TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 121, June 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: June 2020

SCIENCE FICTION

Still Life with Hammers, a Broom, and a Brick Stacker
Tochi Onyebuchi

Single Malt Spacecraft
Marie Vibbert

The Marsh of Camarina
Matthew Kressel

Real Animals
Em North

FANTASY

The Postictal State of Divine Love
Julianna Baggott

Danaë
Megan Arkenberg

Refuge
Ben Peek

What I Assume You Shall Assume
Ken Liu

EXCERPTS

Trouble the Saints
Alaya Dawn Johnson

NONFICTION

Book Reviews, June 2020
Arley Sorg

Media Review: June 2020
JY Yang

Interview: Jessica Cluess
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Julianna Baggott

Marie Vibbert

Ben Peek

Em North

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 Reiko Murakami

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: June 2020

John Joseph Adams | 221 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 121st issue!

We’re kicking off our tenth year with an original fantasy short from Julianna Baggott, “The Postictal State of Divine Love,” which blends myths of vampirism with the pain of living with someone with a chronic illness. The story is the inspiration for our cover art from Reiko Murakami.

Ben Peek brings us our second piece of original fantasy in “Refuge,” another deep dive into the way history disappears into myth—this time in an all-too-believable secondary world. We also have fantasy reprints by Megan Arkenberg (“Danaë”) and Ken Liu (“What I Assume You Shall Assume”).

Our science fiction originals begin with a cunning solution to a tricky problem: how to best age and market fine Scotch. Find out how in Marie Vibbert’s new “Single Malt Spacecraft.” In our other SF short, Em North has crafted a terrifying alien invasion in her story “Real Animals.” Our reprints this month come from Tochi Onyebuchi (“Still Life with Hammers, a Broom, and a Brick Stacker”) and Matthew Kressel (“The Marsh of Camarina”).

Our nonfiction team brings you our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our feature interview is with Jessica Cluess. Our e-book exclusive excerpt is from Alaya Dawn Johnson’s new novel Trouble the Saints.

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.

Still Life with Hammers, a Broom, and a Brick Stacker

Tochi Onyebuchi | 4396 words

Linc tucked down the bill of his worn Red Sox cap and closed his eyes against the sweat stinging them. The truck, lifting carpets of ash and dust into the air like someone spreading a bedsheet, provided the morning’s only sound. But Linc thought he could maybe hear the wreckers up ahead, monstrous, steel-tooth jaws spreading open to dump another load of bricks on the growing pile. In the shadows cast by the leaning, crumbling apartment towers stood black girls and a few jaundiced snow bunnies in leather, neon-colored short skirts, hips kinked to one side while the stone wall supported their lewd poses. The other men in the back of the truck with Linc, leaned over the side of the flatbed and whistled.

“Them trackmarks get me a discount?” one shouted.

“I’m just tryna put one in ya, guh!”

“Love bites, Mami, and so do I.”

“I get paid next Friday!”

They laughed and it sounded like thunder, joyous, irresponsible laughter and even as Linc gripped the handle of his hammer, he couldn’t help smiling. He wanted to get at least a little bit of sleep before they got to the worksite, but the heat was just a few dozen degrees past sleepy, so why not holler at a few whores to pass the time?

At least it wasn’t raining; at least it wasn’t cold enough to aggravate his busted knuckles and the smashed fingers and toes that belonged to any number of kids in various angles of repose in the flatbed. None of them looked up at the red-blue sky threaded with knife-scar clouds and the Colony hovering like a pitted moon overhead.

The whores vanished behind a corner, and the young men retreated to their seats. Hunger hung around them like an odor. Linc knew the work would be the best thing to happen to them. Otherwise, they’d be out there just like he was before rehab, letting hunger compel him to destroy the very things he needed.

“We pickin’ up Ace?” one of the youths asked. He had his hammer draped across his chest, his head propped against the rickety back of the flatbed, his hat brim low over his eyes.

No one answered.

“We pickin’ him up or what?”

Linc stirred, then rapped loudly on the back window. When nothing happened, he rapped again, hard enough to crack the plexi-glas. The driver’s side window creaked downward and a leather-skinned black man with a lazy eye, the ratty remains of a cigar in his false teeth and a straw hat on his head, leaned out on his elbow.

“You gon’ break my goddamn winda poundin’ like that.”

Linc leaned over to be heard over the rumbling through the abandoned roads by the old Ivy Quarter. “Yo, Bishop, we pickin’ up Ace today?”

“Whatchu think?” Bishop spat back. His cigar clung to his teeth. “His place comin’ up right now.” And with that, Bishop retreated. The window only went halfway up after that.

They drove out of the old Ivy Quarter and the dilapidated houses got smaller, their lean more pronounced. The broken windows with their crumbling frames like Bishop’s droopy eye watched them pass. The houses here on the outskirts of that neighborhood looked no different, but out front, piled up on the sidewalk were mattresses, some with blood stains like large copper half dollars on them, children’s clothes mixed in with dirty linens, ants swarming over half-empty bags of fast food, old radios that looked like they’d only recently stopped working.

When they got to Ace’s spot, a slouching duplex that used to be painted blue and yellow once upon a time, there was five-oh out front and a couple people that looked maybe like social workers. The County Sheriff was there, a large metal sphere with arms like a spider, one sporting a small caliber pistol. On its front, a display of a white man’s mustachioed face. Remote policing. The cops were likely partially cyberized, their essential parts replaceable; hence their stomping around irradiated wasteland. But the social workers looked flesh-and-blood enough. One of them looked like she might boot all over her jeans.

Nobody in the truck bed stirred. The chalky dust on their overalls and their jeans and their boots didn’t even budge. But they all watched silently the man they’d worked with being dressed down like a bitch in front of his family. Linc wanted to spit but had run out of saliva.

The front door hung open, and inside, Ace could be seen sitting down in his living room couch, his arms around his two kids, boy and a girl, relaxed but protecting them from the officer who, hand leisurely to his weapon, stood over them. Static-y blue and white from the TV flashed on the eviction cop’s back.

Linc couldn’t hear what was being said, but Ace, from where he sat, raised his voice. The officer never raised his, but eventually Ace shot up from his seat and screamed, “This some bullshit!”

Ace stomped out before the cop could make it look like he was being escorted, waited for the cop and made like he was standing his ground. “You ain’t got no right. You see this neighborhood? You see it? We the last family on the block. Ain’t no one livin’ here. So what goddamn difference it make if me and my family make a life here, huh? What difference do it make?”

The cop raised his non-gun hand, inches from Ace’s chest. “Sir, leave the immediate premises or you will be arrested.”

The social workers walked the children and Ace’s wife out onto the sidewalk and already movers had materialized to start offloading the family’s furniture. The TV blared. “Do you have a place where you can stay?” the social worker asked Ace’s wife.

“No,” she said back. She seemed too tired to be annoyed or upset that their life was being brought out into the street like so much trash. “We ain’t heard from his family in a couple years.”

The social worker’s face half-crinkled in sorrow. “There are some shelters further out. Fairfield and a few more further down the rail line. Our office can furnish you and your family with rail tickets.”

Ace’s wife had stopped looking at the social worker as she droned on, looked instead at the growing pile of furniture and appliances, some of them already rusting from exposure to the poisoned air, some of them already growing rusted blood blisters. Her son, six years old in overalls like the ones Ace wore to work, scurried back inside where his bowl of cereal waited on the table for him. The sight of the kid with his cereal, riveted on the TV while the movers emptied his house, reminded Linc of his own dad who, at the same age as that kid, had come home from school to see all their shit on the sidewalk, an eviction notice stapled to their front door. He hadn’t told Linc about it much, but Jake told him one afternoon when they were skipping stones off the Long Wharf that dad, as a kid, had spent the following two months living in a truck with his dad, their grandfather.

Bishop turned in his seat. The engine had been idling.

Ace’s wife held their infant daughter at her hip.

The officer said “good luck” to Ace and turned away, the silent but ever-watchful sheriff hovering like a pet bird over his shoulder.

“We ain’t dead,” Ace shouted.

Linc could barely hear him over the engine Bishop had now started revving, getting the car ready to peel off.

“You can’t talk about us like we dead. We right here! See this here? This still a family! Ain’t gonna break that! Good luck to you, Officer!”

The rest of Ace’s words were lost in the smoke that billowed from the tailpipe. Bishop shifted into gear and the truck bumped along before shuddering off. No one in the truckbed had moved. Anybody walking by would’ve thought they were sleeping.

“Guess Ace ain’t comin’ to work today,” Jayceon said, arm propped beneath his neck, head bumping softly against the back of the truck bed. Linc heard implied violence in the kid’s voice and wondered what would happen if Bishop spun the car around and caught up with that officer.

• • • •

The site was so fresh, the chalk and plaster and asbestos so thick in the air, that Linc thought if they’d gotten there a couple minutes earlier, the building might’ve fallen right on top of them. A couple of the men had once-white hospital masks they tucked over their noses and mouths. A few pulled up their bandannas, so did some of the women and other on-sighters who came in off the street, all chalky overalls and scratched up Timberland boots.

The stackers gravitated to their own fiefdoms, the slower ones pushed out to some of the isolated corners while the denizens of Bishop’s truck, among the first responders, got their pick of the waste.

“That there’s twenty bucks,” Jayceon said, indicating with his hammer a mound of rubble.

Kendrick hopped over a ledge, dust rising in clouds upon his landing. “I’m standin’ in about two days’ pay rightchea.”

Linc walked past Jayceon who shot back at Kendrick, “You standin’ in a pile o’ bats is what you standin’ in.”

They went back and forth a few times, Mercedes interjecting with her own putdowns, but before long, everyone was working. Dig, clean, sort, build. Linc flipped his hammer so that the flat claw pointed at the ground. Wide stance, he swung around in sweeping strokes, raking through the rubble, and when he found a brick, he flipped his hammer and, with one swift blow, dashed away the mortar that had clung to it. A quick glance, and it went into his pile. More sweeping, more hammering to clear away the detritus. A couple stackers had shorter handles on their hammers and had to stoop further than was healthy, hands that much closer to the wires, nails, broken piping, panes of glass. With each strike, mortar dust erupted, shards shooting in all directions. Grit settled on their clothes, filled their pores, turned the sweat on their brow into streams of mud that tracked the bandannas over their mouths like tearstains.

Rodney, who moved like a ballet dancer around his war-stiffened leg, had about five hundred bricks. He danced in the middle of his pallet, building his stack around him in the shape of an L. Before long, he had nine layers up, alternating the directions of the bricks on each layer so that the whole thing wouldn’t topple.

“How old is you, Bishop?” Mercedes shouted, surrounded by her own stacks.

“Eighty-two next Monday.”

“Coulda swore you was at least eighty-five last week.”

“Hah!” Bugs shouted from his pile of brick and ash. “Bishop, you been stackin’ for least forty-fifty years, that right?”

“Fifty-six years,” Bishop said around his cigar, working in smooth, slow, efficient motions. Once his body got stooped to a particular angle, it stayed that way for the entirety of his run. “Lord’s help, I just might retire soon.”

“That right, Bishop?” Kendrick sang.

“Yep. Get me a nice white horse and set out for Rancho Cooooooocamunga.” At which everyone, including Bishop, roared with mirth.

“You do that, we might miss you, Bishop.” Wyatt this time, athletic build coated in a sheen of muddy sweat where his muscled limbs showed beneath his workshirt. “Who gon’ preach to the congregation here when you gone?”

“The Lord provides,” Bishop said. Then again, beneath his breath, to himself, “The Lord provides.”

Linc was close enough to hear it between the clink his hammer made when it broke the mortar off a brick.

• • • •

The sun silhouettes them. Seen from above, they are ants. Black and brown ants with baseball caps or worn fedoras shielding their faces. Clouds of dust erupt with each blow of the hammer and chalk clings to them in their search for New Haven Heavies, those pitted off-white bricks that, when stacked on square wooden skids or pallets, will get shipped to the local transporter and then shot up, packaged and shrink-wrapped, to the Colony where they will build houses that look just like the ones on Earth used to look. The bricks won’t be irradiated when they arrive the way they’re irradiated now. Space will cleanse them, deepen their off-whiteness, and by the time they get to the docking station, they will be pretty and pitted and just the right kind of almost-dirty.

A brick in one hand, a hammer in the other.

When one gets too close to the other, the second, without raising his head, will shout, “son of a bitch” or “step off” or “we got a problem, nigga?” and the first will either retreat with an apology and a muttered epithet or he’ll say “get it like the Red Cross, nigga” and the two will fight in the dirt, punching each other in the ribs or pinning one guy to the ground and smashing his face with a bat until the blood and the mortar meld together and one of them is still and groaning on his mound of debris and the other stands over him, chest heaving, bloody, broken brick in his hand, finishes his skid and takes a smoke break, having lost the energy to work for the rest of the day.

The cheering subsides and one of the older stackers helps carry the defeated man out of the arena. Enterprising stackers take over his skid, divide the proceeds, add to their own.

“Heard your old lady won’t gi’ you back your Frank Ocean records,” one of them guffaws while some of the others shoot up in the remnants of the half-demolished building. “Heard she changed the locks on your ass.” They vanish into the shadows and sometimes an hour passes before they’re seen again, smooth and swerving and smiling, sometimes two.

One stacker challenges another to a race, see who can build a skid the fastest.

Sometimes, on a really hot day, motivation will evaporate. If one of them sits down for maybe an hour, he can’t get back up again. They all have to wait for the wreckers to finish with the building and in the pause between batterings, Timeica will light up a Newport and tell Mercedes about how there used to be a big market for Haven Heavies in the South when they wanted to replace all them wooden plantations with clean, white brick that looked just the right shade of old. Bishop will verify, mention his grand-pappy or great grand-pappy, and when the building is no longer there to shade them, after they’ve watched it crumble and covered their faces to the dust clouds, they resume their work, a roving part of the landscape like ants or beetles or butterflies.

• • • •

Linc fished a pack of Newports out of his shirt pocket and lit one up. Jayceon followed suit. From East Rock, a ridge grown craggy with poisoned air and sunrays devoid of nutrition, they watched the skyline. Smoke from dumpsters columned into the air, leaned and pitched with the wind. Cracks spread like thick-knuckled fingers through Orange Street, turning the bike lane into a makeshift mountain trail.

The university at the center of the Ivy Quarter jutted like a middle finger amongst the glass-and-steel high rises, made orange by the sunrise and the venom in the air. The whole place looked contaminated, but Linc appreciated how quiet that made it.

Somewhere in the distance, a shuttle shot off into space.

“This the part where I tell you ’bout wantin’ to get to space?”

Jayceon smoked in silence.

“’Bout how I always wanted to see the stars but because I came up where I came up, I got left behind?”

“You forgot the part about going back to school.”

Linc chuckled, pointed to where the old state college used to be, now a sunken pit surrounded by rubble built like the ridge of a crater. It had long ago been pillaged by stackers. No good bricks there. Only bats. “Oh yeah. Gonna go back and maybe study Engineering. What was it, mechanical or electrical?”

“Mechanical, last time you told it.” Jayceon took another drag.

“But then I get to the part where I talk about constantly putting it off.”

“And I say that bit about how they only let white folk up into space.”

Linc smirked. “And I get all poetical and shit and say, ‘they get to build the shit and we just pick up the pieces o’ what they done broke.’ That’s how it goes, right?”

“That’s how Bishop used to say it.”

Linc thought about Ace being put out on the street like that. Thought about space and being left behind. Thought about why God would make him capable of wanting something he could never have. And how most precious things often fall apart for no reason at all.

Jayceon, with his chin, indicated something silhouetted against the gray-gold firmament. It looked like a massive crucifix, cross-beam spread over Edgewood. “Looks like we got tomorrow’s work if they ain’t already pick that place clean.”

It was a crane.

• • • •

“This kinda work, you ain’t gotta pull a jux,” Kendrick told Bugs that first day Bugs had wandered in off the street, lost kid with eyes practically popping out of his head, too young, they thought, to be a dope fiend. But a couple of the stackers wouldn’t have been surprised to find track marks on the kid’s arms. “First of all,” he said between sweeps with his curved-claw hammer, “you get paid for this rightchea. Second of all,” a huff, “time you finish stacking your skids, you way too tired to go off and rob someone.”

“Beats sellin’ fake-ass roses on the corner of York and Broadway!” someone shouted, maybe Timeica, and a few of the stackers chuckled behind their bandannas.

Jayceon told Linc about a guy he knew, used to tell stories about how he preyed on women in abandoned apartment blocks just like this, cornered them where they couldn’t run then did them like those cats in Vietnam used to do the local women. Linc remembered that time after they’d gotten to a demo site and Mercedes had found an arm sticking up out of her mound. “Goddamn dead body broke my bricks!” she’d screamed. Timeica and Bugs and Linc had helped her cart the thing off, wrap it in a nearby rug on someone’s sidewalk, and toss it in a dumpster. The rest of the day, they worked under the stench of burning flesh and smoke filled with human ashes corkscrewing in whorls up into the sky. Jayceon had watched them in silence the whole time.

“This here craftsmanship,” Bishop said between breaths.

“Oh, he gettin’ ready to preach,” Timeica warned from her skid.

“This here what happens when labor meets love.”

“Preach, Bishop. Earn that collection plate money!” Mercedes cheered over her six-high.

“My great grand-pappy,” Bishop said with new wind, “worked this building site in Virginia. Him and his boys had to drive up from South Carolina every day. The carpenters were all white folk, so ’course them laborers and street sweepers and all them other folk were black. They’d watch the carpenters work in between their own shifts and they’d bullshit, but my pappy always told me how much he envied them carpenters. Pappy knew the trade some and he used to make that wood sang, woo!”

“Sang!”

“Oof!”

“Preach, Bishop, preach!”

“Made that wood SANG!”

Bishop waited for them to calm some. “So one day, he walks up to the foreman, makes sure no one else can hear ’im, and tells the foreman he sees the job the white carpenters are doin’. He doesn’t say how much better he is than them, though he could’ve and he wouldn’ta been lying. ’Stead, he asks if maybe he could pitch in a little, make hisself useful. Don’t even need no extra pay. He still take his laborer’s salary. Foreman say sure.”

“What else the foreman gon’ say?” Kendrick said, clapping his hammer to a brick. “Your grand-pappy pro’lly was the best carpenter that side of the Mississippi.”

“You ain’t wrong, Kendrick. You ain’t wrong.” Bishop had his hammer propped up underneath his two hands and chin. He was like that, could stop working for a bit, finish a sermon, then get right back to it. His back never straightened though, just changed its angle of hunch. “Anyway, pappy gets to the worksite extra early so no one can see him work. He do his work and the foreman’s smiling something fierce like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. Pappy was a blessed magician with wood, and the foreman saw it too. Then they’d hear the white folk truck comin’ up over the hill, and pappy would put away his tools, give back the foreman the one’s he’d borrowed, and he pick his broom back up so’s none of the white folk comin’ out their truck got the wrong idea.”

Reverent silence settled over the demo-site. A few had stopped stacking altogether.

“I’da let them see me carvin’ that wood,” Jayceon said, that implied violence thick in his voice. “They’d see I was that much better than ’em. And they wouldn’t be able to say shit to me on account of it.”

Bishop shook his head, sadly. “And they woulda asked you to come out back, help ’em with somethin’ else. And there wouldn’t a been nothin’ but them six white men, twelve foot of rope, and the peach tree they’d hang you from.”

“Peach trees only grow in Georgia,” Jayceon said, smirking.

“Whatever tree it is, it got branches. And that’s all they’d need.” He turned to the rest of the congregation. “So this right here, this all an honest man needs. Kinda work where he can make his own hours. He’s his own boss, and his pay is commensurate to his efforts. This is huggin’ the earth right here. Getting real, live dirt under our fingernails. This the type of work the Lord meant for us to be doin’. And I don’t know about y’all, but I’m a happy and content instrument of His will.”

• • • •

Among them are young men, hoping to earn enough to buy a girl a drink or to put some gas in their hooptie. Among them are men and women with prison-stink still fresh on their skin, the kind that repels most employers, hoping to find the type of work that’ll wash away the odor, or at least coat it in enough dust so they don’t have to smell it anymore. A few of them come from just outside the city limits, on the outskirts of the blast radius where the powers-that-be deign to send them public assistance checks. These come to supplement that income, maybe get their kids something extra for Christmas. The older ones come as an excuse to get outside, or out of habit, ignorant of what else their bodies were made to do. The junkies and alchies, the dope fiends and crack heads and addicts who manage to maintain enough self-possession to hold a hammer with purpose, they work. As do the rest of them. The homeless or destitute or wandering see them and ask if they can join and are welcomed. The bricks land on bricks. The hammers clank. The earth sings.

