funded by my Patreon.

Since I’ve been working on the project for eight years, I’ve seen the way autism representation has evolved that time. Neurodiversity in fiction honestly has a much higher profile now than it did even a decade ago. And autistic people are writing speculative fiction much faster than I can review it all! Many are self-published, but there has been progress with traditional publishing, particularly in mid-sized presses like Angry Robot and Solaris. (Note: Angry Robot is my publisher.) These days, so many autistic authors are offering me review copies that I have to turn some down, which sucks. A pipe dream of mine is to get a team of several autistic reviewers together so as to cover more ground.

If you want to read the book reviews, a good place to start is here: ada-hoffmann.com/reviews-index.

What are some of your favorite short stories from 2019?

I’m writing this just before the Nebula nomination deadline, so thanks for prodding me to review my notes on my favorites. Here are a few:

Megan Arkenberg’s “The Night Princes,” which has fantasy and a grim reality interweaving in complex, psychologically realistic ways and defies easy interpretation.

S.L. Huang’s “As the Last I May Know” and Jamie Wahls’s “Truth Plus,” both of which are heartrending and thought-provoking stories about difficult ethical dilemmas with high stakes. They stayed in my mind long after reading.

Brit E.B. Hvide’s “A Catalog of Love at First Sight,” which ties together so many different forms of love and the ways human communities support each other in the face of great disaster.

D.H. Kelly’s novelette “The Furious Chisel,” which blew me away with both its disability representation and its approach to AI. My favorite part is the way the narrator tries to be as respectful and thoughtful to her robot companion as she can, even when it’s not clear what that means for them both.

Tegan Moore’s “A Forest, or a Tree” and Elizabeth Childs’s “The Beckoning Green,” two very different kinds of feminist horror story, both verdant and alive, emotionally aware and full of growing things.

And, Nibedita Sen’s “We Sang You as Ours,” a tale of sea monsters both graceful and grisly, and of young sisters finding ways to break free of their supernatural family’s toxic patterns.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Alexander Weinstein

Sandra Odell | 1751 words

“Destinations of Love From The Lost Traveler’s Tour Guide,” the latest installment in this marvelous series of stories, struck me as perhaps one of the most poignant in both tone and settings. Has it been a challenge to write each of these pieces in its own voice, reflecting the locations and intent of the destinations?

The writing process has been really interesting, because the pieces have arrived very differently than my more traditional stories in Children of the New World or Universal Love. The stories in those collections tended to follow traditional plot and narrative structures. Ultimately, I’d build the stories by asking myself craft questions about plot/conflict/character. With the tour guide stories, I began to engage with storytelling in a completely different way. I’d go through an emotional experience (of love, solitude, joy) and I’d simultaneously catch a glimpse of a city, or a hotel, or a museum that was the metaphorical destination of that emotion. Then, as though I was a traveler in a new world, I’d explore the landscape while I wrote about it. I’d literally look around inside the new destination as much as possible, writing pretty much non-stop, as I catalogued the dream details of the particular destination.

In this way, I was simultaneously exploring the worldbuilding of the story but also exploring the depths of my own emotions through imaginative play. Questions of character/plot/narrative arc became the by-products of the writing process and oftentimes proved to be superfluous to this new form. For example, there are very few characters and almost no use of dialogue in these stories. Similarly, I wasn’t wondering about the best perspective to use (which is a question I often ask myself at the start of a more traditional story). In fact, it was only later that I realized the voice of the guidebook writers was actually a form of fourth-person address (a collective we addressing a collective you). This is a very experimental point of view that I’d always been intrigued by but didn’t know how to use. Suddenly, I was using that perspective without even realizing it, and the point of view felt completely organic and natural. This new process of creating is incredibly joyful to me as a writer, because I’m writing from within the fantastical locations and making notes like an explorer.

Tell us something of what inspired this particular section of the guide.

The Museum of Heartbreak, for example, chronicles various break-ups I’ve faced, full of pain and sorrow. Just like the museum, my own life contains letters written to an ex which were never answered, or memories of found text messages revealing I’d been cheated on, or the moments when I’d gotten my courage up to ask someone out only to receive a rejection. And among these exhibits, more galleries filled with various broken dreams and romantic futures that never materialized. Now, all of those experiences were incredibly gutting, no doubt—but I also realized they were universal. So the dark humor in that piece comes from a realization of just how many people have gone through these very same experiences. At certain points in everyone’s lives, the world itself has become the Museum of Heartbreak.

On the other hand, The Hotel Aulaun is that beautiful place where we find ourselves fully in love or consumed by passion. This can be the joys of erotic embrace, or the euphoric days of falling in love, or, for the few lucky travelers, the joy of lifelong companionship. This story came from the joys of love in my present life, and my belief that lifelong love and passion is possible if we remember to stay checked in to the sacred hotel of our hearts.

Love is universal, a many splendored thing; all you need, is love is love is love. I was intrigued by the way you portrayed both the positive and negative aspects of love and flirted with both the romantic and platonic. Were there facets of love that you wanted to include in the story but didn’t?

The sacred work of lifelong love. I hint at it in The Hotel Aulaun and The City of Rouxman—but I don’t fully explore what it means to engage in the healing practice of eternal love. I think lifelong love requires us to become deeper, more compassionate and spiritual individuals. It means being able to remain conscious and present with our partner for all the changes, the growth, and the dark and light moments that we, as humans, go through. It also means learning to have deep compassion for our own shadow sides. This is because we have to face our own negative patterns that appear in the mirror of a romantic partnership. When we are reactionary or triggered, we often make the crucial mistake of blaming a partner for our own triggers. The way this manifests can be disagreements, petty annoyances, or deep miscommunications. The work in such moments of conflict seems to be to examine the original source of where our pain is coming from. Almost always the triggers we face in a relationship trace back to childhood, past relationships, or simply the unloved inner self.