• • • •

“You get rough hands,” Linc said to Jayceon, feet dangling over the flaking steel waterfront pier. He felt the patches where duct tape had been put over his holes. Took off the gloves to stare at the skin of his palms, pale beneath the moonlight. Kendrick picked up bits of stone and shrapnel behind them and tossed them into the ocean. The whole place smelled like seaweed and skunk, but the moon shone bright overhead and he could pinpoint just where in relation to the celestial body the Colony hovered. It was a speck no bigger than the farthest star, but he imagined he could see it rotating. “Rough feet too, walking around in them boots all day, kicking piles of trash. Feel like I’m turning into a brick.” He turned his hands over, let them sit in his lap. “You think anyone up there got hands like us?”

Kendrick tossed more junk into the sea. “White folk ain’t got our constitution. Can’t none of ’em swing a hammer like I can.”

“Goddamn right,” Jayceon said quietly around a new cigarette.

Linc turned and could see, seated on a bench, Mercedes, with Timeica leaning against the back of the thing, testing its strength by propping herself on it by her arms. Mercedes was rolling a Turkish cigarette that glowed with flecks of radioactive dust.

“You ain’t a stacker ’til you smash your thumb,” Timeica said. “First busted finger I had, the nail turned all the way black and just fell off. Took about a year to grow back.”

Mercedes didn’t seem to be listening.

Timeica laughed, then let up off the bench, came around and sat in it.

Linc didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, but saw Mercedes wearing the look of someone whose head keeps falling off their hammer, someone frustrated, realizing any light at the end of the tunnel’s just more tunnel. She looked ready to die.

“You seen Ace around some?” Kendrick asked no one in particular. He’d stopped throwing shit into the water.

Jayceon lit up another Newport. “He somewhere he can’t stack.” The flame danced at the end of his cig. “Might be there for a couple years.”

Winter was on its way, and Linc could already see in his mind’s eye the warehouse they’d huddle in, the rusted garbage can whose burning refuse would provide their warmth. He could already feel the cold biting through his duct-taped fingertips, could see the stackers dropping off who caught pneumonia and couldn’t get it treated. He could feel hammers accidentally breaking hands, leaving them monstrously swollen and constricted.

“We ain’t dead,” Linc whispered to himself.

He looked up at where he thought the Colony sat. “Good luck to you, Officer,” he said before walking back the way he had come. His hands ached for a hammer.

©2016 by Tochi Onyebuchi. Originally published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African, its sequel, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls. He holds degrees from Yale, the Tisch School of the Arts, Sciences Po, and Columbia Law School. His fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, Omenana Magazine, Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America, and elsewhere. His non-fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. Riot Baby is his adult fiction debut. You can find him online at tochionyebuchi.com and on Twitter @TochiTrueStory.

Single Malt Spacecraft

Marie Vibbert | 3669 words

The first time Fresia tasted scotch, it was true love. She was twenty-two. Her boyfriend had just turned twenty-one and had gotten a bottle of Glen Livet from his dad. He poured a shot for himself and for his friend, but none for Fresia.

“Come on,” she said, “I want to taste it.”

“Girls don’t like whisky,” he said. “Trust me, you’ll hate it.”

“Let me find out for myself.”

“Not for what this costs, sorry.”

The friend gasped over his empty shot glass. “Oh, that’s good.”

Her boyfriend put the whisky on the top of the fridge where he knew Fresia was too short to reach.

Later, when the guys were in the next room, she climbed on the counter to get it down and drank straight from the bottle.

It tasted like lying in the sun on a perfect summer day, like only the best parts of caramel. She took another, larger swig, and didn’t wipe the lip before putting it away.

• • • •

Fresia’s ship broke through the cloud layer and approached Burke Lakefront Spaceport over the slate-colored waves of Lake Erie. The buildings were the same faux-1950s revival she remembered, but they were dingier, glass gone to smeary opacity, the lawns unkempt. A lot changed in forty years, though to her it had been two weeks.

Fresia hoped looks weren’t everything. She banked to land and the bottle next to her foot tipped against her. Single malt scotch: Glen Fresia, forty years aged. A very small batch, a very special batch.

Fresia opened the cargo doors and got a face full of muddy lake scent. This was her third trip home, her third gamble, throwing herself forty years ahead of Earth so she could keep her dream alive. Her Glen Fresia. Last time there’d been a pair of softly glowing silicone loader bots. This time she faced a crowd of human laborers. Surly human laborers.

A young man detached himself from the crowd. “Well come, Miss Fresia.” He said “welcome” like two words and “Miss” like he was translating it.

How much had language drifted this time? “Are you the port relativity liaison?”

He bowed. “Nope. I’m Stuart. You would remember my grand mother.” He held out the metal card she’d given to her home business agent, who had refused paper on what felt like religious grounds.

She took the card, afraid it was the only surviving artifact of her last visit. “What happened to this place?”

“The war,” Stuart shrugged. “But Miss should make a killing. Nostalgia is large these days. And dang . . .” he picked a ceramic superhero out of its foam cradle. “I haven’t seen one of these since I was a child.”

“Is my storage locker intact?” The warehouses near at hand looked like rotted teeth.

“Nope. Grand salvaged the contents. Moved all south during the war, and back again. Little different location. I show you.” He set the superhero reverently in its place and waved to the porters. “Care this!”

• • • •

The new warehouse looked like a sandcastle version of a barn. Stuart caught her staring. “Slurock. You have this when you were home last?”

“No. What is it?”

“Silicone mud mix sprays out of a hose. Goes up fast. Flexible for earthquakes. Ugly as butt, right?”

“I wouldn’t pick it.” Fresia wished he’d move faster.

Stuart passed his wrist over a sensor on a post to open the door. So they were doing it that way now. One hundred and twenty years had passed since her first trip out, but there were always doors, always some means of opening them. The interior walls looked like marbled plastic and were probably another new material she’d never heard of. The doors just looked like doors, though.

Fresia felt her shoulders unclench the minute she saw her casks. Here was something timeless. She stroked the wood she’d abandoned to the vagaries of decades a few weeks ago. Next to it were the business ledgers, hard copy to ensure they survived, and what had been a top-of-the-line data interface forty years ago. Fresia flipped the little box open and the screen projected above it. “Is this going to work for my sales and purchases?”

“Not sure. The . . . datainfrastructures suffered.” He pronounced “data infrastructures” like a single, multisyllabic word learned phonetically. “Grand saw it coming, though. Tracked your holdings and transferred as need.”

“Bucking for a tip?”

“You pay my family well,” he said, with the careful nonchalance of someone bucking for a tip.

Stuart showed her how to approve purchases on the device imbedded in his wrist. They were using ceramic casks now, lined in printed oak. She worried over the effect on flavor, but Stuart insisted there was no supplier for real oak casks.

She transferred a bonus to Stuart and made a gift in his grandmother’s memory to a charity. “Looks like I won’t be upgrading the ship,” she said. Not terrible. This was not the worst she could have found things. Glen Fresia would live another day. “Tell me, what’s new and cheap and made of something that ages badly?”

He looked disappointed. “How you get into this . . .” he waved his hands helplessly.

“Junk dealing?”

He narrowed his gaze like sunlight in a lens, like he was trying to burn understanding into her. “I mean . . . your ship? This independence?”

“How’d I get out of my trucking contract?”

His response was a widening of the eyes, eagerness. His grand had to have told him the story: Intrepid trucker makes it good on a lucky stash of comic books. “You’re trying to get me to brag so I like you.”

Stuart ducked his head but couldn’t hide his smile. “It working?”

• • • •

Fresia spent the night with Stuart. He wasn’t handsome, but he was enthusiastic, and she felt a need to press flesh to flesh.

The guilt set in before her sweat cooled. Liking Stuart was a betrayal of her idea of herself as a celibate space pirate, sworn off men, giving her heart to the more reliable affections of scotch whisky.

And she knew she’d never see him again.

God, she was selfish. Did she really think it would always be worth it?

Too uncomfortable to sleep, she explored Stuart’s apartment. It felt familiar. Possibly it was old-fashioned, an artifact of the family’s business selling nostalgic items from exactly forty years ago. Stuart followed her into a kitchen that looked like his grandmother’s. He put his hands on her bare hips and kissed her shoulder. “Hungry?”

She wasn’t particularly, but it was a chance for fresh food. “Yeah.”

Stuart fried eggs wearing silk sleep shorts. Downy hairs on his stomach, skin taut and smooth as eggshell. It was the best he’d looked. “When will you . . . quit?” he asked. He looked back when she didn’t answer. “I . . . meaning it must be lonely, all those years.”

Now he was bucking for more than a tip. “Feels like a few weeks to me.”

He slid a plate in front of her. It smelled of garlic and cheese, comforting and savory. “A few weeks can be lonely, too.”

The eggs were a little too hot, crispy on the edges—exactly how she liked them. “I have Whisky,” she said, meaning her cat, but she could tell from the sudden widening of his eyes that he worried she was an alcoholic.

Well, she loved scotch, too.

She finished the eggs, felt tender toward Stuart for worrying, and they made love again, long and slow and this time she fell asleep after, and that was good.

In the morning, Stuart wouldn’t look at her as they signed the final agreements.

That wasn’t to be helped. It stung leaving people behind when she first signed up, and it would sting again. She imagined the hard acceleration pushing the emotion right out of her.

It didn’t.

When the gees leveled off, she curled up in her beanbag chair in the rec room. The week of travel stretched before her, empty. Weeks could be lonely, too.

Whisky sauntered in, yowling his displeasure at the AutoCat Pet Crate decanting him. He never got the hang of acceleration-gravity and would mew piteously and slink on the floor, showing his horror at being heavier than expected. The AutoCat kept him safe from that, but it was akin to a daylong trip to the vet.

She crawled to him. “I’m sorry, baby. Takeoff and landing are awful.” He avoided her with his chin raised in righteous indignation.

Well, he’d come around when she started a movie.

As always, her agent (she had to stop calling him Stuart in her head) had provided her with a curated collection of film and books from the past four decades. It was in the original contract, for her own good. She had to try. Try to catch up, understand, relate. The memes slipped from under her so fast. She had to be ready to integrate with society when she hit the ground for the last time.

The first movie she queued up didn’t make sense at all: footage of streams and fields, uncut flying paths that crawled under leaves or swung up to where a person’s head should be.

Whisky yowled and hopped neatly into her lap, turning once and dropping into a puddle of warm orange fur. She was forgiven. Take that, Stuart. She had Whisky, and whisky, to keep her company.

She uncorked the latest scotch. It had a wheat-like touch to its mellow oak. Not as caramel as the last batch. A delightful change.

She’d had good luck, overall. Her first batch started with the purchase of a five-year-old cask and it had come out fragile forty years later, vanishing on the tongue with sharpness and clarity like an icicle. She switched to buying new mash and barrels. One cask in the second batch failed—a slight air leak that might not have damaged it in ten years had turned the contents weak in forty. Maybe the new-fangled barrels would be a good thing. Safer. There could be new flavor influences to discover.

She scratched behind Whisky’s ears. The next film started, and it made even less sense. Discordant music fading in and out, flashes of still images. How depressing and futile her little film festival was! A condensed trip to a past skipped over.

She left the player going in the background and re-read A Wizard of Earthsea while Whisky purred on her stomach.

In the middle of the second chapter, she fell out of the story, thinking about Stuart, about his blue silk shorts and the way he leaned back on the kitchen counter, half-turned to her. He was living in fast-forward. How many fried eggs had he eaten? The thought hurt. She pushed it down. Any guy could feel perfect if you only knew him for a day.

A week later, the ship decelerated.

Style and culture changes were slower on Glieseg. The spaceport building had added two new wings, and moving sidewalks had been put in. She couldn’t quantify it, but it felt like there were more people—maybe that was just the sidewalks moving them faster.

She found, to her horror, a thriving nostalgic trinkets market along the arrivals bay. Truckers like her setting Earth imports out under cloth awnings. The second table had the wax butterflies Stuart had suggested she buy. Swarms of them. Well, no money in those, then.

Her previous agent, Tracy, met her, still recognizable for his lopsided smile, leaning on the arm of his middle-aged daughter. “We’re anxious to see the news from Earth!” he said.

“Still not accepting bank notes?”

He laughed. “We’ll upgrade and repair your vessel and feed and house you, never fear. It’s a public good, that you bring novelties and stories.”

Fresia gestured at the bustling market of other truckers. “Seriously? What am I adding?”

Tracy patted her arm. “Oh, how you capitalists think! A thing doesn’t have to be unique to be welcome. Now be happy! See what I’ve arranged—goods from the new colonies for you to take back to the mother planet.”

“New colonies! I miss a lot when I’m en route. Still no faster than light radio?”

“How would that even work?” the daughter scowled. Tracy cackled delightedly and they spoke rapidly in a patois. Daughter rolling her eyes and gesturing, father waving ideas away with one hand. They were close speakers, people who touched a lot. Fresia felt the empty air between her and them.

She sleepwalked through the day, feeling like she’d left a kettle on back on Earth.

In the morning, Fresia was loaded up with news and data files as well as the promised exotic trade goods—a crate of biological specimens suspended in sparkling energy fields.

“I was lucky to see you twice,” Tracy said, smiling-sad in the way only old people could pull off. He shook her hand a long time. “My grandchild, Patra, will greet you next time. I am training her. Unless you wish to stay?” His fingers closed, tugged on hers.

She couldn’t bring herself to speak in response. She hugged him. She knew when she first set out that she’d end up not at home on either side of her route, but she hadn’t really known. What was the difference, between intellectual-knowing and real knowing? Tracey probably knew.

• • • •

The colonist’s film collection started with a news report specially made for her to bring to Earth. Usually she liked these prosaic, easily digested stories. This time it felt like a highlight reel from four seasons of a sport she didn’t follow. Names, dates, numbers . . . did any of it mean anything?

She had a double shot, neat, of Glen Fresia Number One. Life wasn’t so bad. She lived in endless luxury of fine alcohol.

She tried to gather Whisky into her arms, but he turned and hissed at her. She gave him extra food and a wax butterfly to destroy. She thought about the casual intimacy between Tracy and his daughter, between him and this granddaughter she would meet next time.

Stuart could be a grandfather by the time she got back to Earth. She started to look forward to meeting his kids, seeing what sort of people they turned out to be, wondering what they would reveal about him in their attitudes and manners.

• • • •

Just outside of Earth-controlled space, Fresia was seized with certainty that no one was living on the home planet anymore. Where was the air traffic control signal?

A long, anxious second past the usual time, the signal was there.

Burke Lakefront had a strange, organic feel this time, like the buildings had melted or grown fungus on them. The lake had retreated, a beach of dark sand separating the old break wall from sluggish waves.

She was met by a dour-faced, boney man who introduced himself as Cic.

“Are you Stuart’s son?”

Cic spoke stilted, formal English, and almost sneered as he identified himself as Stuart’s cousin, once removed. “Stuart died unexpectedly. Heart attack at forty-three. He did not make adequate arrangements for your business.” Cic’s lip curled in distaste as he handed her a slender package. “He left you these.” It was a packet of letters, a one-sided conversation of years. Fresia cried, not because Stuart was particularly special to her, but because he wasn’t.

Cic studied the port lights over her head like a surly teen avoiding watching his parents kiss.

“Sorry.” She cleared her throat, straightened her spine. “Let’s go.” It would all be worth it, for the whisky. Wasn’t that her agreement with herself?

The warehouse was still there, but had grown soft folds like a cake left out too long. The casks were not.

The data link Stuart had left for her didn’t work. Cic said, “It would not matter if it did. The bank is gone. You have no dollars.”

Still reeling from the news about Stuart, half her mind on what his letters might contain, Fresia wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. “No dollars? My money? Nothing is left? Where is my whisky?”

“I took it as payment.” He looked like he thought this a generous concession.

“Payment for what?”

“For my services in your absence.”

“I need you to tell me what happened to my whisky. I need my ship serviced so I can take off again. I need to buy more whisky.”

Cic folded his arms. “How is this my problem?”

• • • •

After several hours of negotiation and grudging translation, Cic admitted he’d moved the casks to the bottling facility, but hadn’t been able to pay for processing. Fresia arranged to have the whisky bottled in exchange for a percentage of the yield, with the box of bio specimens and the tchotchkes from forty years ago going to Cic to pay for whatever it was he felt he’d done for her. He certainly hadn’t safeguarded her business. No new casks of fresh liquor to age. There would be no tryst on this trip! She spent the night back on her ship, eating the last of her supplies from the colony.

“Damn you for dying, Stuart.” She set a shot in front of the empty chair opposite her.

Compared to Stuart, losing all her amassed fortune impacted her emotionally like losing a particularly long game of solitaire. They had only been numbers in a computer. It wouldn’t bother her at all if she could get back on her route!

She had always known she had a limited number of trips in her tank. Despite that, she hadn’t formed a Plan B.

The security system projected an image of Cic in front of her. He was knocking on the cargo door. Ugh. He looked even more of a prick in side-view.

She opened a channel rather than get up from her sulk. “What do you want?”

“You have no fuel. There is no reason to hold on to this ship. You will sell it to me.”

Fresia slammed down her bowl. Not that he heard that. He was squinting up at the security light over the hatch.

Whisky hopped on the table and started eating the spilled oatmeal. She pushed him off. “That’s bad for you, cat.” He ignored her.

Fresia grabbed a bottle of Glen Fresia Batch Two (it came in particularly heavy glass) and stomped to the cargo door. She brandished the bottle. “I’m not selling. Not to you.”

Cic was nonplused. “The port will demand rent.”

“You could get me in the sky again, you cheat.”

His cold expression didn’t change. “I could. For your whisky.”

Fresia lowered her hand. She looked down at the lovely, caramel-colored liquid sloshing in the clear bottle. She had a store on the ship, one case from each batch. “How much?”

“All of it.”

“Oh, fuck OFF.” She slammed the door shut. Back in the galley she watched him shrug and walk away on projection.

Glen Fresia Batch Four came out peaty, complex and dark despite the mellowing of age. No discernable new flavor from the artificial oak. It paired well with instant oatmeal and depression.

• • • •

The next day, probably at Cic’s invitation, the port authority visited. The chief officer had bushy ginger hair and a little tablet she consulted after every sentence, as though it was transcribing or translating for her.

“We do not accept barter,” she said, after Fresia offered a bottle of whisky.

“It’s very valuable!”

A glance down, a word mouthed, a glance up. “It is not currency.”

“For the love of Jupiter—no, don’t translate that,” Fresia was already frustrated with how slow the conversation was going. Of course, now the officer was checking her plea not to check. “Don’t you know anyone who would be willing to trade scotch for cash?”

The officer’s eyes widened. She didn’t check her tablet. “Scotch?” she asked, with perfect, clear understanding.

A lucky break at last! Fresia waggled the bottle. “I don’t suppose you’d mind a sip while we haggle?”

The officer looked adorably heartbroken. “We must . . . propriety . . . no bribes.”

Cic skulked just outside the cordon for Fresia’s ship, looking like a cat watching a fish gasp its last. Fresia put down her bottle. “No bribes. But if you put me in touch with someone who can buy my scotch,” she paused to let her reading catch up. “I will then have money from that sale for fees.”

“We do not have authority. We cannot contact food merchants.”

But this woman did care. Fresia could see that. She cared about scotch. She put her arm around the official’s shoulders. “How would you like to help humanity itself?”

“No bribes.”

Fresia nodded. “No bribes. A legitimate business deal, and a public good. If you can’t put me in touch with a food merchant, can you put me in touch with a government?”

The official looked doubtful, but she also kept looking at Fresia’s bottle. “That would not . . . be against the rules.”

• • • •

Fresia left Earth for the last time, misty-eyed and much poorer—she’d ended up trading all but one bottle each of her hard-gotten whiskies. (The open bottles, which she had to keep.) She had her fuel and bills paid enough that the creditors wouldn’t stop her launching.

No Glen Fresia Batch Five aging, alas, but she had something better in her hold: Four bio-stasis beds full of tiny, fresh-sprouted barley plants. Twenty packets of dried yeast. Peat moss and oak saplings. All through an agreement with the Scottish Cultural Union. They were happy to have her promise to stop selling American-aged scotch on Earth. She’d find someplace in the stars to plant her fields, some place she could settle down and watch them grow, official property of Scotland, minus reasonable personal use.

Glen Stuart had a nice, Scottish ring to it.

The future tasted malty, with hints of hope.

©2020 by Marie Vibbert.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marie Vibbert is a software developer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is a member of the Cleveland science fiction workshop, The Cajun Sushi Hamsters, attended Clarion in 2013, and joined SFWA in 2014. She has sold over 50 short stories to markets such as Analog, F&SF, and Amazing Stories. She has ridden 17% of the roller coasters in the United States and plays for the Cleveland Fusion women’s tackle football team. Her website is marievibbert.com.

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

The Marsh of Camarina

Matthew Kressel | 4432 words

“Your grades really are quite spectacular, Sita,” my career advisor Mrs. Dana Rice says to me in her deep southern drawl, an accent I’ve come to associate with my studies here. “A 3.8 cumulative GPA at Georgia Tech is nothing to sneeze at. You should be proud of yourself!”

I force a smile and say, “Thank you.” But all I can focus on is the football stadium gleaming outside Mrs. Rice’s office window. Sweeping. Enormous. Empty. Baking in the morning sun. I went to a game my freshman year and cheered on the Yellow Jackets with all the other Rambling Wrecks. But after that, I got too immersed in my studies to cheer on anything but my grades. And just like the band’s snapping snare drum then, my heart beats triple time now. Mrs. Rice didn’t call me in to here to pat me on the back for my grades.

“As you may have heard, Sita,” she says, and I brace myself, “we’ve been having some . . . difficulties placing students into jobs after graduation.”

If this were a contest of euphemisms, she’d win the grand prize. By “difficulties” Mrs. Rice means that—according to a study commissioned by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office—ninety-four percent of students graduating with computer science bachelor degrees were unable to find employment last year. Their jobs were replaced by high-level AIs, programs that could build code for a hundredth of the price of a human employee. This year—though the numbers aren’t totaled yet—is shaping up to be far worse. “Yes,” I tell her, “I’ve heard some things.”

“Well, then, Sita,” she says, haltingly, “Have you considered what you’ll do when you graduate from Tech in two months? What are your plans?”

My breath catches in my throat as I gaze out the window again, at the thousands of plastic stadium seats cracking in the superheated air. It’s supposed to break 100 for the fifth time this month, and it’s only April. “My brother has severe mental and physical disabilities,” I say. “I was hoping to work for a company that designs software tools to facilitate occupational therapists’ work with developmentally and physically disabled children.”

Mrs. Rice frowns, the same frown I’ve seen on a thousand empathetic faces when I tell them of my brother, when they imagine the hardships all of us, but especially Miguel, have endured. “That’s very admirable, Sita. But with things as they are, such a career path may not be possible anymore.” What Mrs. Rice means is that with a five-minute download and a half-dozen mouse clicks, an AI can do what it took me four years and two hundred thousand dollars to learn.

“Yeah,” I say, holding back the knot growing in my chest. “I know.” Until this moment my future was a speculative thing I’d brushed away like a pesky mosquito. But saying the truth out loud makes it sting. The thing I’ve worked hardest for in my life won’t ever come to be. Now I have to find something else.

“Have you considered graduate school?” Mrs. Rice says. “Tech has one of the top computer science research programs in the country. You’d have your own fully furnished apartment in our graduate living centers.” Her palm rests on a folder, which I’ve no doubt contains several glossy brochures flowering with QR codes.

“I have, Mrs. Rice. But graduate school is impossible for me now.”

She leans back. “Oh?”

“To afford Tech I had to take out several large loans. Frankly, I can’t afford it.”

“But with your grades, we could look into scholarships and grants.”

I want to say, And after graduate school, then what? Even with financial help, I’d owe more than I do now, which is greater than the cost of a house. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life paying back government-sanctioned loan sharks. Instead I say, “Thank you, but graduate school is not an option for me at this time.”

“I see. So what are your plans then, Sita?”

“Well,” I say, “to be honest I’m still kind of figuring things out.”

Mrs. Rice leans back. Stares. Sighs. Her expression loosens, like she’s taking off her shoes and belt at the end of a long day. And it occurs to me that everything that’s come before this moment was Mrs. Rice, the professional career counselor, and everything that is about to come is Dana Rice, the human being.

“Askuwheteau,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“It means ‘he who keeps watch’ in Algonquin. Tell me, Sita, do you like the outdoors?”

“The outdoors?”

“Yes. Do you like to farm?”

She types on her keyboard, then swivels her screen around so I can see. Arrays of buildings spoke out from a tall central mill. Neat rows of crops grow tall in the interstices. And circling it all like a fortress wall is a dense boreal forest. At the top of the screen, a bold and serifed title reads:

“Askuwheteau, An Experiment in Sustainable Living.”

• • • •

Three months, nine days, and three flights later—the last of which is on a four-person seaplane that scares the living fuck out of me—I arrive at Askuwheteau on a four-wheel drive electric truck. Geographically, I’m in Canada’s Northwest Territories, twenty-four miles southeast of Rocher River. But mentally it feels like I’ve traveled to another planet.

It was 102 degrees when I took off from Newark last night. But here, it’s barely reached eighty. The air smells of loam and pine needles and ancient forests, and it feels cool on my skin. Light years from the supersaturated particulate soup of Jersey City. Grasses, taller than me, bend and hiss in the steady breeze, while hidden birds make strange calls from the shadowed boughs of pines.

Askuwheteau, I learned in the months since my meeting with Mrs. Rice, was founded nine years ago by a small group of scientists from around the world, with financial help from the Canadian government, as an experiment in sustainable living. Since then it has grown into a community of four hundred. Its mission: to build a city of the future. Efficient. Green. Net-zero carbon emissions. Fully sustainable. A model for cities extant and forthcoming. And for my participation in this grand experiment, the Canadian government will pay me four hundred dollars a week, room and board included. Most of that money will go toward paying off my loans. The rest I’ll send home, to help my parents pay for Miguel’s care.

My shoes sink into mud as I approach Askuwheteau, hefting my heavy suitcase. The city looks so much larger than the website implied. Like the thriving crops surrounding its buildings, Askuwheteau has grown.

As I sink and struggle and curse through the muddy slop, a long-haired blond woman in dirty overalls runs up to me. “Sita?” she says. “I’m Nazdia! We spoke on the phone?” She holds out her hand, and when she smiles her green eyes sparkle in the sun. “I’ll be your mentor until we get you up to speed. How was your trip?”

“Long,” I say. “And bumpy.”

“No doubt!” she says, grabbing my suitcase. “The jet stream is super erratic! It makes flying up here pretty hairy. But you’ve arrived in one piece, so that’s all that counts! Come, I’ll show you around.”

And she does. She shows me my living quarters, which are much larger and more comfortable than I expect. “No shortage of space around here,” she says with a grin. “With our industrial 3D printers, we can build almost anything. Later, I’ll show you the ultralight I built! Maybe we can go for a ride.” I politely smile and nod, but I think I’m done with flying for a while.

She shows me the mess hall, a sprawling cafeteria that smells of coffee and fried onions. “We grow almost everything ourselves,” Nazdia says. “You hungry? Try this.” She hands me a homemade granola bar and it’s absolutely delicious.

She takes me out to the fields, where workers in overalls and thick gloves toil over long aisles of crops. Plots of carrots. Cucumbers. Tomatoes. Corn. Soy. Kale. Collard greens. Daikon. Bamboo. And in the greenhouses, rows of taro. Peanuts. Eggplant. Okra. Plus hybrids and experimentals. And beyond the fields, blooming fruit orchards. As we walk, she spouts off more Latin than a Pope’s sermon, while yellow farm bots cruise down the aisles yanking up weeds and munching on bugs. “We’ve developed some resilient species,” she says. “But everything’s organic. Any pests the bots find, they crush, and we turn them into compost. We reuse as much as possible. Nothing is wasted.”

She takes me to the power station and shows me a vast field of solar arrays, gleaming in the sun. “We’re at net positive generation. And we have enough battery backup to run for a week. That’s super important during the short days of winter. And we can grow another twenty-five percent without adding more capacity.” She beams proudly as she says, “I studied engineering back in Boston. This here’s my baby.”

Then, after a pause, she adds, “And, no, we’re not fully sustainable. Yet. We’re still dependent on the outside world for a great many things. But one night, when you’re settled in, I’ll tell you all about our plan for world domination.” She chuckles as she takes my arm and leads me on.

She introduces me to many others: Richard, a store clerk, from Victoria; Elsa, a radiologist from Portland; Puloma, a math teacher from Montreal; Mohammed, a truck driver from Calgary. Gupta, Marie Elena, Ursa, Kelly, Thomas, and Barbara. Delilah, Shmuel, Dana, Eco, and Pravit. So many more, their names just as quickly spoken as forgotten.

As the sun descends behind the pines, Nazdia leads me, exhausted, back to my room. “Breakfast is from seven to seven thirty,” she says. “Get there early if you want a doughnut. They go fast!”

“Thank you, Nazdia. I’m tired, so maybe I missed something, but what exactly am I supposed to do here?”

“They didn’t tell you?”

“They?”

“Hm,” she says, running her hand through her long hair. “The problem with anarcho-socialism is that sometimes we overlook important things. Well, basically, Sita, you help here any damn way you can!”

• • • •

As it turns out, Askuwheteau needs a lot of help. There are water filtration units that keep breaking down and fields that keep getting flooded. There’s an infestation of aphids attacking the fruits, and irregular power outages in a quarter of the domiciles. But I stick to what I know: IT.

I start work in one of the storehouses, where a dozen farm bots, dirty, yellow four-legged spiders the size of nightstands, lay heaped in a pile. Some have blown motherboards and others have broken servos, while others just need a software refresh. Their control code uses an out-of-date, open-source AI, and as I print, download, patch and reboot, the irony isn’t lost on me. Here I am fixing the very things that obsoleted me. If I do my job too well, I’ll displace myself all over again.

But I actually like the work, and it keeps me busy through the long daylight hours. And each time I send one of my bots into the field, it feels bittersweet, as if I’m a mother, watching her child leave the nest. In less than a week I’ve repaired all the bots, and I’ve vastly improved the efficiency of the others.

The first Friday night, Pruvit, a former dockworker from Baltimore, carefully pours out cherry-flavored vodka she distilled herself to a growing crowd.

Nazdia pulls me aside. “How’s it going?”

“Pretty good,” I say, taking a sip of Pruvit’s vodka—it’s amazing. “I’m done with the bots and was thinking about attacking the internet uplink tomorrow. I think I could double the bandwidth by next week if we split the signal across multiple satellites.”

“That’s good,” she says. “That’s real good. But if I could distill the best advice I’d ever received here—”

“Distill?” I say, grinning, as I hold up my glass.

Nazdia doesn’t smile back. Instead, she looks serious. Maybe even worried. “Take it slow, Sita,” she says. “The worst possible thing you can do here is work yourself out of a job.”

“But I thought you said there’s always so much to do?”

“There is,” she says, then downs the rest of her drink. “And there will be. But maybe we like it that way. Maybe it’s always better waking up knowing you have somewhere to be.”

• • • •

“Entonces, you getting along with your coworkers?” Papa says to me. “They nice?” His face pixelates and reforms as the uplink jumps satellites. I’ve been here three months, and I still haven’t quite worked that bug out. It’s almost midnight back home in Jersey City, 2,200 miles away, and Papa looks exhausted.

“Everyone’s been pretty great,” I say. “Nazdia has been showing me around.”

“Nazdia? She’s your mentor, right?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“And have you made any other friends?”

“Papa, please. Not tonight.”

“Mm,” he says, pursing his lips. “Okay.”

But I can see in Papa’s face that it’s not okay. Papa worries I’ll never get married, settle down, and produce offspring. And while I’m somewhat gender agnostic in my sexual preferences, the truth is that, even if I wanted to, there’s no possible way I can achieve that enduring western fantasy, to marry, produce children, and own a home. I could never afford any of that. I’m barely making my loan payments as it is.

“Look who wants to say hello!” Mama says, and the screen jumps to Miguel’s bedroom. She stands beside my brother, who waves enthusiastically from his wheelchair. He wears the Star Wars pajamas I bought him just before I left.

“Hello, Sita!” Miguel says. “You at the North Pole? Did you meet Santa?”

“Not yet,” I say, my throat tightening. I want to hug him and kiss his warm cheeks. I want to snuggle with him and watch cartoons together, like we did every Saturday morning, before I moved away to college. God, I miss him so much. “But I do have something special to show you.” I shut off my bedroom lights and swivel my screen to face the window. Outside, a rare early showing of the aurora borealis paints phosphorescent ribbons across the sky.

“Wooooooow!” Miguel exclaims. “It’s beau-ti-ful!”

No one can see me as I wipe my eyes. I was going to make tools to help suffering people, like Miguel. Yet here I am, half a continent away, a glorified weeder. I want to go home, to help them, to be with them, but this is where I have to be. Without my income, I don’t think my family would survive. I let them watch the aurora for a while, then I swing the screen back.

“Okay, Miguel,” Mama says. “It’s way past your bedtime. Say goodnight!”

“Goodnight, Sita!”

“Goodnight, Miguel. I love you.”

“I love you too!”

Mama blows me a kiss and signs off, but Papa stays online. We sit in silence for a while. There is not much one can say after seeing the aurora.

Papa, a first-generation son of Mexican immigrants, used to do construction all over Brooklyn, Queens, Westchester, and Long Island, working long, hard hours that did hell to his body, until construction bots took over his job two years back. My parents dumped a lot of their savings to send me to school, to give me chances they never had. I’d always imagined I’d be doing something important, something for the greater good, making a decent living, and helping out my family in all the ways they helped me. Yet here I am, holed away on a muddy farm, doing work any average high-school kid could do, sending home crumbs. I’m a failure.

“Have I disappointed you, Papa?” I say.

“Never! You’re my pride, Sita. Siempre.”

“I feel like I should be doing something meaningful.”

“You are. You’re doing honest work, just like the thousands of others up there with you.”

“There are only four hundred here at Askuwheteau, Papa.”

“I know, but I’m counting the other eco-cities too.”

“Other cities?”

“You don’t know? I just read there are six eco-cities like yours in Canada now, and a dozen more planned. It seems, mija, that you’ve started a trend.”

• • • •

Summer gives way to fall, and judging by the quickly shortening days, I know it’s going to be a long, dark winter. (Pruvit isn’t the only wise soul; many others are fermenting large quantities of alcohol.) It seems to me I see new faces every day: Edna, a nurse practitioner from Halifax; Myron, an accountant from Qualicum Beach; Jaakkina, a marketing exec from New York; Rozamund, a barista from San Francisco. Last I checked, our population has grown to over five hundred. The only thing I can tell that unites us all is our debt, our unemployment, and our general lack of career direction, most of which, as far as I can tell, isn’t our fault. AIs are tearing through jobs like sharks through fish.

It’s not quite two p.m., the sun dipping low in the sky, when I get the call. Another farm bot has drowned itself in a puddle. I put on my boots and overalls and wade out to the muddy fields. About two-thirds of the crops have been harvested, stored, and preserved for the long winter. Their plots have been covered in hay and compost to keep the soil warm, and the greenhouses have been shielded and reinforced for the predicted frigid gales. The rest of the crops aren’t far behind, their tired, browning leaves bending earthward. I walk past a row of fattening gourds, squash, and pumpkin, their gnarled vines like witch’s fingers trying to yank them back into the ground from which they came.

“Howdy, Sita,” a woman in a knitted purple hat says to me. Her French-accented voice is familiar, but it takes me a moment.

“Xavierre? Holy shit.”

“Indeed! Hello, Sita.”

Xavierre and I met at a student art show at Emory University, when I was there to support a friend, and she was just a lonely Classics major cruising for art-loving girls. We dated a bit, freshman year, and for a while we thought we loved each other. But after a year, the sparks faded, and she went off into the world of medieval European literature, and I went off to study binary search trees and NP-completeness. I hadn’t seen her since graduation day, when she came by to give me a card and a goodbye kiss. “I had no idea you were here.”

“Just arrived last week,” she says. “Surprisingly, knowing how to distinguish between Middle-High and Middle-Low German dialects is not as marketable a skill as I had at first presumed.”

We both burst into hysterical laughter. God, how we used to laugh. But our voices fade into the cool of the afternoon, into the gusting winds. “And you?” she says. “I thought you were all set to conquer the world of adaptive devices and interfaces.”

“Turns out, there are things better at it than me.”

“Yeah,” Xavierre says. “Join the club.”

We stare at each other for a long moment. So much time has passed, and it feels as if we’re different people now. “Got one here that had too much to drink,” she says, and kicks the machine with her boot. The yellow bot rests half-sunk in a foot of water. “Heard you’re the robot girl around here.”

I walk around to inspect it. “Damn. That’s the fourth drowned one this week. It’s the melting permafrost. These floods never stop.”

“No,” she says, looking off into the trees. “This is our Marsh of Camarina.”

“Our what?”

“Our Marsh of Camarina. Camarina was an ancient Sicilian city. Its people kept getting sick with a strange disease, and they believed the local swamp was the cause. So they consulted an oracle, who advised them against draining it. The disease would pass, in time, the oracle said. But the people didn’t heed this advice and drained the swamp anyway. The disease vanished. But as it turned out, the swamp was the only thing preventing the Carthaginian army from attacking. Every last person in Camarina was killed. Sometimes when you remove one problem, you just make another.”

The bot sinks deeper. “Enough with the history lessons, professor,” I say. “Help me get this thing out of the mud.”

Together we heave the bot from the brown water, and the mud slurps and gurgles as liquid rushes to fill the hole.

Xavierre wipes mud from her cheeks and sighs. “So this is what we’ve become. Two students at the top of our class, reduced to farm hands.”

“There’s nothing wrong with honest work,” I say, echoing my father’s words.

“Honest?” Xavierre says. “You know full well that AIs could do all of the jobs around here better than we can. I mean, there’s a reason why you’re using old hardware and obsolete code, right? It’s so you have something to do, to busy yourself with.”

“Damn, that’s bleak,” I say.

“Bleak, but true. I’m not here to do honest work, Sita. I’m here so I don’t starve. I’m in debt deeper than these fucking pools. But the truth is, I kind of like it.”

“You like being in debt?”

“No, I like having time. I do a little bit of work in the day, and at night I read all the books I want. Have you been to the library? They have hundreds of books, Sita. Actual paper books. Oh, the smell! It’s heaven.”

“You’re insane,” I say, smiling.

“And that’s why you’ve always loved me.”

The sun is already scraping the tops of the trees. “Come on,” I say. “It’s getting late. Help me heft this thing back to the shop.”

“Aye, aye, cap’n,” she says, saluting me. “Onward march.”

• • • •

The winter is long and cold and lonely, and more than once Xavierre and I cuddle together in the dark, in her quarters or in mine, staring out at the slowly turning stars. I know, and I think she does too, it’s not love that draws us together, but the feeling that these loping spans of darkness are better endured with company.

When she’s not with me, Xavierre devours literature, and I often find her holed up in some uncomfortable nook, so engrossed in a book she doesn’t hear me call her name. She’s introduced me to Parzival, The Decameron, Sholem Asch, and Shirley Jackson. I connect with some stories, and not others, and there are times when I find myself staring off into space, like I’ve regressed to some pre-literate savannah ape, focused solely on being and survival. Sometimes it feels as if I’m trying to fill a void.

And we, humanity, are very clever at filling voids. Miranda teaches painting, and Alma starts a choir. Humberto forms a book club, and Aruna teaches Hindi. Michael gives guitar lessons, and Trisha does improv. And there is alcohol, overflowing quantities of it, like Pruvit’s vodka and Martin’s beer and some commercial liquor smuggled in from “below,” what we now call everything beneath the 60th parallel.

Perhaps it’s Seasonal Affective Disorder, but sometimes I can’t help but feel as if these are all just distractions we use to keep ourselves from facing bleak truths. All of us here had dreams of being one thing, and now we must become another. Even on the shortest of days, we have time, and perhaps too much of it.

On those days when the sun flashes for a moment above the horizon before vanishing, and on those nights when I sleep alone, I feel the great immensity of the universe, the Earth as one small speck in an infinite black sea, and we, humanity, are just aphids on its back. I try to shake off these thoughts as best I can. Still, they persist.

When, at last, the long, dreary winter gives way to spring, when the snow begins to melt, and the muddy fields become visible again, a restlessness stirs within me, as if I’m a seed in the thawing ground, ready to burst forth. I tell Nazdia I’m ready to take her up on her offer, to fly in her ultralight.

Twenty minutes later she gleefully straps me in to the back seat of her aircraft of carbon-fiber tubes and thin plastic sheeting. She painted the wings to look like Canada geese and told me that more than once she’s been followed by a flying skein of them.

“You ready?” she says. I give her the thumbs up, and she starts the engine. We race down the field of dead grass and take off in less than a hundred feet. My stomach lurches into my throat. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

“I’ll take us up to 1,500 feet,” Nazdia says to me over the headset. “That’ll give us a great view!”

We ascend in a wide corkscrew, and I swallow down my growing nausea. But after a few minutes, she levels out, and I let myself breathe and relax.

“Look!” she says, pointing down.

I risk a glance over the edge of the airframe. Askuwheteau spreads like a giant snowflake over the Earth, rectangular fields placed around it in strange, new hieroglyphs. I read a projection that by the end of the year Askuwheteau will be home to nearly two thousand people. And it makes sense why Richard, the store clerk from Victoria, and Elsa, the radiologist from Portland, and Puloma, the math teacher from Montreal, and Mohammed, the truck driver from Calgary, and all the others have come here. It makes sense why Askuwheteau is just one of dozens of eco-cities popping up all over Canada. Why the United States is pumping money into these cities too. Why the waiting list is large and growing. There are machines now, machines that we invented, which do our jobs better than us. And when, given a choice between paying more for less, or less for more, humans, like nature, always pick the latter.