So the work with a romantic partner is to hold space for one another so that deep healing and intimacy can flourish. This requires dropping our own reactionary triggering in order to create a space wherein the inner relationship with our wounded selves and the outer relationship with the beloved can be healed, nurtured, and celebrated. I call this building a temple of love in our hearts. And when that temple has been built, then each partner, on a somatic and emotional level, feels safe to grow, to heal, and to flourish. Perhaps this destination—of the temple of love—is yet another destination waiting to being written.

Much like Toxicity and Joy, Love is an abstract. When writing these pieces, how do you open yourself to the possibilities of embracing abstractions in a way that makes them concrete?

A key practice is to allow synesthesia and free-association to take the reins. For example, in “Toxic Destinations,” I wrote about the city of Phôtl—which is a place of great misery and toxicity. To be able to describe that location, I began to think about the crummy bars I’d frequented in college: the sticky floors, someone vomiting into a dirty urinal, cheap strobe lights, bad music, women with too much makeup and slurred words, greasy dudes smoking cigarettes . . . good . . . now what else is associated with the dregs of the all-too-common “partying” scene in America . . . I see loud frat brothers, aging alcoholics in crumpled suits, the hollow-eyed and middle-aged dashing into bathrooms to snort cocaine with rabid hunger . . . good . . . and who fed those toxic people their poisons . . . horrendous parents, backstabbing friends, loan officers making shark-toothed mortgages, politicians transformed into enormous slugs . . . As you can see, the random associations begin to become dreamy and surreal. Much of this free-writing is ultimately unusable—but the process lets me produce a wealth of emotional-laden details which are anchored in the concrete.

For “Destinations of Love,” the technique was very much the same. What does love feel like to me? The first thing I see is candlelight . . . the way its softness flickers against sheets and cheekbones, an early summer wind moving across the body . . . and now a band begins to strike up the music, while out there on the lake, beneath the moon . . . and in this way each image conjures the next. Association leads to association. The key for me is to try to get intoxicated with language, to be swept into the images, to be lost in the dream of the destination (which is ultimately my own emotion) and return with the concrete objects of words so to tether the emotions to the tangible world of the page.

What does love mean to you?

I think love is the fundamental vibration of the universe—a mixture of exuberant joy and erotic creation (birds and bees, the earth ripe with spring, the stars in one’s eyes upon seeing one’s lover). Its sensation is a boundary-dissolving limitlessness that allows us to transcend the limited perception of self in order to experience an interconnected merging with other. And to experience love fully means being willing to unwrap the barbed wire of self-protection from our hearts. In fact, love’s super power is that it melts the barbed wire immediately and frees us from our fears.

Romantic love is, of course, only one of the many forms love takes. There’s love for parents and children, for our friends, for the larger community. I see love as a series of expanding circles. At the center of that circle is our ability to love ourselves. This is no small task, and it unfortunately goes unattended and left for last. The process of self-love requires an ability to literally look in the mirror and be able to tell ourselves that we love ourselves with infinite compassion. Meanwhile, at the furthest rings of the expanding circles of love, is our ability to love this world: humanity, nature, the planet and all its beings. This is the transcendental plane of love—which includes the ability to have compassion for those who have hurt us, and to extend love rather than hatred to the world. In this way, love means caring for others and rejoicing in our shared humanity and the mystery of life.

Writing can be as exhausting as it is invigorating. What do you do to recharge the writing batteries so you can face the page once more? What does self-care look like for Alexander Weinstein?

Love with my partner and our children. Family get-togethers. Music—both going to concerts and playing it at home (I like to play guitar, piano, singing bowls/drums). Yoga. Nature walks. Gardening. Travel. Taking the time to prepare a really good meal with friends. Swimming and playing in bodies of water whenever possible. Lots of baths. Massage (if I’m lucky!) Dance. Letting myself sleep in and take naps. And, believe it or not, writing. I find that first drafts can actually recharge the batteries. As for revision . . . I’m still learning how to make that a self-nurturing experience!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 214 words

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Marie Vibbert (“Single Malt Spacecraft”) and Em North (“Real Animals”), along with SF reprints by Tochi Onyebuchi (“Still Life with Hammers, a Broom, and a Brick Stacker”) and Matthew Kressel (“The Marsh of Camarina”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Julianna Baggott (“The Postictal State of Divine Love”) and Ben Peek (“Refuge”), and fantasy reprints by Megan Arkenberg (“Danae”) and Ken Liu (“What I Assume You Shall Assume”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our feature interview is with Jessica Cluess. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Ashok K. Banker, Ray Nayler, Mari Ness, KT Bryski, Sunny Moraine, and Todd McAulty.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

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Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance you’re a regular reader of Lightspeed and/or Nightmare. We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Lightspeed and Nightmare and my anthologies, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding the magazines, so the magazines really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account. Plus, since I sometimes independently publish works using indie-publishing tools (as described above), we thought it would be good to have a single place where folks could come to show their support for such projects.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy my work as an editor, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of two award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and my other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor & Book Reviewer

Arley Sorg

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Alex Puncekar

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

Chris Kluwe

Carrie Vaughn

Christopher East

Violet Allen

Interviewer

Christian A. Coleman

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed (and/or Nightmare), you might also enjoy these works edited by John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon) [Forthcoming 2020]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming]

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker [forthcoming]

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.