“The battery’s getting low,” Nazdia says. “I’m going to head back now.”

She takes a sweeping turn, and the sky is blue and endless to my right, the Earth, green and sprawling to my left. And here I am, stuck in the middle, between dirt and eternity. I’m not sure what I’m going to do today when I get home. All I know is I have to do something.

©2018 by Matthew Kressel. Originally published in Shades Within Us: Tales of Migrations and Fractured Borders, edited by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Kressel is a writer & software developer. He has been a finalist for the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Eugie Award. His short fiction can be found in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Analog, io9, Nightmare, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2018 Edition, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 3, as well as many other online and print publications, and has been translated into seven languages. As a software developer, he created the Moksha submissions system, in use by many of the largest SF publishers today. Matt is also the co-host of Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in New York alongside Ellen Datlow. Find him online at @mattkressel or at www.matthewkressel.net.

Real Animals

Em North | 7700 words

The bear has been stalking the taxidermy garden for ten weeks now, ever since Raffi showed up. Sometimes it disappears for a few days or a week, but it always comes back. Prowls the perimeter, looking for weak spots. From inside the taxidermy garden, Raffi feels the bear’s presence tugging on her, as though it has become the pole of her personal compass.

The taxidermy garden isn’t a real garden. It’s a ski chalet, or what used to be a ski chalet, all hand-hewn logs and wood stoves and floor-to-ceiling windows crowded with snow-capped mountains. The only plants are bodies and the bodies are not exactly taxidermied, but that is the closest word Raffi can find for whatever it is that her friend Kay is doing to them. What Kay does is take the corpses down to the basement and empty them of their insides and fill them with new, longer-lasting substances. She turns their wounds into decorations the same way she used to take pieces of wood and seal their knots and whorls with shimmering teal enamel so that flaws metamorphosed into features.

The bodies lounge on couches, sit at the dining room table, lie in perpetual slumber in the chalet’s many beds. The bodies belong to people Raffi knows. The town in northern Montana where she has lived for her entire life had a population of 246, before this all began. There aren’t 246 bodies in the taxidermy garden, but there are a lot. Kay saves as many people as she can.

Raffi wishes the taxidermy garden were less beautiful. The people in it are not what she would call lifelike—their angles are too strange, their stillness not at all like that of sleep. But this makes them somehow more lovely, the way they wear their own death like an adornment, like a diamond necklace, like an elaborate and absurd peacock-feather hat. When Raffi looks at her old neighbor whose leg is now made of concrete, it pours out of him so naturally that it is difficult for her to remember that once he had a leg made of flesh, back before the mountain lion tore it off and he ended up here. If it were less beautiful, she thinks, it would be easier to remember how things used to be.

• • • •

The taxidermy garden would not be possible if the animals—the mountain lions and bears and coyotes and so forth—acted like real animals. If they ate their prey, if they dragged it off to dens or into the underbrush, if they stripped flesh from bone, there would be nothing left for Kay or Raffi or Buck to find and haul back to the chalet and put in the garden. Then again, if the animals were real animals there wouldn’t be any need to have a taxidermy garden at all.

• • • •

Kay’s husband Buck is a hunter who never seems to find any irony in the deer he shoots or the cuts of venison he stores in the freezer. The night before Kay’s wedding, while she and Raffi folded place cards, she told Raffi that this was what won her over in the first place, this lack of humor, the way he approached everything so seriously. “You can trust a man like that,” she said to Raffi. “He’ll never go looking for something that isn’t there.” Raffi had wanted to ask if he would see the things that were there, but she knew better. Ever since she and Kay had swapped best friend bracelets back in the second grade, they’d had an understanding—they would never ruin things for one another. The world did enough of that already.

Now Buck protects the taxidermy garden, walks along the electric fencing that circles the perimeter of the chalet’s grounds, the butt of an AR-15 pressed to his shoulder. It was Buck who found Raffi, half out of her mind, dragging Graham’s body behind her. She’d hauled it all the way from town, each step more impossible than the last. When she saw Buck—the big solid shape of him, looking exactly the same as always—she’d sat down on the hard ground and waited for him to find her. He took the whole situation in at a glance, threw Graham’s body over his shoulder and carried it off. When Raffi didn’t follow, he returned and threw her over his shoulder too. He’d delivered her to Kay as if she were just another body.

• • • •

At dinner—venison, of course—Raffi sits across the dining room table from Buck and Kay, next to Marta, the woman who used to own the diner on the outskirts of town. Marta has gray hair, coiled into a bun, and a wide grin that is almost, but not quite, like the one she used to flash whenever Raffi slipped into the diner to splurge on a cup of coffee or a plate of pancakes. The wrinkled flesh of her neck slips seamlessly into wood now, a smooth, varnished oak that disappears beneath the collar of her shirt.

Buck and Raffi argue about the animals while Kay stares out through the windows at the sunset. The sky is ferociously red, the mountains stark. Kay looks like she isn’t listening, but periodically she pushes her foot against Raffi’s leg under the table. Raffi takes it to be support, but it might be Kay’s way of telling her to shut up.

“The aliens don’t give a fuck about us,” Buck says. “They just kill because killing’s fun. Because they’re living inside the animals, and that’s what animals have always wanted to do.”

“You think dogs have always wanted to kill people?” Raffi asks.

“They’re descended from wolves, aren’t they?”

Raffi thinks about the dog she and her husband Graham had, a shepherd-husky cross named Bo. After the animals changed, Graham took him out into the backyard and came back in alone. She woke in the middle of the night to the movement of him sobbing next to her. “That’s bullshit,” she says now. “They’re not dumb. There’s a logic to all of this.”

“There’s a logic to a hawk eating a rabbit,” Buck says. “That doesn’t mean the hawk is the next Einstein.”

Kay nudges Raffi harder under the table. Raffi grabs Kay’s foot with her hand and doesn’t say anything else, only holds it there and watches the blood-red sky fade to orange, then indigo.

• • • •

That night before the wedding, Kay looked up from folding place cards and said, “Well, what about you? What made you fall in love with Graham?” Raffi can’t remember what she said. Something about the kindness of his laugh, maybe, or how sweet he was with her aunt—the person who’d raised her, closer than a parent. By the time Raffi and Graham got together, her aunt was dying from one of the new tickborne illnesses, and Graham always found ways to help her without making it seem like he was.

Whatever answer Raffi gave Kay though, it wasn’t the real one. Raffi knew, even if she rarely acknowledged it to herself, why she had fallen in love with Graham: He was there. Everyone in her life, it felt like, had left or was in the process of leaving. Her mom, when Raffi was hardly old enough to know what it meant; Kay, off at art school on the West Coast, promising to call, to visit, but leaving nonetheless; her aunt, a little more of her gone each day, no amount of wishing on either of their parts sufficient to stop the progression. Against all of this absence, Graham was resolutely, undeniably present. Although, of course, he isn’t anymore.

• • • •

It takes Kay a long time to finish taxidermying Graham. Ten weeks since Raffi watched him disappear into the distance, his head bobbing over Buck’s shoulder. Ten weeks that he’s been down in the basement, a place Raffi has never gone, though she often imagines what it looks like. Sometimes she thinks about Kay down there with Graham, running her hands over his body. She wonders if Kay talks to him while she works; she wonders what Kay might say.

Raffi doesn’t know if the delay is because Kay has a large backlog of bodies and Graham must wait his place in line, or if something about him is difficult to repair, or if Kay is trying to do a particularly good job for Raffi’s sake. Or maybe she’s just buying Raffi some time before she has to look death in the eyes.

Regardless, Raffi appreciates the reprieve. Instead of living in the world where Graham is dead, she is living in the one before she knew he existed. She has found her way back to a time when the world was a small snow globe designed for her and Kay alone. To the years when they spent every day together and then called each other at night to share all the thoughts they’d had in the hour since parting.

When they’re together now, Raffi finds herself thinking about how they used to go camping as teenagers, just the two of them. Their Walmart sleeping bags were never warm enough for the deep chill of Montana nights; they always ended up huddled for warmth, their bags zipped together. A tiny enclave of heat in the middle of so much cold.

• • • •

The first time Raffi saw the aliens was before they were in the animals, back when they were still just liquid. Her aunt wanted to go see them, and, as she often put it, “one of the perks of dying is that everyone has to do what you want.” The pools had been around for a while by then—long enough for biologists to deem the extraterrestrial microbes both inert and innocuous, long enough for general fascination to fade. The government still monitored the larger pools, but there were too many of them appearing and too many other ecological catastrophes unfolding. Everyone in Raffi’s town knew there was an unmonitored pool in the caldera a few hours away.

Raffi drove her aunt the three hours over winding mountain passes, creeping around the turns, hands sweaty on the steering wheel. They had to hike out to the pool and Raffi was afraid: that it would be too much, that they would make it halfway there and her aunt would keel over, and Raffi would be left alone in the mountains with no way to fix anything. If Kay hadn’t been away at school, she would have come with them; the whole thing would have felt like an adventure instead of an ordeal. But Kay was gone and her aunt wanted this, so Raffi would try to help her have it.

It was a fall afternoon and the air smelled like snow and the sky was slate gray. Raffi’s aunt held onto her arm and together they walked up the path, one step and another and another. Every ten or twenty minutes they stopped to rest. Raffi’s aunt was breathing hard, her grip on Raffi’s arm growing heavier, but she smiled every time their eyes met.

The pool sat in the very bottom of the caldera, maybe fifteen feet across. The aliens looked like water, if the water were laced with golden dust. When they got there, Raffi’s aunt didn’t say anything, only un-looped her arm from Raffi’s and stripped off her clothes. She walked into the water without a pause, without a shiver, and Raffi felt as though there were a fist clenching her voice somewhere deep inside her. She couldn’t say a thing. She could only watch, could only wait for her aunt to turn around and come back to her.

• • • •

The first time Buck suggests going after the bear, the three of them are in the kitchen butchering a bighorn sheep. Kay and Buck stand side by side in front of the butcher block, the shape before them looking strange and diminished without its skin. Raffi sits at the kitchen table next to Buck’s old hunting friend. Kay has replaced the eye he is missing with a glittering hunk of mica and—in spite of his unnatural stillness—anytime Raffi glances over he appears to be watching her skeptically.

“I know,” Raffi says to the hunter, “you could do much better. Too bad you can’t take over for me.” Raffi was a vegetarian before, and now Kay gives her simple tasks with clear instructions. She cuts things into slices, she salts or smokes or debones. She listens to Kay and Buck talking quietly as they disassemble the sheep.

“. . . if I can’t kill the bear in our territory, then I’ll follow it into its own. Catch it sleeping and put a bullet in it.” Buck’s voice is uninflected, as though he is talking about building a fire or cooking dinner.

Kay’s butcher knife clatters onto the block. “No,” she says, “absolutely not.” Her hands are bloody; there is a crimson smudge on her forehead.

Buck doesn’t look up, only shrugs as he methodically saws off one of the sheep’s legs.

• • • •

All her life, Raffi has fought to need no one. To be able to take care of herself and the people she loves. She has learned to move towards the things that scare her. She has broken bones in the pursuit of fearlessness: her collarbone mishandling a rifle, her fibula while hurtling down a mountain. She can feel the ghost of this part of herself shifting halfheartedly, pacing around with a ghost-gun, insisting that she’ll go with Buck to hunt the bear. Look, the ghost says to Kay, I can protect you, too. But the ghost, that old urge, it doesn’t have any power anymore. All this fighting to be strong and capable and for what? For the swipe of a paw, for gold eyes in the dark. Raffi didn’t even cry after Graham died, she just got to work hauling his body. None of it matters. Let Buck load his guns and shoot their dinner. Let the animals tear the world down. Raffi doesn’t have anything left to prove.

• • • •

During the days, while Buck is outside patrolling and Kay is tending to her catalog of corpses in the basement, Raffi wanders through the taxidermy garden, talking to the people she used to know.

“I’m sorry I tried to use you as a replacement for Kay,” she says to the woman standing in front the picture window in the living room. Her throat glimmers a deep fuchsia where Kay filled in the claw marks. “I was so lonely and then you moved in next door to me and Graham, and I thought it was the universe cutting me a break.” Their friendship had been a thing of effort: plans made and rescheduled and reluctantly attended. It had intensified the ache of Kay’s absence rather than diminishing it.

“I hated the nights you came over to our house,” Raffi says to Graham’s best friend, a broad-shouldered man with a smile that had always slipped easily into a smirk, though it wouldn’t anymore. He was sitting on the toilet in one of the taxidermy garden’s many bathrooms, reading a magazine. Raffi perches on the sink. “You made Graham into the worst version of himself,” she says. “You made me wonder why I married him. He was always better than you, though.”

“Thank you for taking such good care of my aunt,” Raffi says to an older woman in a rocking chair who had been her aunt’s hospice nurse. “I always told myself I was going to find a way to tell you what it meant to me, how you eased the hurt of things a little just by being there, how your voice soothed her at the end. But every time I thought about it, I got to missing her so much I had to put the whole idea away.” In the afterwards, Raffi felt like an astronaut, floating through a vast emptiness, rebounding off space-detritus. Even Graham, and Kay when she flew back for the funeral, were far-off planets, barely visible in the distance. But the nurse saw her on the street one day, said, “Oh, honey,” and pulled her into a hug so tight that Raffi felt, for a moment, grounded.

• • • •

The next day Buck heads out with a large rucksack on his back. That night, when he doesn’t return, Kay climbs the narrow staircase to Raffi’s bedroom in the attic. There are other rooms in the house—so many rooms—but most of them had their own bodies by the time Raffi arrived, and she didn’t like the idea of being just another immobile form. The room in the attic is more comfortable to her than the rest of the house anyway, with its low sloping ceilings and its twin bed. She feels contained by the small space, embraced.

Raffi moves over to make room for Kay who sits down on the bed next to her, pulling the comforter up over her knees. It is like they are twelve years old again, having a sleepover, but they are not twelve, and Raffi can’t remember the last night she and Kay were alone, without husbands or other friends, without the intrusion of the outside world.

“Do you think he’s okay?” Kay asks, and Raffi nods, although she is trying not to think at all. “I can’t believe he went out after it. Or I can, but I don’t want to.”

“He’s always been persistent.”

“Remember when that coyote kept hanging around the house and I was afraid it would eat the kittens and he didn’t say anything, just presented me with the pelt a few days later like it was a bouquet of flowers?”

Raffi remembers. Raffi remembers Kay and Buck’s entire courtship, how unthreatening he had seemed at first, so quiet and focused on killing things. It had seemed impossible that someone like Kay would fall in love with a person like that. That someone like Buck could take Kay away from her.

“Guess we should have joined the ranks of the valiant deer slayers,” Raffi says. It was what they always called the boys, then men who spent lunches debating the merits of synthetic versus real deer-urine lures. They look at each other, silent for a moment, then burst out laughing.

“If only we’d seen this coming,” Kay says, as they start to sober up, setting them off again. They’re close enough that Raffi can feel Kay’s laughter, and she leans into it, hungry for the way their edges had once blurred together. She knows they’re a little hysterical, maybe more than a little. She can feel tears pressing against the edges of her laughter. It’s just—who would have known that the end of the world would feel so ridiculous?

• • • •

People in Raffi and Kay’s little Montana town realized what was happening a beat or two before the rest of the world. It’s not that they were more observant, only that they were more surrounded. In a town like that, you’re never alone. Moose, elk, bears, coyotes, deer, mountain lions, porcupines, bison, sheep, beavers—at night you can’t swing a flashlight without seeing the shine of eyes.

Raffi can still remember the first one she noticed: a bald eagle, spreading its wings with a click-click-click like a kite unfurling, like bullets entering the chamber of a gun. For Kay, it was a moose whose eyes glowed pure, molten gold. And Buck saw a grizzly, he told them later, sitting on its haunches and admiring the metallic glint of its claws. “It looked like it was smiling,” he said, and they shuddered because Buck, of all people, was not one to see something that wasn’t there.

• • • •

When Raffi’s aunt was in the final stages of dying, she had strange dreams, and when she woke she would come into the room where Raffi slept on the floor and stand over her until Raffi woke too, and then she would pour the dreams into Raffi, as though she were an overfull pitcher and Raffi an empty bowl. The dreams were all variations on a theme, and the theme was:

There will come a day, not too long from now, when people will be afraid to leave their houses and bears will walk through the streets of the town with the swagger of men. It will be quiet in the houses, even the ones built on a foundation of shouting. In one house, a father will sing a lullaby to his children: snow keeps falling on down that mountain, putting the bears to sleep. He’s been singing the lullaby since the children were born—he’s singing it now—but soon it will feel like a prayer. In another house, a woman will say I told you so, I told you we should have left, I told you we should never have come here. The person she is speaking to will say nothing. In another house, a boy will rock his brother in his arms saying, shh, shh, it’s all right. Outside, the bears will walk down Main Street, ignoring the traffic light as it blinks from yellow to red to green again. They will lumber and sway. They will stop to smell a tumbled tricycle; they will amble on. In the park, there will be a pile of dead dogs, buzzing and seething with the business of decay, but the bears won’t bother the bodies. It’s only the humans they’re coming for.

• • • •

Buck comes back from hunting the bear a few days later, not victorious, but alive, which feels like almost the same thing. While he was gone, the taxidermy garden held its breath. Kay lingered in the basement even longer than usual, climbing up the stairs to Raffi’s attic late in the night, the two of them staying awake until their conversations felt like a dream they were sharing.

When the door opens and Buck shoulders his way in, there is a sense of exhalation. They decide they will take the day off from their typical pursuits—killing and preserving and talking to the dead. Buck loads the wood stove in the living room all the way up so that the air grows warm and amiable. Kay opens some of the dusty bottles of liquor that sit behind the bar in the corner, irreplaceable now. She pours them each elaborate, personalized cocktails in glasses so delicate it seems preposterous that they still exist. Raffi finds a cardboard box of Christmas decorations in a closet and drapes the living room’s bodies in tinsel and silvery baubles so they can feel included in the celebration in spite of their inability to imbibe cocktails.

They drink until they can’t remember they ever lived another life. They try on each other’s personalities so that for a while Raffi is the stoic hunter and Buck is the taxidermist. “Do me,” Raffi says to Kay in Buck’s gravelly monotone, and Kay says, “very accurate,” raising her eyebrows suggestively, which makes Raffi not want to be Buck anymore. Kay-as-Raffi drapes her legs across the lap of a sculptor whom she once did an exhibit with, and says, “Look, maybe I can’t bring you back to life, but at least I tried.” They drink until the bodies aren’t bodies anymore, until they’re people who can talk and laugh and respond to questions. They drink until the room spins, and Raffi imagines it is spinning fast enough to shake off all the animals lingering outside it. At some point, they fall asleep, and when Raffi wakes later, Kay is nestled into the crook of Buck’s arm, and the room is cold. She pushes herself to her feet, staggers her way back to the attic.

• • • •

When Kay finishes with Graham’s body, she comes to find Raffi, who is curled up in a leather armchair in the study, reading one of the cheap paperback thrillers that line the shelves.

“Do you know where you want him to go?” Kay asks.

“Do you know that if you replace all the bad guys in these books with bears and wolves, it’s a pretty accurate portrayal of our current situation?”

Kay raises her eyebrows. “Do you want him up in the attic with you?”

Raffi shakes her head, looks down at her book. The wolf sped off into the night, his tires spinning against the wet asphalt, but Marianne knew he’d be back soon . . .

“Do you want to come with me and we can pick a place together?”

Raffi shakes her head again. What she wants—other than a million impossible things—is for Kay to keep working on Graham down in the basement. To live forever in limbo, to have Graham’s body neither gone nor present.

“I’ll find him a good spot, then,” Kay says, more of a question than a statement, so Raffi nods. Kay rests her hand on Raffi’s shoulder, squeezes it hard. When they were kids, they believed they could transmit thoughts by touching each other’s skin and concentrating so hard it felt like their eyes would pop. But Raffi is wearing a thick sweater, a layer of scratchy wool between their skin, and after a final squeeze, Kay is gone.

• • • •

The worst part of what happened to Graham—the thing that keeps Raffi from being able to talk about it, even with Kay—is what didn’t happen to her. This is what keeps her up at night, what turns her stomach and aches her head and makes her contemplate taking all her clothes off and walking out into the snow (she has heard that hypothermia is like going to sleep). When the bear came and smashed through the planks they’d nailed over their windows, when Graham threw himself in front of her, when she tried to pull him back and pleaded no no, when the bear so casually swiped a paw across Graham’s face, almost like a lover’s slap but for the cracking of bone loud in Raffi’s ears, when Graham crumpled to the ground—Raffi thought, okay then. She had always been so afraid of death, of the great endless nothingness of it. But okay, she thought, okay, let this be the end.

The bear stood on its hind legs and looked down at her. Its eyes were a gold so bright they hurt to look at.

“Come on, then,” Raffi said, and her voice sounded unfamiliar. “Come on.”

But the bear didn’t. It looked at her and looked and looked and then it turned and dropped back onto four feet and padded silently out of the house, leaving Raffi alone with Graham’s body.

• • • •

Sometimes when Raffi is wandering through the taxidermy garden, she imagines herself a docent in a museum. These are what humans looked like, the docent says. See how they stand and sit and gaze out into the middle distance. These creatures used to think themselves the pinnacle of evolution, the top of the food chain, the rulers of the world. Look how fragile they are, made of flesh and bone, so easily punctured, so easily broken. See what became of them, see what is left.

• • • •

The bear is back again. It is mostly invisible—heavy paw prints in fresh snow, coarse fur tangled in fencing—but its presence tugs at Raffi. One night at dinner, she feels eyes on the back of her neck and when she turns, the bear is visible just beyond the electric fencing. Its gold eyes glint in the dusk, emitting their own light. When Raffi turns back around, she sees Buck watching.

“You should leave it be,” she says to him, unsure of whether she is trying to protect him or the bear.

“So it can find a way in and kill us while we’re sleeping?”

“So you don’t get killed yourself.”

Buck doesn’t respond but Raffi knows that the inside of his mind is a gun. When she was young, she begged her aunt to teach her to shoot, hated the idea of the boys in her class knowing something she didn’t. That first time at the range, she jumped so hard at every gunshot that afterwards her back and neck were sore for days. She had loved the feeling.

• • • •

Raffi doesn’t talk to Buck about it, but secretly she is convinced that the aliens are saving the planet. What bigger threat is there to Earth’s survival than humans? What more destructive force? When she thinks about the polar bears and tigers and bees dying, about the glaciers melting and the oceans warming, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and whales washing up dead on the beaches, when she imagines the mountain landscape she loves so much teeming with life again, a decade or a century in the future, she can feel something that is not so far from relief.

• • • •

Raffi finds Graham in one of the garden’s most luxurious bedrooms, stretched out on the king-sized bed. He is reading a book of poetry, and Raffi wonders if this is a gift Kay is giving her, this new version of Graham. He is some of Kay’s best work, the lines of his body so precisely him and not him, all at once. The crevasses in his face have been filled with a gold substance that is the exact color of the animals’ eyes. Seeing him is like seeing a stranger wearing Graham’s skin. Still, she climbs into the bed with him, rests her head on his shoulder. It is hard beneath her cheek.

They lie like that, not talking, the light gradually shifting in the room. Graham reads poetry—Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on.—and Raffi closes her eyes and tries to imagine a world where they are both here together.

“I’m sorry,” she says, after a while. “I can’t imagine it. You and Buck never really got along.”

Graham says nothing. Raffi feels herself slipping back into old habits, half-truths and empty spaces. She pushes herself up onto an elbow, looks him in the eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says again. “I was so unhappy and I couldn’t figure out how to put it into words. I don’t know when the things we wanted stopped being the things I wanted.”

Graham says nothing.

“I don’t know if I ever wanted those things, or if I only wanted to want them.”

Graham says nothing.

“It made my aunt so happy to see us together, to know that I wouldn’t be alone after she died.”

Graham says nothing.

“I’m sorry,” Raffi says.

And nothing.

• • • •

At night on her way to the attic, Raffi overhears Kay and Buck arguing behind the closed bedroom door. She tells her feet to keep walking, but they disregard her directions and slip stealthily closer instead. It is mostly Kay’s voice she hears, the cadences of it familiar even though Raffi can only make out a handful of words. She doesn’t need the words to know what they are saying. That the garden must be protected, that the risk is unnecessary, that they each want the other to stay alive, that they are furious with this desire.

Back when Kay and Buck first got married—only a year or so after Kay had finished art school and come back home—Raffi waited for Kay to call her up and complain. She waited to see her own discomfort mirrored and therefore diminished. She waited for their similarity of circumstance to return them to the kind of intimacy they’d had before Kay left and Raffi, taking care of her aunt, stayed. But Kay didn’t complain. She settled into married life like it was a bespoke jacket, sewn perfectly to her measurements. She flourished, developing a name for herself, content with Buck’s stolid affection.

Raffi wants to push the door open, wants to tell them that it is too late, now, to be arguing. But she doesn’t. She listens until their voices grow soft, and then she leaves.

• • • •

The next morning, the taxidermy garden is uncomfortably quiet. Raffi wanders from room to room, checking in with the various inhabitants, until she finds Kay in the master bedroom, sitting on the floor at her mother’s feet. Kay’s mother is wearing an elegant silk bathrobe, reclined in a wingback chair with one leg crossed over the other. Raffi sits down next to Kay. The carpet is so thick that it’s like sitting on a pillow.

“Buck’s gone,” Kay says. Raffi thinks, of course, but she doesn’t say anything, just puts her arm around Kay’s shoulders. Kay slumps into her. “He left a note,” she says. “He said he’d be back in two days, that he’d only be gone the one night.”

Raffi wants to comfort her but she can’t think of anything to say that is both comforting and true. “He made it back last time,” she says after a long pause.

Kay shakes her head, pushes the palms of her hands into her eyes. She looks up at her mother’s calm, lined face. “She was the first one,” Kay says. “I had no idea what I was doing.” She traces her finger over a seam that runs up the back of her mother’s leg.

“She looks just like herself though,” Raffi says. “Even more so somehow.”

Raffi wishes, suddenly, that her aunt had waited a little longer to die, that instead of her body decomposing into nothingness deep beneath the ground she could be here in the garden with them.

“It was her old Siamese cat that got her. Isn’t that the world’s worst joke?”

They sit in silence for a bit, Raffi’s hand resting on Kay’s knee.

“Do you know she used to clean this house?” Kay says. “It’s how we knew it existed and had the electric fence. We always joked about what a nutjob the owner was, having an electric perimeter in Montana, as if we were living in Alaska.”

“Didn’t save him in the end though, did it?”

“Can’t say as I feel too sorry. He was always a dick to my mom.”

“Now she’s got the master bedroom,” Raffi says.

“She sure does.”

• • • •

Instead of going down to the basement like normal, Kay says, “Let’s make popcorn on the wood stove. If he’s going to take off like this, he deserves to miss out.” It is a treat to eat something that isn’t rice or meat, to watch the kernels pop and jump.

“Remember how we used to stuff bags of popcorn into our bras to go to the movies?” Kay says, and as soon as she says it, Raffi does, the memory crystalline and gleaming like a marble in the sun.

They finish the popcorn, but Kay still doesn’t go. “Pick me a good book,” she says, and they lie on opposite ends of the couch, their legs touching under a blanket. Raffi gives the old woman sitting in the armchair her own thriller, propping it carefully in her lap. They read each other the best lines aloud, let the animals become punch lines: The bear arrives in Texas looking for trouble on a Friday in June, his fedora tilted at a jaunty angle. When Kay finds bits she likes, she nudges Raffi with her foot. The room is warm and smells like popcorn; even the old woman looks like she’s enjoying her book.

• • • •

That night, up in the attic, Raffi waits, although she tells herself she isn’t. When she hears footsteps on the stairs, she tries not to think about what it means that Kay only wants her company in the moments when Buck is gone. It is cold in the attic and Raffi’s body aches with loneliness and she will take what she can get: spare moments of time, the heat of Kay’s shoulder pressed up against her, the easy understanding that belongs to them and no one else.

“I’m having doubts,” Kay says, “about the taxidermy garden.”

Raffi understands that Kay needs to talk about something that is not Buck, that it is her turn to create for Kay a world where Buck is not somewhere in the darkness with golden eyes watching him. “What kind of doubts?”

“Well, not doubts so much as nightmares. The bodies keep talking to me.”

“What do they say?”

“They want to tell me everything, all the details of their lives and what it’s like to be dead and how it was when the animals killed them. They talk and talk and talk and then I wake up and I’m so tired.” Kay tilts her head so that it rests against Raffi’s, and Raffi closes her eyes into the closeness. “They tell me about the things they miss most: red velvet cake, a favorite song, television on a rainy day. It’s never what you think it’d be.”

Raffi matches her breathing to Kay’s.

“What do you miss most?” Kay asks.

Raffi tries to recall. It is like looking for a word in a language she has mostly forgotten. How long has it been since it all began? The first attacks, the comprehension that blossomed like a bruise. Before is a dream.

• • • •

Sometimes Raffi can’t help but wish that she could climb into Kay’s skin with her. Sometimes she wants to hold her so tight that their boundaries dissolve. Sometimes she wants to say, when we die—tomorrow or next month—can you taxidermy all of me inside all of you so that I never have to be alone again?

• • • •

By the time the sun sets the next day, Kay has given up the pretense of reading and is staring out the window. She is so still that Raffi watches for the movement of her chest, waits for Kay to blink to reassure her that she is not alone with a roomful of bodies. Raffi is afraid she is watching something in Kay break that she will never be able to repair, their snow globe finally cracking, the water readying itself to rush out. She brings Kay strips of jerky to chew on. She watches Kay watch the window. When the window has darkened to a mirror so that it’s impossible to see anything other than the reflection of the wood stove’s flames, Raffi takes Kay’s hand and leads her up to the attic.

They lie down side by side in Raffi’s little bed, both of them still in their jeans and sweaters. They are touching at the shoulders and hips. Raffi feels fiercely grateful to have Kay here next to her. Miserable, yes, but alive, and needing her.

“I shouldn’t have let him go,” Kay says.

“You didn’t.”

Raffi takes Kay’s hand, and Kay holds on tight enough to make Raffi’s fingers ache.

• • • •

Buck does not come back the next day, or the one after that. Kay and Raffi don’t talk about where he is or what might have happened to him. They hardly talk at all. Kay doesn’t go back down to the basement. She doesn’t brush her teeth or change her clothes. Her hair tangles and the shadows under her eyes deepen and she smells of sweat and anxiety. Raffi orbits her, afraid to let her out of sight, afraid that if she stops willing Kay to be a person, from one breath to the next she will transform into a body.

• • • •

Before Raffi’s aunt got sick, Kay and Raffi were going to leave together. Kay would go to art school and Raffi would go to the neighboring liberal arts college and study biology and they would live together and everything would be the same between them, but the world would be better. It had all felt so real that even after Kay left, Raffi could close her eyes and see the little apartment they would have shared. Maybe this was the reason for the gap that grew between them—every time Raffi talked to Kay, this other life became a little less vivid, as though the color was draining out of it and into the version in which Kay had a roommate from Portland and Raffi was working at a dude ranch and letting one of the wranglers take her out to dinner every now and then. Raffi’s aunt had told her to go, but Raffi would not. So Kay went alone, and Raffi stayed and went on dates with Graham and took long hikes alone through the mountains and tried to hold onto every minute of time she had left with her aunt.

• • • •

On the sixth day of Buck’s absence, Raffi wakes in the watery light of early morning and Kay is not in bed with her. Before her eyes make sense of what she’s seeing, she’s halfway down the stairs, some sixth sense ringing alarm bells so loud that she can hardly think. She is so ready to fling herself out the door that when she sees Kay pulling on her boots in the mudroom, she feels as though she has run into a wall. She gapes, gasping for breath. Kay meets her eyes, but only for an instant.

“At least Buck told you he was going to leave,” Raffi says.

Kay flinches. “It wouldn’t be fair, asking you to come with me.”

“You haven’t asked me anything.”

Raffi is furious. She can’t stand to be in the room with Kay a second longer. She turns around and walks back into the house, digging her nails into her palms. She wants to slam the door so hard behind her that the glass shatters. She wants to say, fine, if that’s what you want, just go, it’s not like you haven’t left before. She wants to rewind the movie of their lives until they’re thirteen years old zipped into a sleeping bag cocoon, and pause everything there.

She isn’t paying attention to where she is walking; her attention is still with Kay, who even at this moment might be walking out towards the animals. Fine, Raffi thinks, fine, fine, fine. She bumps into someone in the hallway and for a moment she thinks it is Kay, conjured forth by her anger, before she realizes it is just another body. An older man who used to plow the roads. Raffi puts her palm against his chest, pushes him hard and he topples backwards with a crash. She kicks him—this is what he gets for not being Kay, this is what the whole world gets for falling apart—but his body is a hard thing now and her toe makes a cracking noise, a throb of pain shooting up her leg.

“Why are you kicking Henry?”

Raffi turns around and, this time, it is Kay. She shrugs, her vision swimming.

“I’m sorry,” Kay says. She looks lost, a small child looking for her parents. She and Raffi never fight, haven’t since they were kids. Even when things began to collapse between them, it happened quietly, wordlessly.

Raffi wants to comfort her, but she imagines waking up an hour later, the only breathing occupant of the taxidermy garden, and doesn’t say anything.

“It felt like having you here meant that maybe I’d make it back. That there’d be something to make it back to.”

“I’m a person, not an anchor,” Raffi says. “Not another of your bodies.”

“I’m sorry,” Kay says again. “All of this—” she gestures vaguely around her “—I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m so scared of losing everything, everyone.” She reaches her hand out, and Raffi can’t help herself, she takes it. Kay’s fingers are cold.

“Do you want to come with me?” Kay asks.

Raffi doesn’t know if there is any space left for the things she wants, but the idea of being left behind again is unbearable. She nods.

• • • •

Raffi tells Kay she needs time, and Kay doesn’t argue. “I’ll be in the basement,” she says, “just yell down when you’re ready.”

Back in the attic, Raffi sits alone on her bed and breathes in for a count of five, out for a count of five, the way she did after her aunt died: one breath and one breath and one breath. “That’s all it takes to keep living,” one of the hospice nurses had said to her. When the trembling inside her stills, she dresses in her warmest clothes and climbs back down the stairs.

It is full morning now, a bluebird day, and the sun streams through the windows and makes Kay’s creations gleam, reflecting off bits of metal and glass, polished wood and leather. Raffi walks from room to room, saying her goodbyes. The strangeness of it all seeps through her, as though in preparing to leave she is able to see the taxidermy garden clearly for the first time. But the strangeness only adds to the beauty, more undeniable than ever in the sunshine.

In Graham’s bedroom, she rests her cheek against his. “I hope being dead is like existing in the moment before waking, when anything could happen,” she says to him. “I hope when we wake up, we’re birds or bears or rabbits.”

So many rooms, so many bodies, but eventually she is standing at the top of the basement stairs. She and Kay pull on their boots together this time. Raffi loads one of Buck’s guns, slings it over her shoulder. It is heavy, menacing. She thinks of her aunt saying, “Don’t aim at something unless you want to kill it.”

Kay opens the door and cold air and light pour in. Behind them, the taxidermy garden is silent, bodies watching through the windows as they walk away. A bird wheels overhead and Raffi puts her hand on the gun, but it is only a speck in the sky. She takes a breath. In her mind’s eye, she sees her and Kay’s bodies, transformed in ways she can’t yet imagine, lying together in her bed in the attic.

Raffi takes Kay’s hand. Somewhere, the bear is waiting. Somewhere, Buck’s body is lying alone, ready to come home to the taxidermy garden.

©2020 by Em North.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Em North is a writer currently living in Baltimore, MD. She teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University where she received her MFA. She was a member of the Clarion Workshop class of 2019, where she was awarded a Delany-Kushner-Sherman The Future is Queer scholarship. Prior to pursuing her MFA, she worked as a physicist, snowboard instructor, and horse trainer, living in eleven states in ten years. Her nonfiction can be found in The Threepenny Review, Catapult, and Best American Experimental Writing 2020. This is her first fiction publication.

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

The Postictal State of Divine Love

Julianna Baggott | 7322 words

My mother used to tell me we came from the matriarchal vampiric line that had been traced farther back than Queen Elizabeth. She only told me these things after a seizure. Many people with epilepsy talk about how, after a seizure, strange memories pop up—small but suddenly vibrant details; my mother would recall the small vibrant details of our collective vampiric past.

What kind of mother would do this?

Mine. And, when I was little, I loved her for it.

I. Scientific Overview of Vampiric Evolution

Vampires are part of the natural world. They are not the same species as humans; they have evolved differently over time; and although they are vastly different in appearance and other physical characteristics from region to region, they exist in every surviving culture.

Just as bees are essential to the survival of plant life through cross-pollination, vampires are essential to our survival as a species because of the presence of immunoglobulin in blood.¹ The gamma-globulin proteins comprising immunoglobulin (See Fig. 1) found in blood are used by the immune system to help identify and neutralize foreign objects such as bacteria and viruses. Thus, while the folkloric connection between vampirism and blood has scientific grounding, it is actually immunoglobulin that lies at the heart of this connection.

Vampires have hyper-evolved immune systems. Most importantly from the human perspective, they serve to boost our immune systems by co-existing with us. Co-existence with vampires can range from a mosquito biting a vampire and then a human; kissing; coughing or sneezing; sexual intercourse; etc.

• • • •

My mother told me the stories mostly with her eyes closed. Present tense, third person. Her language was strange or maybe strained is the better word, and always intimate, very intimate. Her brow would be pinched. If she’d lost feeling in her right arm, which often happened, I’d rub it for her.

Why would my mother tell me these stories?

Because she believed them.

What did it mean to be a descendant of the matriarchal vampiric line? Were we different from any other mother and daughter?

“We are different,” my mother told me. “Nature loves diversity. We are that diversity. We’re the curved beaks of Darwin’s finches.”

One time, before they took her license away, we were driving at night and a possum darted into the road, his pale eyes went red, but he darted back into the brush the way he came. “See that! That’s evolution. We’re like the possum that’s learned not to play dead in front of an oncoming car!”

“Are we better than regular people?” I asked.

“Not better, no. We’re essential to regular people.”

• • • •

Without the existence of vampires, humans would be immediately susceptible to pandemic viruses—in particular new “superbugs”—with the potential to quickly wipe out our entire population.² In short: Vampires are essential to our existence.

• • • •

My mother was always afraid that I would seize. She hovered if I seemed to go glassy-eyed with daydreams. I would smile and make eye contact and try to put her at ease—Look at me! I’m here. I’m okay!

Still she told everyone to watch over me—my teachers, camp counselors, lifeguards. And my father too. Lean but paunchy, he only swung around every once in a while. He always had a gift and took me out to dinner—a place that served shakes, always, because I loved shakes.

“Keep an eye on her, Ted,” my mother would shout from the front door. “You know, in case . . .”

He would look me in the eyes.

I wanted him to see the vampire in me. But I also smiled to let him know that I was okay—I wasn’t going to seize at the restaurant, spraying my milkshake everywhere.

Then he booped my nose. “I don’t know,” he said. “She looks normal to me!”

I knew what this meant. My mother was not normal. I decided this was why he left her. And his leaving meant I would have to stay.

• • • •

. . . More specifically, decreases in vampire populations can be directly tied to rising mortality rates in human populations. For example, the Bubonic Plague (a.k.a. The Black Death)—characterized by high fever and excessive bleeding—hit Europe in 1346. The spread of the Black Death was a direct result of decreased vampire populations due to persecution. A number of religious inquisitions—the Medieval Inquisition and the Episcopal Inquisition took place from about 1184-1230, followed by the Papal Inquisition beginning in the 1230s—all of which persecuted vampires (both suspected and real), succeeded in killing off a significant percentage of the global vampiric population. The effect was that the human species became particularly susceptible to attack from new diseases—in this case, the Plague. It is no coincidence that the Plague hit Italy the hardest, resulting in the death of 70% of that country’s entire human population. Catholic persecution of vampires in Italy had been the strongest of all the European countries; Italy therefore had the lowest population of vampires, and subsequently was hit hardest by the Plague. (Ironically, vampires were frequently charged with spreading the disease, as victims often bled from the mouth, making their lips appear bloody and thereby calling to mind the myth of the vampire.)

• • • •

The seizures had their own will. You couldn’t ask them questions or make suggestions or plead with them. My mother seized on the kitchen floor, in the mini-mart, in my orthodontist’s waiting room, on the neighbor’s lawn not far from their above-ground pool deck, in the bathroom at my ballet rehearsal and on the bus because she could no longer drive a car.

Something’s wrong with your mom.

Honey! Come here! It’s your mother!

Jesus, is she having a seizure or something?

This bitch is cray.

Stand back, stand back. Please stand back.

Don’t look!

I’m not afraid to look! I know what to do. Let go of me!

Don’t put something in her mouth.

Don’t restrain her.

Just let me roll her to her side. There, yes. I know the fluttery whites of my mother’s eyes. I’m here. I’m with you. I’m right here.

• • • •

Another prime example is the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1920, which resulted in a death toll of 50-100 million people worldwide. Unlike most influenza outbreaks—which tend to most strongly effect children under the age of two, those over sixty-five, and the immune-compromised—the Spanish Flu was hardest on the healthiest, in particular those between 20 and 40 years of age. The final cause of death was a “cytokine storm”³; the immune system turns on itself, resulting in bleeding from the nose, ears, and internal organs, along with edema of the lungs. The stronger the immune system, the stronger the attack. Vampires were nearly decimated. Losses to the vampire population weakened the human population, leading to an influx of other diseases (measles, mumps, rubella, polio, etc.). Stability was not achieved until antibiotics were invented—made possible due to scientific research that included testing of the immunoglobulin found in vampires . . .

• • • •

My mother felt strange after. She wouldn’t remember the seizure itself and she’d be disoriented, but she didn’t struggle for language. Words came to her. Not her own really. Some other kind of voice, a voice let loose by the seizure itself.

How did the stories go?

Like this:

The Queen is high on poppies.

Her corset is too tight. She twists against it.

But there is no corset—instead her pregnant belly, the rigging of muscles and the pink shining skin are strung tight and drum-taut.

When the pain spikes, she hears a growl in her own throat. Smells blood—iron-rich, it swells round her.

The nursemaid leans toward her, face to face. She cups Elizabeth’s skull and lifts her head, pressing a cup to her lips—bitter tea. The nursemaid smiles but her eyes shine like beetles, as if they crawled across a blank face and decided to stop for a moment and pretend to be eyes.

After a few sips, Elizabeth whispers, panting, “I’m a beast.”

The nursemaid’s mouth opens as if it’s just found a bit of skin to tear open and create a mouth. “You are birthing,” the nursemaid’s mouth says. “Soon, you will push.”

Birthing what? Elizabeth wonders.

And then the pain rises again and she remembers the boy in the barnyard with the cleft in his skull and the wide-set pitching eyes. Once, he was overtaken, his body fell and thrashed until he bit his tongue off.

Birthing—what?

And when the pain passes, Elizabeth stares wide-eyed out the window.

Crows clap up from the fields and, farther, on the greening hillside, gray sheep and shepherds. But the shepherds are not shepherds.

One turns and she sees the face of one of her guards.

This country house was chosen for her final months because it is remote, nearly desolate. She is said to be in one place and then another and a third, like the Catholics say of some of their saints who can be everywhere and nowhere at once.

She always expected a Catholic assassin. But now the Catholics are within her. Each wields a small knife in a dirty fist.

This is her punishment. This is what love brings.

Her mother taught her nothing less.

Her mother is here, beside her now. The clean slice of her beheading is wrapped, quite simply, like a mild wound, but it won’t stop bleeding. Frail dots of blood are pinking the white.

“Mother,” Elizabeth says.

And her mother’s face is beautiful. A cold hand on her forehead. Hushing.

“I’ve missed you,” Elizabeth whispers, girlishly.

Her mother smiles, and the smile means that they are both built for longing, that they know loss so well they’re no longer afraid of it.

Elizabeth was first a prisoner inside of her mother’s ribs. Prison upon prison.

Her mother’s cold hand lifts and it’s white and limp and wet. A rag for wiping her face.

“We are drawing near!” The nursemaid’s face appears between Elizabeth’s bony knees. “Stoke the fire!” she tells someone Elizabeth cannot see.

Elizabeth shakes her head. She prefers the cold air but she is suddenly mute with pain. Has the tea made her tongue swell? Has someone sewn her mouth shut?

Out the window in the golden light, the sheep are glowing. On fire. Each one goes up, bright flame then snuffed, nothing but smoke.

It’s the poppy tea, says a distant voice ringing in her head. It makes you see what no one else sees. But this is no comfort. She sees it and so there’s truth to it. Sheep and smoke. What was there then gone.

Also she always sees and hears and knows things that others can’t see and hear and know.

Her heart is kicking like a child locked in a trunk.

She was once locked in a trunk as a child. She remembers rubbing her fingers across the hinges from within. Keep me. Keep me.

No, let me loose.

A young woman sets a hot basin on a table, setting off a dull watery gong, and it’s as if this summons the pain again. Elizabeth is seized, her belly hardening. Her body is a country all its own—shrouded and pale, vulnerable. And here then, an invasion by fire blazing through woodlands, rolling through cities. Wind-whipped, it coughs clouds into the darkening sky.

And then gone. More panting. Her teeth bared.

“I see the head!” the nursemaid shouts.

And again Elizabeth recalls her mother—imagines the thunk of her head as it hit the ground. Our skulls are heavy. They hold so much.

“Pull her up!” the nursemaid says.

Two young women now on either side of Elizabeth push her until she locks her elbows behind her back. She tries to get above her rounded stomach.

Her body knows what’s being asked of it.

She pushes. Her blood pounding in her head. Her fists gripping the furs lain beneath her. The world is nothing but air and motes of dust in dying sun and ghost sheep on the hill with an agitation of crows and her mother’s death—a bloody mess.

Her lover. His skin on hers. So long ago now but how warm his body was! Skin to skin! The awe of something so simple.

“Again,” the nursemaid says. “Another push!”

But it’s not simply another push, instead hours.

Where’s Raleigh? Darkness fills the windows, swallowing time.

She remembers her father’s fat fingers, greased with lard, drumming the table.

The fungal smell of her cell.

The trunk, its hinges, her small pink fingers—delicate and quick as a mouse’s.

And for one moment, she remembers what it was to be within her own mother, shrouded in the watery dark, pressing one tiny hand in front of her own delicate face, a handprint rising to the surface of her mother’s skin.

“Raleigh!”

And her mind starts to clear.

Wind sweeping across fallow dry fields.

The wolves are nestled in lairs, curled tight, ears twitching in the wind. She is a Queen but also a bastard.

Her bastard-child is coming.

A man from the Mission is in the hall, a wet nurse with him. The Mission will protect and provide because this child is of her line, not just the lineage that made her queen of this great land—she could be the queen of many more. She could send her descendants out, one by one—trundled to foreign territories. And with her power inside of them, they could take hold. The vampiric—human and creature—are heathens, spread across lands no one yet knows. They eat and root and dig and build and breed and breathe, unaware that they are waiting for a great Queen. She senses them beyond the seas, their beating hearts, their brimming blood!

Nearer, she feels the hives humming. If this baby is a girl, she could be mother to them all. This is what the Mission knows and protects. This is the true royal line.

The baby’s head writhes within her very bones—its skull fitted with a tight crown.

And when the last steadfast seams of her body are rent apart, the baby is born.

A fine cry, stuttered bleating. Purpled lips and a vibrant tongue, white teeth already budding.

An infant girl, held high, blood-smeared and steaming in the cold air.

An infant girl to be shuttled off and hidden, a keep-safe.

“We’re not like other people,” my mother would say.

“I know.”

“We’re different. You feel it, don’t you? You’re royalty.”

“I do feel it.” I wanted to feel it very badly.

“And you’re a Native too, which is also a kind of royalty. The line lived on. And there’s your father’s ancestors too. Polish, Welsh, Nigerian, some Vietnamese. Some of those strands might be vampiric too. You never know.”

“I’m many different things all mixed up. I know.”

“We’re different and powerful.”

“Yes.”

I wanted to believe but believing was hard because I was only myself, just that. A small girl with mussy brown hair and uneven bangs that my mother cut herself, my dark fringe dusting the bathroom sink.

• • • •

At home, resting in bed, after, my mother kept the room dark, the pillows propped behind her back. I helped her take hits from her can of O2. Sometimes all she wanted was to eat grapes. Everything else tasted too metallic.

I fully understood that the infant girl was supposedly our ancestor. But, naturally, as I got older, I had more questions.

By fifteen, I was saying things like, “None of your descriptions of vampires are how they really are in movies or books. Nothing at all.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to bite anybody!”

“Of course not.”

“How do you know all of this? I mean, who could prove that they’re a descendant of royalty?”

“I’m a member,” she said.

“A member of what?”

“The Mission has gone through ups and downs, but parts of it still exist.”

“Oh, okay. Right.” I rolled my eyes. “The Mission. I guess it’s a secret society so secret you can’t tell me anything about it?”

“Yes.”

“And one day, will I be a member? I mean, if I’m of the matriarchal vampiric line and all, I should be.”

“Maybe.”

“People think vampires are evil, sometimes they’re even cool,” I said. “We aren’t evil or cool.”

“None of the supposed facts about vampires are true. None of them,” she always answered this way, her voice a rough whisper. “None of them.”

A. List of Common Assumptions and Misconceptions about Vampires, with their Origins and/or Socio-Scientific Explanations

Vampires are “bloodsucking,” i.e., parasitic in nature. In rare cases of abnormal psychology, vampires have attacked humans and other vampires alike⁴, but to no higher degree than abnormal psychology found in the general human population. It is likely that this particular misconception stemmed from cases of severe illness in humans when vampires were used for their beneficial immune systems. Before the discovery of immunoglobulin in 1890, some doctors were already using vampires to boost the immune systems of very ill patients.⁵ In some cases, the vampire would bite a sick person in the jugular in an attempt to inject them directly with immunities and/or inoculate them.⁶

Vampires are immortal. Due to their powerful immune systems, vampires do live much longer than humans. In fact, a vampiric Queen—who is given the best immunities of all of her drones worldwide—can live for a very long time. [The lifespan of a Queen ranges anywhere from 140 to 300 years.] They are not immortal, however.

Vampires are light-sensitive, nocturnal, and aggressive. Over time, many unusual-looking vampires have become nocturnal for their own safety. And for those vampires who have become nocturnal, their eyes have evolved to night vision. [The same evolutionary survival technique can also be seen in cats and raccoons.] More broadly, early vampire lore coincided with the niacin deficiencies of certain populations that were raising corn as a crop but did not know the proper preparation of corn to get the nutritional benefits (primarily vitamin B3). These people developed pellagra, characterized by sensitivity to light, insomnia, and aggression. It is distinctly possible that pellagra sufferers were seen as unholy and therefore linked to negative vampiric mythology. The result of which was vampires being thought to be light-sensitive, nocturnal, and violent.

There is a group of rare disease called porphyrias, the result of over-production of porphyrins found in hemoglobin. (One disorder found in this category affected King George III.) It causes a discoloration of urine, dementia, collapses, and foaming at the mouth. Again, these diseases can create symptoms that are linked to vampires—light-sensitivity (resulting in paleness), cracked and bleeding skin, and receding gums (creating the appearance of fangs). Keeping out of the sun and blood-drinking were prescribed.

Anemia is also linked to vampirism, and women are the primary sufferers of anemia due to loss of blood through menstruation. “During the nineteenth century, sufferers on this side of the grave were treated with animal blood, which they were expected to imbibe. In Joseph-Ferdinand Gueldry’s painting, The Blood Drinkers, of 1898, (Fig. 2) a line of pale and languid women queue up in an abattoir for a glass of warm ox’s blood.”⁷ Sufferers of anemia are often pale and crave foods high in protein, and the drinking of blood was often prescribed.

Vampires can only be killed by silver bullets, wooden stakes through the heart, decapitation, etc. Vampires can be killed in all the ways that humans can. However, since the vampiric immune system is much more highly developed than the human equivalent, vampires do not die nearly as easily from the diseases that plague humans.

Silver bullets warrant a special mention. Because of silver’s antibiotic properties, this mineral has been used (notably in World War I) to reduce the risk of infection. Vampires, however, have extreme reactions to antibiotics, which can cause their immune systems to attack their own bodies. Over-ingestion of silver causes argyria, an incurable dermatological condition that leads to grayish-blue pigmentation of the skin, nails, gums, and deep tissues. This condition also occurs in vampires. Given the grayish-blue complexion that results, argyria has contributed to the misconception that vampires are undead.⁸

Vampires do not cast a reflection in mirrors. The origins may hearken back to the role of “the gramarye” and the misunderstanding of literacy. Gramarye comes from Middle English gramarie, as well as from Old French gramaire, grammar, book of magic. During the 9th century to the 14th century, the ability to read was widely perceived by the uneducated as a form of magic. During this era, traveling entertainers—in particular, magicians—relied heavily on mirrors to perform their tricks. The sudden appearance and supposed absence of objects—as well as reflections—was popular among these traveling magicians, known as gramarye. The educated class was also seen as gramarye for their ability to read, and, because of the longevity and health of vampiric populations, records indicate that the percentage of vampires—in this era and others when persecution of vampires wasn’t depopulating the species—are demonstrably higher in the educated classes. It is possible, therefore, that because of vampires being linked to the gramarye, they were also linked not only to books, which were perceived as magical, but also the trickery of mirrors—in particular the absence of reflections in mirrors—and therefore the myth was started. The widespread persistence of the myth was due to the migratory nature of the traveling magicians.

Vampires sleep in coffins. There is a well-known case in Serbia in the 1780s of a wealthy family of vampires being persecuted. The family owned and operated a funeral parlor and hid in the coffins they made there. They were eventually discovered, exposed, and executed—including the children, aged 3, 7, and 14. This story has been documented in numerous places and spread widely throughout Europe.⁹ Moreover, in the 1700s and 1800s there were several large-scale outbreaks of cimicidae (bed bugs) in cities across Europe and North America. This was largely due to industrialization and the overcrowding that resulted. To reduce the impact, many people slept in small, enclosed chambers, sometimes called Sleeping Cabinets (See Fig. 3). It is possible that because sleeping cabinets were the source of this myth, especially in light of the class distinctions (See Vampires do not cast a reflection in mirrors above) and the fact that sleeping cabinets were purchased mostly by the wealthy.

Vampires are hypersexual by nature. Libido varies from vampire to vampire, just as it does among human populations. But Darwinistically speaking, there is an immune system advantage to humans if they manage to have sex with a vampire. Thus, it has been hypothesized that humans are drawn to vampires more than vampires are drawn to humans.¹⁰ Someone with a vampire sex partner, for example, will likely be sick less often, have fewer allergies, lower cholesterol, etc.

Vampires have aversions to rosaries and holy water. The origins of this misconception stem from the Catholic Church’s longstanding persecution of vampires, dating back to the Early Church as far back as the apostle Peter, “the Rock of the Church.” Because of the Church’s foundational view that the blood of Christ, alone, has the power to sanctify, the early apostles were hostile to any vampiric connection to blood—whether scientifically and medically based or metaphorically or symbolically based, as it interfered with evangelization and conversion.¹¹

• • • •

My mother’s seizures started when she was nine years old. She was in gym class. The large fluorescent lights overhead were fluttering in their cages. She doesn’t remember the game, only that she’d been running very fast for a long time and she stopped and was almost hyperventilating and then she was on the gym floor looking up, surrounded by a swarm of her classmates’ faces. They blurred and wobbled. Her body felt wrung out. Her head throbbed. Her mouth tasted like blood. The blood was wet and sticky on her cheek.

“Don’t touch her!” her gym teacher shouted. “Don’t touch her! Get back!”

“I was afraid, very afraid,” my mother would tell me, “but what was so strange was how much they were afraid of me. My fear bounced off of them and came back at me, having expanded exponentially. It was an escalation of fear, whipping higher and higher up into the gym rafters. It rattled the stacked bleachers. It made the lights shake.”

By the time I was in my early twenties, I was still living at home and taking my classes online and at the local college. This way, I could stay close and help her. I had history classes. I learned about colonialism, the rise and fall, post-colonialism. The map of what was once British territory bleeds in all directions. I learned that Queen Elizabeth created her own lore—the Virgin Queen, powerful enough to create a storm to destroy the Spanish Armada and then, of course, the North American colonies, the slaughter of Native Americans . . . Queen Elizabeth’s plan failed. There was no unification.

Because none of it was real.

Queen Elizabeth’s baby girl smeared with blood? A symptom of my mother’s illness.

I stopped questioning my mother. I was starting to feel that life could be lonesome. And in various ways when the full weight of her isolation struck me, I said, “You must have felt alone, but you’re not alone anymore.”

“I have you,” my mother said.

“And I have you.”

I knew this couldn’t sustain me forever.

II. History of Vampires, Vampiric Persecution, and the Origin and Development of Protective Societal and Governmental Intervention

Vampires have existed on Earth as long as humans have; and all cultures possess their own distinct vampire lore. Vampires exist in mythology dating back to ancient cultures, including Persia, ancient Babylonia, and Assyria. There is strong evidence that Cleopatra was of a vampiric bloodline. They also appear in both Greek and Roman mythology. The first documented use of the term comes from Old Russian and dates to 1047 AD. Vampire killings were regularly recorded in Europe beginning in the early 1700s, although the actual word “vampire” does not appear in The Oxford English Dictionary until 1734.

The last queen to rule vampires globally was half-vampire (on her mother’s side) and half-human (on her father’s side)—Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, was decapitated—not only because it was the typical form of execution in that period, but also because she was revealed to be a vampire and this was a preferred method for killing vampires (See Section I.A., above).

Queen Elizabeth lived a long life—nearly double the lifespan of the human population in the late 1500s and early 1600s.¹² She survived smallpox and other diseases. The royal line was lost because she didn’t have any heirs—or at least not any publicly recognized children. Queen Elizabeth remained unmarried so that she could retain complete power over her dominions. This made having a legitimate heir impossible. But she wanted to keep the royal line. She had an affair with a full-blooded vampire—Sir Walter Raleigh—producing an heir.

From the point of view of the British, Queen Elizabeth’s reign was seen as a great hope for unification—under her rule—of vampires and humans within her own kingdom and beyond. She could never achieve this goal in her lifetime. (The Mission has abandoned unification as a goal.) She did, however, attempt to create small independent colonies in a preemptive attempt to achieve unification, a plan which necessitated sending her heir to the New World to gain control. Sir Walter Raleigh sent their illegitimate daughter to Virginia, for her protection. See: Chapter Five: Roanoke, The Lost Colony for more details. The royal line was lost.

• • • •

“You know, my vampirisim and my epilepsy have a lot in common,” my mother said. I was helping her in the vegetable garden, tying tomato plants to stakes. Dark purpling clouds had gathered on the horizon: a storm was coming and my mother didn’t want the plants battered by hard rain. “Both have been misunderstood throughout history.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “That’s really true.” I was very aware of how much my mother’s issues had in common by now. I’d finished my degree in psychology, and I was working on my masters. I tried not to concentrate on my mother’s sustained delusion, but my studies helped me understand her. I could imagine how hard it was to have epilepsy and how vampirism had become easier to explain to me, to herself. The story of how special we were, how strong and helpful to others. And this part—how misunderstood.

“It was called the sacred disease, sent by the gods,” my mother said, taking a moment to stretch her back. “In the Middle Ages, it was ‘morbus daemonicus.’ Epileptics were told to pray, to fast, to beat ourselves, to suffer. And the exorcisms, of course. Our patron saint was Valentin, he was supposed to cure us. It was the falling sickness. We ate metals, plants, matter scraped from human skulls. So much persecution. We’ve been divinities and demons—epileptics and vampires, both.”

There was a reason why my mother was more likely to talk about the matriarchal vampiric line after her seizures. Religious experiences—seeing visions or auras—in the altered state of consciousness after an epileptic seizure have been reported in 1.3% of all epilepsy patients. That stat rises to 2.2% of all temporal lobe epilepsy patients, like my mother. (I followed the work of O. Devinsky on this kind of thing.) I’d been waiting for a moment—like this one—to bring up the idea that her belief in our vampirism was a byproduct of the seizures. I wanted to explain the limbic system, the emotional center of her being, and its association to her temporal lobe.

I straightened up and stood next to her. We were wearing matching flowered gardening gloves, and I noticed how we were standing in identical postures—the slight hunch to our shoulders, our gloved hands on our hips. We were both looking at the brooding clouds. I was about to say something, but then my mother said, “Wait. That cloud is about to be ripped open. The rain will start from that tear in the cloud. It’ll blur in a line straight down to the horizon.”

So, I waited. And she was right. It was far off, miles away, but I could see the line between rain and no rain.

“The tomatoes are trembling,” she said then. “Quick. Let’s get the rest of these staked before it’s pouring rain here too.”

• • • •

Throughout history, countless vampires—and suspected vampires—have been staked through the heart with various kinds of wood. In Russia, many were staked through the mouth; and those in Serbia were staked through the stomach. They have had the skin on their chests pierced in order to “deflate” them of blood. In Germany and western Slavic areas, they were decapitated, their heads buried between their feet, behind their backs, or some distance away from their bodies. Various parts of their bodies have been spiked to the earth so they would not be able to rise from the dead. Romani drove iron needles into their hearts, filled their mouths with steel, and drove stakes of hawthorn through their legs. In sixteenth-century Italy, bricks were forced into the mouths of already-dead female vampires. Their bodies have been dismembered and burned. In the Balkans, vampires were shot and drowned. In Romania, people went so far as to shoot an extra bullet through the coffin of anyone even suspected of being a vampire when they were alive.

• • • •

“Tell me the story of the baby again. What happened to the baby?” my mother whispers. We’re in the single-occupancy room of her a care facility. Her stay here is temporary, we hope. Her seizures got worse with the onset of menopause. The doctors hope to get them under control.

But they found something while she was here. A clouded lung. Cancers have been correlated to seizure medications.

I lean over the hospital bed’s guardrails. “They hid the girl away. And then, it got too dangerous. They sent her to the colonies.”

“Where?”

“Roanoke.”

My mother smiles. The room is barely lit. The fluorescent lights overhead are kept off. There’s only a bit of light coming in through the heavy plastic curtains. “Tell me,” she says. “I can’t tell it to myself.”

“The girl who was born of Queen Elizabeth couldn’t be raised out in the open,” I say. “Queen Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen. This was her bastard child—but royalty in the other line, the hidden vampiric line, could continue. Had to. That was the point. The child needed to be hidden and protected.” The room is filled with plants, ferns, peace lilies, and succulents sent as gifts. My mother’s friends know that she doesn’t like cut flowers, their pending deaths.

“Tell it right,” my mother says, insistently. She means in third person, present tense. “With your eyes closed.”

And so I do it as well as I can:

There’s a cage made of wooden stakes. It’s within the fence that surrounds the village. This is where she sits, in the cage.

They call her Cro and have carved it into the tree to scare off the Indians that round and round. Why Cro? Because she is feared like the bird of death by that name. The colonists blame her for everything. She is death. She is the reason why the sky withholds rain. Why a baby was born early and dead. Why one man killed the other even though she’d been asleep at the time. She’d dreamed it and so it was done.

She wonders if she does control the sky, death, murder. The Indians do fear her but not the way the others think. A Croatan boy saved her from the tide when she waded in to kill herself.

The colonists—the men, the women, but most of all the other children—hate her. This is why she sits in the cage of wooden stakes.

She has no mother or father. She was put on the ship alone and unrecorded. Raleigh was the one to escort her. She calls him Rolly because that’s what she misheard as a child and he allowed it to become a pet name—kept between the two of them. He is the one who’s visited her throughout her life—in the hills, deep in the woods, in fortresses. He told her that the colonists would need her. He told her that she was a balm of the world, light, and goodness and power.

She was watched over on the ship like a jewel, at first, because Rolly told the captain to do just that. But it didn’t last. And, to protect herself, she became vicious. She liked to watch the storms come up. She liked to be lashed by the wind and rain. She became feral.

And now in the cage of wooden stakes, she sees eyes flashing in the trees. The Croatan are out there, waiting. They call like hoot owls and she knows they are saying, “Come, come with us. These others are bound to go mad and scatter and die.”

She has made them a little mad already. She hasn’t been a balm or light or goodness. She has had power and she has defended herself.

She digs at the stakes, clawing away dirt. And, one by one, she uproots them. She finds enough space to push her way out. She walks to the tall fence and unlocks the latches.

“I loved this part as a child,” I say. “Do you remember?”

“I do remember. I remember so much. Keep going . . .”

Cro moves quickly now, silently. The Croatan are near. She also senses tiny mosquito wings, the twist of rodents in their nests, the birds ruffling and cooing, heartbeats everywhere and the forest alive with flitting pulses. She understands their language, she knows what they want and need and long for.

Even the plants have thrown open their scents. They are telling each other—she’s coming, she’s here . . . among us.

And she walks off into the woods and disappears.

It’s quiet a moment. Nurses moving in the halls, a horn blaring in far-off traffic, a family down the hall bursting into laughter and clapping.

“And how are you?” my mother says. “Are you doing okay?”

“I am.” I’m getting married at the end of summer, two and a half months from now. My mother hopes to walk me down the aisle.

“How can I die early like this?”

“You’re not going to die,” I say.

“We’re of the line,” she says. “It grants us a long life. Longer than others.”

“Shhh.”

“I’ve left you such a mess. There are so many boxes of stuff. So many papers and documents and pictures. I have a safe deposit box. The key is in the small drawer in the roll-top desk.”

“I’ll collect everything.”

“It’s important.” She reaches out and grabs my wrist. “The Mission,” she whispers. “I made copies. It was the late ’70s before the government seized all of the documentation. It was like the Pentagon Papers. I copied pages and pages late at night and shuttled them out of our headquarters. But I told no one. The raid came just days later.”

The delusion has found its edges and is pushing into new terrain. I’ve never heard any of this before. “You should get some sleep,” I tell her.

“Promise me,” she says. “You’ll get the key. It’s in the little drawer in the roll-top.”

“I promise.”

She’s exhausted, but restless. She scratches at the tape around her IV and then seems surprised by it, as if she’d forgotten it was there—maybe even surprised that she was here, dying. “Promise.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Do you believe all of it? Everything I’ve told you?” She closes her eyes.

“Yes,” I say, because it doesn’t matter now.

“Did you tell him?”

She means my fiancé, Brian. “Yes.” And I have, here and there. It’s not simple.

This pleases her. She smiles a little. “Do you know why I told you?”

“You wanted me to feel strong and special.”

“You are,” she says. “We are the kind of vampire that walks among humans and we make them better. We make the world better. We move among them. Sometimes I’m seizing—that is my movement among them. Sometimes you’re smiling—that is your movement among them. But we make them better. We are. We exist. And there are others like us. They just don’t know it. We’re never alone.”

“That’s right.”

• • • •

In 1723, Dutch scientist Antonie Philip Van Leeuwenhoek was 90 years old and still writing technical observations on his deathbed. Widely regarded as “the Father of Microbiology,” Van Leeuwenhoek is much less well known for his formation of the S.S.V.P.—the Secret Society of Vampiric Protectors. The Mission and the Secret Society of Vampiric Protectors have a long and complex history, including periods of mutual cooperation and aggression. At Van Leeuwenhoek’s urging, a small group of physicians and scientists pooled their own data obtained from various populations all around the globe; when taken as a whole, this data made it clear that vampires possess biological properties of great benefit to humans. There was even documentation in support of the view that some doctors—including, in less-developed areas of the world, the equivalent of witch doctors—were using vampires for transfusions¹³ and direct bites to the patient’s jugular in order to relieve depressed immune systems, as well as for inoculation purposes. The group quickly arrived at the conclusion that vampires were not only good for human life—they were essential to it. Thus, while vampires were being hunted down and killed the world over, they decided to go about saving the vampires in order that humanity might survive.¹⁴

• • • •

My mother sleeps. I’m gathering my phone, my keys, my bag. But I’m drawn to the crack in the curtains, the glow. It’s night, summer. I have a view of tall parking lot lights. In the distance, traffic is winding around one side of a hill. A row of bright headlights, their beams chopping into the darkness. I imagine each of them, trying to get home, trying to get out of a trap, wanting to be something or someone else, as we do. I think of the word headlamps—small fires moving in the dark. The tall parking lot lights are swarmed with insects. The moths, their wings.

I close the curtains tightly.

I turn and look at my mother who is my daughter who is my ancestor who is my offspring, my past spiraling behind me, my future burning in front—a blur of being. She is of me and I am of her.

One day, not too far off, she will die, but I’ll still feel her presence, won’t I? I’ll have to sort through her things, box up her life. But there is no way to box up a life. Not really.

In death, my mother will be freed of the convulsive cage of her body. Maybe she’ll become the grandest version of herself.

I’ll remain as I am, and, right now, I’m nothing more than an ordinary woman leaving her mother in the care of strangers.

I move to the door.

The fluorescent lights flicker.

And just then, I sense something I don’t understand. One of the gift ferns is exhaling a frothy scent. I walk back over to one of them. And I hear some muted language—like words said underwater. I lean in close to its lush fronds, and I hear distinct chatter . . . something about fear and love.

¹. The term “immunoglobulin,” coined by Paul Erlich in 1890, is another way of talking about antibodies.

². Ingmanson, Wallace and Pershing, Vladimir, 2014, Superbugs: The Virulent End of Time, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York City.

³. Fink, Edwardo, 2011, The perfect cytokine storm, Immunology Monthly, v. 223, p. 58-72.

⁴. Orwell, J.S. and Whatley, Terrence, V., Attacks, Swarms, and Incidents: A Compendium of Vampiric Events, US Government’s Archival Documents—HIVE, 1989, 1392 p.

⁵. Wattlebee, Humphrey, 1911, A Brief Oral History of the Hidden Life of Discredited Doctors, Binderbee and Bussbaum Publishers, Oxen-Round-the-Hills, England, 513 p.

⁶. Dumont, Marie-Louise, 1917, Les Medicines Interdits et Mysterieux, Fabrieux, Paris, France, 246 p.

⁷. Blakemore, Colin and Jennett, Sheila, The Oxford Companion to the Body. 2001. Encyclopedia.com. (September 28, 2010). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O128-vampire.html, 700 p.

⁸. Although silver ceased to be used for medical purposes by the early 1940s, ostensibly because certain antibiotics were invented, it was also due to secret government intervention to protect vampires.

⁹. Köztársaság, Nikola, approximately late 1800s early 1900s, Usmen Istoričar nad Vampir, publisher unknown, 44 p.

¹⁰. Dufozio, Amber and Fessel, Curt, 2010, The Sexual Proclivities, Patterns, and Penchants of Vampire-Human Relations—The Illustrated Unabridged Text, US Government’s Archival Documents—HIVE, 789 p.

¹¹. Unknown, 1999, The Gospel According to Golligeth: The Lost Gospel of Truth and Wisdom, Letters to Peter and Paul, pp. 121-149.

¹². There are other famous rules with vampiric lineage. Of the U.S. Presidents, for example, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, James Madison, Herbert Hoover, and Harry Truman all had vampiric bloodlines. (After 1946, a president’s vampiric bloodline became top secret and cannot be addressed in this report.) ¹³. Note that the first recorded blood transfusion took place in 1667.

¹⁴. It has been speculated that Van Leeuwenhoek was a vampire himself. In addition to his keen interest in the welfare of vampires—well documented in the founding papers of the S.S.V.P.—his age alone is an indicator. He lived to 90 in an era when the average life expectancy was less than half that.

©2020 by Julianna Baggott.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julianna Baggott is the author of over a dozen novels, including Pure and The Seventh Book of Wonders, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. There are over one hundred foreign editions of her novels overseas. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine, Tor.com, Terraform, Conjunctions, and Strange Horizons. She teaches screenwriting at the Florida State University Film School.

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

Danaë

Megan Arkenberg | 4622 words

“All the works of this artist, though somewhat uncouth to look at, nevertheless have a touch of the divine in them.”

—Pausanias

She notices him primarily as a new scent in the antiseptic air of the Tower: a rich man’s perfume of milk and fig, myrrh and pistachio. You might expect that the Tower itself would stink of brass, so much of it heaped together beneath the Argive sun, but the metal has no scent of its own. What you smell is only the oil and sweat on your skin, broken down by the copper, wafted to your nostrils and triggering some mammalian predilection for the stink of blood. And she never touches the Tower. Her hands are always gloved: leather for the hot work, the casting and the welding, and cotton for setting the gears.

“What would I do with your gold?” she snaps, watching the visiting stranger upend a velvet bag over her bed. The coins spill over the sheepskin blanket and clatter to the floor, drawing attention, as he no doubt intended, to the bed’s narrowness. You might call it Spartan, and stumble through a quirk of etymology onto the name of her mother’s mother, the first queen of that famously uncomfortable city. Don’t let it trouble you. We’re in an age of Heroes: the time here is spread thin, glutinously anachronistic. If Danaë seems to know what’s coming, it’s not always because an Oracle told her.

“I imagine it has an unsavory purpose,” she muses, “this boy you want me to build?”

“A gift for the king,” says the stranger. The last of his coins lands on her bed with a clear chime, a daintier sound than she’s used to hearing from metal.

Here, the scene appears as no Titian or Klimt would paint it. Danaë sits at her workbench on a tall, backless stool, wearing a rust-stained shirt and a laborer’s striped trousers. Around her neck, she’s looped a linen sweatcloth stamped with crude icons of eyes: maybe this is a sly reference to Argus Panoptes, the thousand-eyed monster who once patrolled the fertile fields of Argos guarding her great-great-grandmother Io, or maybe it’s just what she found between the scarves and felted caps in the dyer’s market stall. Her visitor stands beneath the Tower’s only window, where the light falls twenty or thirty feet onto his handsome face, picking out a sharp ridge of eyebrow and nose and chiseled upper lip. Around the room, on wooden shelves and stacks of paper, ingots, and broken molds, her creatures watch: shining brass faces, bold enamel eyes.

The Greeks have many words for what she builds, these beings of metal and mathematics: daidala, agalmata, xoana. Words for the cleverness of mortal hands, and for images of the divine. Danaë doesn’t care for these words, or more properly for this fuzziness between invention and worship. She prefers to keep the Gods out of her workshop, for all the reasons you might expect.

Her clockwork creatures have taken to the visitor, almost preening. The Owl moves her head as though tracking a mouse’s progress. The Siren stretches her wings, her feathers flowing like scales. You wouldn’t mistake these movements for something organic. They’re too choreographed, too controlled—three seconds this way, two seconds that. All of the faces are ugly.

Danaë leans back on the stool and blots her forehead with the eye-stamped cloth. “Why would anyone want to harm our beloved king?”

“Because he’s a cunt,” the stranger says, tucking the purse into his belt.

“A more principled stance than I expected.”

He chuckles. “What have your principles been, when you’ve created toys that kill?”

Accidents, she could say. Purely unintentional. But why deny it? Anyone who sees her mechanical Python tightening his coils, her Lion dispatching and retracting his claws, would know the lie for what it is.

“I don’t have any,” she says. “I’m a bit of a monster, actually.”

“Then we understand each other.” He smiles conspiratorially. He steps towards her, out of the light, and oh, how out of place he is among the brass creatures, this sweet-smelling being of breath and skin. “It’s a comfort, isn’t it, to be the most frightening thing in the dark?”

He holds out his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, she takes it.

• • • •

What you’ve heard about the Tower is wrong. It was a polite request, not a demand. It was only that she seemed happier with some distance from the rest of them—happier when the charwomen didn’t knock over the contraptions she’d left stacked on the hearth, when the servants didn’t interrupt her to collect the tools she’d borrowed or the mugs she’d piled on her workbench, when the men in the hallways and courtyards didn’t do their best to compliment her pleasant nose, her straight teeth (she hadn’t given them much to work with).

The truth, as you might expect, is that the princess of the Argives was often unhappy. Boredom stalked her when she wasn’t sending serpents to terrorize farmers and torture mice, when her metal kittens weren’t slicing the skin from courtiers’ fingers, when soldiers and kings weren’t recoiling under the shadow of metal wings. She once declared her favorite myth to be the story of Talos, a monstrous bull cunningly wrought of brass and held together by a single pin. Pull the pin, and all of his blood spills out—a hot and viscous cascade, pounding down like the spillway of a dam at the height of the winter rains. At her worst moments, when the work stalled or when the rain on her metal roof was too loud for her to think, she wished it were that easy. On another branch of her family tree, hanging like rotting fruit, the wife and daughters of Minos were all suicides. At Naxos, at Athens, on Crete, the beautiful women who bedded Gods and heroes and animals and sons-in-law made a tidy end of things, spinning some final, feminine handicraft: a sturdy length of jute, a girdle stitched with stars. But Danaë had no such luck. Some divinity in her, or simple fate, scorned the tightening of a rope.

When she acceded to their request, the Argives described her exile as “self-imposed.”

They were right, of course. She could leave: There were no guards at her door, waiting to crush her under their shields or chop her into pieces if she ventured outside. So she went to the market, studied joints and quills and follicles at the taxidermists’ stall, shifted through crates of metal rings and semi-precious eyes at the jewelers’. She sat outside the café and sipped bitter coffee, tongued her way through honey-sweetened cheesecake. She watched dancers on the sticky floor of a discotheque. Oh, she watched, tracking the world’s motion with barely disguised disgust, so that she could return to her Tower like a sun-blinded mole seeking the comfort of her den. The brief trips were enough to remind her of what she’d escaped: so many wheels spinning and spinning, spraying mud, gouging trenches in the smooth path of fate. So much energy expended on nothing.

The thought followed her home, became a kind of obsession. To fight one’s fate or to accede to it seemed equally undignified. As she fitted shoulder to socket or quill to follicle, she found herself thinking of the abducted women at the edges of this story, of Ariadne, Libya, Europa, Io. It stinks of bullshit, doesn’t it? All these women carried away like cattle, bred like cows; all the monsters meant to prevent it, the neatherd with a thousand eyes, the brass bull held together by a pin. If Danaë considered it long enough, it gave her vertigo. So much making and unmaking, brass into bull, woman into livestock into mother into dynasty. When it wasn’t the indignity of the abductions that sickened her, it was the waste, the inefficacy. The monsters must lose to simple animal husbandry—not because the rutting cow is superior, but because the skill and craftsmanship of their builders picked a battle with the Gods. And the Gods always win.

Reason enough to lock them out of her Tower.

But the visiting stranger has offered an almost unimaginable opportunity. What happens when the Gods and craftsmanship are on the same side? Danaë has reason to think she will be an exception. The Tower is the opposite of a guardian, and Danaë is the opposite of abducted, and a boy made of metal is the opposite of a son. And if a prophecy says he will still slay the king, well—What else would you expect of her creature?

Perhaps for once the play is perfectly scripted, a voluntary collaboration between a woman and the Gods. At her best moments, Danaë feels something akin to faith.

• • • •

She works on the boy night and day, alternating coffee with wine, torches with shades to keep the sunlight from the narrow window from glinting off the brass and blinding her. After all these years shaping her creatures, maintaining equilibrium in her workshop comes as naturally as the rest of the process: calculating, molding, casting, joining, winding, setting, shining. Her other creatures become part of the rhythm. The Owl catches a mouse and crushes it to a pulp. Then, having no use for the meat, she drops the corpse on Danaë’s pillow, and Danaë adds it to the fire. The Owl cleans her talons by scraping them against the hearth’s granite ledge, her claws leaving deep gouges in the stone, and the sound joins the ringing of Danaë’s hammer, or the gentler tap of her jeweler’s mallet pounding a fingernail into place.

The new creature takes shape from anatomy textbooks, parchments from Egypt and Larissa, and from shards of black and red pottery. Broad, smooth thighs and pectorals, heavy ringlets. Eyes of lapis, teeth of elephant ivory. In a fit of playfulness, she calls him Perseus, a name to frustrate the etymologists: It may be from perthein, “to waste,” “to ravage,” or “to strike,” or it may be a tribute to Persephone, that woman not cattle-rustled but plucked like a flower. The underground queen of seeds and roots, but also of mines and ore.

Perseus. He is the first beautiful thing Danaë has ever made.

• • • •

Meanwhile, the time of myth is elastic. Somewhere, a mother brags that her daughter is lovelier than all the goddesses of the sea. Somewhere else, a serpent advances upon a rock. Holding her metal boy, oiling the gears in his sword-hand, Danaë feels the proximity of these things: these other women, other Gods to be crossed, and so many other monsters. The Gorgons cackling in their caves in Libya, and Pegasus, shining like silver, springing from a puddle of blood. Danaë will never encounter them, or not while they live, at any rate—not in the flesh.

Wiping her hands on her trousers, she admonishes herself for this new breed of melancholy. What is flesh, anyway? Flesh always becomes something else. It becomes rot, puthein, like the name of that serpentine monster Apollo left to stink in the sun at Delphi. Or it becomes stone, like the daughter of Tantalus. Flesh can be stitched into a hero’s armor or pasted on his shield or flown above his troops in battle. It is the material of Nature’s craftsmanship, and heroes’, which is only a little above nature. There’s something vaguely agricultural about heroism, she decides: taking what comes out of the earth, out of the body, and putting it to another purpose.

But farmers need tools, and tools need inventors. And inventors need material.

As a child, she loved the rosy glow of copper. She grew into a magpie, and the list of baubles that caught her eye soon ran the length of the market: silver chains and bronze shields and glass marbles and felt hats and clay pipes and paper crowns. Other children gathered driftwood or smooth pebbles from the mud. These held no interest for her: what she loved was the work of mortal hands.

All that myth remembers of her is a powerful attachment to gold.

• • • •

Her visitor’s name is not important. He was beautiful, and he charmed her creatures and filled her Tower with the scent of wealth, and she made love to him in fact or metaphor. In some stories, he was the king’s brother; in others, a god. He was at best a catalyst, like the Oracle’s answer that brings a great empire to ruin. In any case, he isn’t there when the mob storms her workshop and finds the boy and hammers her into the casket.

She could have argued with them, she supposes. It’s not a weapon, only a man. Not even a man, only a boy. No, not a child, it’s just a plaything—a bored woman’s show of cleverness, a toy to delight the king. But would this have been any better? They have seen the damage her cleverness can do. Is a woman who builds deadly toys any better than one who hammers weapons, or who conceives exceptional offspring?

Mothers fair poorly in these stories: Look at Metis, or Semele, or poor perverted Pasiphaë. But craftsmen do little better. Ask Daedalus, whose first sin was building Ariadne’s dancing-ground, about the dangers of royal recreation. He’s up there now, somewhere above the Aegean, flapping his wax wings.

He is luckier than Danaë in one respect: His prison had a window large enough to fit through.

Through all her days at the workbench, she maintained her posture meticulously. Now the roof of the casket presses on her skull, driving her chin against her collarbone. One arm is trapped across her legs, pinned by her thigh and the roof of the casket, while the other rests between Perseus and one wooden wall. Discomfort turns to agony, then to a liquid numbness creeping in towards her spine. Her gut and her blood and her eyeballs seem to slosh about with the rocking of the sea. And yes, she thinks—curved almost fetal in her casket, her brass boy cradled between her bicep and her breast, bruising her ribs with every jostle of the waves—yes, her visitor was clever: very psychologically astute. There’s a comfort to be found in being the most monstrous thing in the dark. But then you get locked in a box, with only your hideous self for company.

She lets the rage run through her, rising with each wave. Thinks of Io and Europa, borne helpless over the sea; thinks of dancers at the disco, loving and arguing with the same people every night, worse than wind-up soldiers. For once she was willing to play along—but where did it get her? Where does complacency get any mortal? The Gods are perverse.

Announcing this to the darkness, to the metal boy at her side, Danaë conceives an idea.

• • • •

The waves cast them onto a bitter little island called Seriphos, dotted with rude tin-roofed fishermen’s huts and the dry, gaping throats of mine shafts. Iron and copper in the soil make the ground show red between tangles of uncultivated green. Perseus lifts Danaë from the casket, sets her on the metallic earth and begins to chafe feeling into her limbs. She winces against the pain, clenching her fingers through the sand, making it smell of blood.

As soon as she can walk, they make their way to the palace. It seems only a little grander than the fishermen’s huts—built of the same dull clay, roofed with the same tin. The king, a gigantic man, sits on what looks like a milkmaid’s stool; his thighs are twice as wide as the throne, and the lowness of the seat displays them well, all sinew and coiled tension.

Danaë’s legs tremble as she bows, but the walk from the beach has revived her a little, and she does not need Perseus to hold her upright. She knows enough to be grateful for this. She recognizes the look on Polydectes’s broad, sunburned face, having seen it often enough in her own mirror—nostrils flared, as though weakness has a scent he could track.

“What do you want?” he demands. Looking her over, he sees nothing worth taking; not for him, the charms of a pleasant nose and straight teeth, nor even a quick and glittering eye.

“I want to give you a gift,” she says, clasping her hands behind her back. “A plaything fit for a king.”

He turns now to Perseus, and his face takes on a more thoughtful cast. The nostrils flatten, the blue-painted lids lower as the eyes scan Perseus’s long limbs and wide, gleaming chest. This, they seem to say, is indeed fitting. Polydectes moistens his lips.

Danaë catches her rising smile and tucks it down beneath her tongue. “No,” she says. “This is a child’s toy compared to what I have in mind, your majesty. I’ll send him to Libya in pursuit of a truly royal gift. But first, I must find him a weapon.”

“Do you know where you are, woman?” He slaps a hand against the hard slab of his thigh. “The smiths of Seriphos are beyond praising. You can find any weapon you desire on this island, and no better anywhere else in Greece.” Now he frowns, or leers; it is difficult to tell which. “I see no need to send to Libya for any gift.”

“It is a rare and wonderful artifact, my king.”

Polydectes shakes his head at this strange, stubborn woman. What do you think he sees when he looks at her? She’s no beauty; her complexion, long sun-starved and hearth-seared, has gone gray with the days at sea, and her hair has thinned with hunger. She stands straight, but there’s a tremor in her muscles that even Polydectes can’t mistake for awe. All is not well with her. Does he see a cunning woman in that sharp, glittering gaze? And if he does, what does a woman’s cunning mean to him? Is she a sorceress? Or is she a seductress, an adventurer, a con?

“My smiths can make any wonderful thing you imagine,” he says softly. “Tell them what you have in mind, woman. There’s no reason to send to Libya.”

Danaë has grown bored of this. She drops her clasped hands and straightens her shoulders, though they ache as though iron nails have been driven between her bones. She tosses her head, ignoring the sickness that the gesture sends rolling through her gut.

“I am the finest craftsman in the world,” she says. In this stone hall, her own voice sounds strange to her; she is used to it echoing off of metal walls. Her words seem rougher here, like ore wrenched from the earth, and she finds that she likes the effect. “My works put Daedalus and Hephaestus to shame. I have made Sirens that sing and owls that hunt, and mice that hide from the owls. I have made snakes that hatch from eagle’s eggs and swans that give birth to serpents. I built a pack of wolves whose feats will terrify the Argives for generations to come. And I tell you, most merciful king of Seriphos, that the gift I mean to fetch for you is greater than anything my hands can build.”

It is a risk. Honesty is always a risk—honesty to a king, doubly so. But she hasn’t misjudged Polydectes; he respects strength and boldness above all.

“Very well.” He throws his smile at her like a gambler flinging his cards at his opponent, unsure if the hand will win or cost him the game, but knowing it will do one or the other. “We will give your boy a sword and a ship. But if what he brings back does not impress me, woman, I will cut off your hands.”

She bows again. Perseus follows her lead, lowering those unblinking lapis eyes.

“We have nothing to fear,” she says. She even manages, for a moment, to believe it.

And then, time stops.

In Seriphos, the waves freeze on the sea. Beyond the bare doorway of Polydectes’s throne room, the weeds stand fixed on the hillside, twisted like snakes. A seabird hovers like an ink stain on the petrifyingly blue sky. The past and future that ripple behind her, the genealogy she wears like a cloth around her neck, the monsters advancing on princesses and women fleeing monsters and queens speaking foolishly or wisely—she feels all of it snap in her brain like a wire stretched too thin, and the blood rushes from her head.

As she faints, she can hear the Gods laughing.

• • • •

In her fever, she dreams of the Minotaur.

They are walking the labyrinth together, she and this half-brother of her distant cousins—another monster she’ll never meet in the flesh. In her dream she can feel his bullish heat, can taste a strange combination of cowhide and human sweat in the air. The dream-labyrinth is full of lapis-colored flies; the Minotaur blinks them away with his beautiful eyelashes, but she must shoo them with her hands, brushing her cheeks and forehead like a woman smoothing her wrinkles in a mirror. Their buzzing hurts her head.

Meanwhile, the Minotaur is speaking to her in a human voice. It sounds exactly like her visiting stranger’s. They even smell alike, she realizes: milk and fig, sweet and smooth.

“I’ve been thinking,” the monster says, “about the difference between myself and a Gorgon.”

“Theseus kills one and Perseus kills the other,” Danaë mumbles, pushing a fly from her lip. Fever has flattened her brain, and she must pluck hard to grab hold of any thread. “One with golden string, the other with a bronze shield.”

He looks offended, or as offended as a bull’s head can look. “Pardon me. And what kills you, Danaë? A brass pin, perhaps? The stories never say.”

She flinches. She’s mortal enough for that, even in a dream.

“I deserved that,” she admits. “So what is it, this difference between you?”

“You already know. You sent your boy to collect it.” Clop, clop, clop—his human feet make a sound like hooves. “It’s all in the head. Cut off my head and I’m nothing. A human body, a bull’s head. Two ordinary things, nothing monstrous about them.”

If she were less feverish, or if this were more solid than a dream, Danaë would attempt to chart the path they’re following—left here, right there, left and left again. But she suspects it would be fruitless. They may as well be walking in circles. “A Gorgon’s head is still a Gorgon,” she replies. “It still makes things happen.”

“You might call it a weapon.”

“I might call it a tool.”

He snorts, a cold and heavy sound. “Once upon a time,” he says, “if you wanted something, you transformed.” He points to the wall beside them and she realizes it’s painted with a mural: Argus the thousand-eyed keeping watch over Io, a white cow chained to an olive tree. Their shared ancestor, more or less. “You wanted a girl, you turned into a bull, or she did. You wanted safety, you turned into a river or a tree. But things are different now that mortals are more cunning. You want a bull, you build a mechanical cow. You want safety, you build a Tower, or a labyrinth.”

She smiles grimly. “If you want a dead king, you find the tool to make one.”

“If it’s really a dead king you want. Personally, I suspect you’re more ambitious.”

They are still walking in the labyrinth but the ceiling has vanished. The flies drift off of their faces and float into the sky, where they stick in constellations. Yes, there is the Bull, her companion’s father—and there, just above him, is Perseus, arm raised to grip an invisible sword. Flies into stars into heroes. She looks down again, fighting vertigo, and realizes that they are standing on Daedalus’s first creation: the dancing-floor of Ariadne.

“The birthing of monsters is complicated,” the Minotaur muses. “Look at my mother. To make a hero, you just follow the path, but to make a monster, you need to fuck up somewhere. You have to offend a God. You have to go against fate, but only for a turn—a short twist in the path. Anything more and they’ll destroy you outright.”

Danaë crouches, her legs still trembling with sea-cramp, and runs one hand through the soil, tracing the maze’s curve. Crete must be like Seriphos—there must be copper in the earth—because she smells blood when she touches the ground. Or maybe it is blood, the smell of a sacrifice: throats cut, pins pulled. A future suicide dancing in her labyrinth.

When Danaë’s mother was pregnant, she developed a craving for metal. Eurydice, that mysterious footnote in the Argive genealogy—for we know almost nothing about her, except that she was the daughter of the founders of Sparta—wanted to eat brass, copper, iron. She went into the king’s guardhouses and licked the weapons, wandered into his treasury and chewed on the jewelry. She sliced her tongue on the sharp edges. Finally, in desperation, she sent for an Argive butcher, who brought her a wineskin full of cow’s blood.

Yes, Danaë thinks, smelling the metal on her fingers: the birthing of monsters is complicated. And to birth oneself monstrous—is that not an even harder task? That takes a bit of work. That requires a bit of cunning.

• • • •

She wakes with a jolt on a rope cot in the back of Polydectes’s palace. The smell of metal is still there, mingling with salt and bitter greenery, but something underneath it stinks of rot and wet rock. The house of Polydectes is silent as a grave. She raises herself on one arm and glances down the long, narrow room.

It is lined with hideous statues.

Danaë sets her bare feet on the floor and rises carefully. There in the shadows, almost unnoticeable against the drab clay wall, Perseus stands with a velvet bag cradled in his arms. She passes him, walking from statue to statue; she traces the curves of jawbones and rounded cheeks, touches frozen eyes and parted lips. In all her days, she has never seen such fear captured on human faces. So many names for the things she builds—daidala, agalmata, xoana—but this will be her masterpiece. This is a divine production: nature into nature, flesh into stone.

When she reaches the end of the line, she returns to Perseus and lifts the bag from his hands—carefully, so as not to disturb the drawstring. Through the soft material she can feel the bones of a woman’s face, the curve of an eye socket, the loose hinge of a jaw. Above those, the dense, fibrous coils of snakes.

Something rises in her chest. It takes her a moment to recognize the feeling as pride.

• • • •

That night, on the ship back to Argos, she drags her mattress onto the deck and sits out under the stars. It is late summer and the meteors are flying through her creature’s constellation. Perseus stands silently in the bow, and the Gorgon’s head rests between her feet, sheathed in velvet. It will have brutal work to do when they reach the Argive court.

Yes, to make oneself the most frightening thing in the darkness—that is not an easy task. But a clever woman makes do. Danaë smiles to herself.

Although it occurs to her, in a flash like the laughter of the Gods, that she will never again sleep soundly without the rocking of the waves.

©2018 by Megan Arkenberg. Originally published in Making Monsters: A Speculative and Classical Anthology, edited by Emma Bridges and Djibril al-Ayad. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Megan Arkenberg‘s work has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies, including Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. She has edited the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance since 2008. She currently lives in Northern California, where she’s pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. Visit her online at www.meganarkenberg.com.

Refuge

Ben Peek | 6573 words

Dear Mr. Quilas,

This morning, I began to read your new collection of essays, Forgotten Lives. I’ve enjoyed a number of your books previously, but this collection held a particular interest for me. Aned Heast, the subject of your third essay, “A Refuge in Juar,” held a personal interest and I looked forward to reading your piece about him. Sadly, I was disappointed. Your essay was riddled with misinformation and errors.

I’m sure you do not wish to be told that. Few writers want to be told they are wrong. Few people, in fact. One of the truths I’ve discovered in life is that many of us go to extraordinary lengths to avoid acknowledging our errors. I hope you are not such a person, Mr. Quilas. I hope you do not tear this letter up, or burn it. As I said, I have enjoyed your books. I think you’re a very fine historian. It is not my intent to chastise you or belittle you. Rather, I would like to help you get to know your subject.

I suppose if we are to continue, introductions are in order. My name is Laena Kae. Once, I was an author. I’ll not flatter myself and suggest that you have heard of me. I know you haven’t. My books have been out of print for at least twenty years and, when in print, they were mostly ignored. Nowadays, I am mostly retired from writing. I manage a letter or two like this one I am writing to you, but that is about it. I live in the Mountains of Ger. I own a small cottage there with my wife. We have a garden that grows too much for us and animals that demand too much of our attention. Two days a week, I work in the University of Mireea. I help visiting academics with their research. It is easy to get lost in the library, I am told.

Before I came to the Mountains of Ger, I led a very different life. Before, I was the official biographer of Captain Aned Heast, your essay’s subject.

I took the position in 1025, just over forty years ago. At the time, I was twenty-seven and very ambitious. I had to be. If I hadn’t been, I would’ve never gotten the job. As strange as it is to write now, given how few people remember him, there were once many academics and authors who wanted to be the official biographer of Aned Heast.

Heast’s objection to them all was simple. He did not want people to write about him. He thought there were better topics and more deserving people for writers to spend our time on. Indeed, Heast’s opinion was so firm in this regard that he would have declined my services if the soldiers he led had not supported my request.

I rode beside Captain Heast and his army, Refuge, for over a decade. After a while, I came to think of myself as one of them. I was taught how to fight. I saw parts of the world I didn’t know existed. I witnessed tragedies and sacrifice. I made friends and enemies. I watched people die and in turn, I killed people. And throughout it all, I learned about Aned Heast, a man whose struggle was not with one particular country, or person, but whose fight was against the shape of the world we lived in—a shape we all played a part in forming.

• • • •

In your essay, Mr. Quilas, you write that Heast was born in Gogair in 960. In fact, he was in born in 964. Likewise, you said he was an orphan, but he did not grow up in an orphanage. His parents were Jara and Maez Heast. They were horse breakers. They died in a fire in 971. After that, Heast lived with his aunt and uncle. His uncle was a blacksmith and Heast was his reluctant apprentice for five years. At the age of twelve, he took what he’d learned from his uncle and got a job with the mercenary army, Refuge.

Heast told me that he did not really understand what Refuge was. He said that in our first interview. At the age of twelve, he could read, but not well, and he knew very little about local politics, much less the world. What he did know was that Refuge was an army that people hired. He knew it had no loyalty to any country and no home to speak of. It was enough for him. What he mainly cared about was that Refuge was leaving Gogair. In the diaries of the two officers who accepted Heast’s application, the first noted that he was polite and that he was fit. The second said that he would require training in arms if he was to become a soldier in their army. Neither of the two officers saw a hint of the man who would, fifteen years later, become the youngest Captain of Refuge.

In the first year of Heast’s captaincy, Refuge defended a crumbling port in Tinalan against the Mad King’s army for six months. It is estimated that two thousand people were able to flee the purges taking place because of them. After that, Refuge drove the Great Horde of Ilaro Kato out of the Spires of Yaela, freeing it and its people from a despotic ruler for the first time in a decade. He then routed the Lords of Faaisha when they rode against the pacifist tribes on the Plateau in 995.

And in 997, Aned Heast led Refuge into Illate, where they were defeated by The Five Queens of Ooila.

He was presumed dead until he arrived in the town Juar, in the country Zoatia, six months later.

You were right, Mr. Quilas, to pick this moment in Heast’s life as the focus of your essay. It does define him. However, you were wrong when you wrote that Heast rode into the drought-stricken town. He walked. He didn’t own a horse, not then. He was broke. He’d lost everything in Illate. All that he owned he now carried. A sword that was nicked and chipped. Clothes that were a faded mix of black, gray, and white. A pack that was made from tough canvas and patched in places. Inside was an ugly knife and a few coins. One of the coins was made from iron, a currency mostly illegal by then.

When Heast reached the gates of Juar, he had not eaten for a day. He still had water, but it would run out before nightfall. Worst of all, though, was that Heast was tired. It was an acknowledgement he feared making in full. Once, he’d been able to march for months on scraps of food and soakings of water and very little sleep. But by the time he pushed open Juar’s unguarded gate, he knew that time was over. He was parched, hungry, and struggling awfully with his leg.

He had lost his left leg in the Battle of Illate. The witch, Anemone, had been forced to amputate it above the knee. A blacksmith whose name Heast never mentioned made him a unique metal replacement. But it was also heavy and awkward and Heast was not used to it. He no longer needed a cane, or a crutch to help himself walk, but he could not make his way through the world as well or easily as he’d once done. In the years that followed Juar, Heast would accept his new stride, accept it as part of him as much as his weathered face and sharp blue eyes. But on that day, he’d not accepted it. He was frustrated by his limp, tired by the weight of it, and more than a little full of self-loathing.

Juar fell around Heast, a physical replication of how he felt about himself, tired and rundown. There weren’t any people to be seen, but there were signs that until recently, the streets had been busy. The ground was torn up by wagons. He stepped around the dried shit of horses. The buildings he passed were wide open. Chairs and bottles and dirty plates could be seen, speckled with flies and other insects. It surprised him. Many of the drought-ridden towns he’d walked through on the way to Juar had been abandoned and boarded up, but that work had been done with a care and attention that spoke of a desire the townsfolk had to return.

About a quarter of the way into the town, Heast heard the voices of children. They came from ahead of him, from where a trio of wells had been dug.

After a while, a dozen children between the ages of eight and thirteen appeared. They had an old bucket attached to rope and were dipping it into one of the wells to pull up dirty water. Heast could see that it was dirty because they poured it into bottles at their feet. As a whole, the kids were a mix of gender and skin colour, being black and brown and white, but that was typical of Zoatia and its population. What was not typical was the children’s clothes. None of them fit right. They were too big, too small, ripped, and badly patched.

And none of them wore shoes.

The children watched Heast warily as he approached. He stopped half a dozen steps in front of them and asked politely where the inn was.

A girl answered him. He thought she was about ten, but she might have been eleven or twelve. She was thin and brown and had short dark hair. Her eyes were bold, though. There was a cut above one of them, the left one, long enough and deep enough that it would scar. It’d been made with a knife.

“Everyone stays in the orphanage,” the girl said. “Ostir makes us all stay there. He says no one can be just running around anymore.”

Heast had a lot questions, but instead he asked, “Where’s the orphanage?”

“I can show you.” She looked around at the other children. “But you’ve got to promise not to tell Ostir where we were.”

“Where were you?”

“Here.”

“Where?”

“At the well—” She broke off suddenly and offered him a suffering smile. “Funny.”

She led Heast down the road after that, led him past more tracks, more shit, and more open buildings. After a while, he turned to look at the wells again, to where the children had been picking up the bottles of water, and found them gone.

The orphanage was off the main road, down a few empty streets. It was a great big building, the oldest thing in the town. It’d been made from brick and stone and had once been a church, or so Heast suspected. It was true then, Mr. Quilas, as it is true now, that a lot of the buildings that were used to worship the gods when they were alive remained standing. The practice of planning towns around such buildings was an old one, even when Heast walked through Juar. He supposed that people thought it made them safer, that somehow a god’s power remained within it, but he admitted later that the thought might just be cynicism on his part. Because of the size of the orphanage, Heast would’ve found it without the girl’s help, but he was grateful for her guidance once inside. It was a labyrinth of halls that led to different floors and yards and he knew he would’ve gotten lost by himself.

The girl led Heast into a courtyard where a man rested on a sagging wicker chair in the shade. He had a glass of watered red wine next to him and a book face down in his lap. He was a big, solid white man, and he wore a dirty yellow robe. The slit in it revealed brown canvas pants. His boots, Heast saw, were a thick, solid leather, soldier’s boots.

“Who do you have there, Zafne?” the man asked, turning lazily as they approached. “I didn’t think we were expecting anyone today.”

“He didn’t tell me his name,” the girl said. “He just said he was looking for a room for the night.”

“I’ve money,” Heast said.

“Do you now?” He rose easily from his seat and held out his hand. “My name is Ostir Liss. I run this orphanage.”

“Aned Heast.”

Ostir’s handshake lost its strength. “The Captain of Refuge?”

“I’ve had that honour,” Heast said and released the other man’s hand. “But I don’t have it any longer.”

“I’d heard that you’d all died in Illate,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind me asking. There’s a story—”

“Maybe we could talk about it later? I’d like to find a room more than anything. I’ve walked here from the coast.”

“Of course. My apologies. My manners have dried up like the land you see. We’ve a room you can have. It’s not much, but you’ll have been in worse.” Ostir turned to the girl who was still standing beside Heast. “Zafne, you can go back to your friends. I’ll show Aned to his room.” The girl hesitated. Her attention had changed dramatically after Heast said his name. He thought it likely that she’d read one of those cheap novels about Refuge, the ones with garish yellow covers. The books were quite popular during Heast’s life, much to his disgust. In them, he and his now dead soldiers rode over cliffs without injury and said witty lines of dialogue to characterise themselves after they killed black-hearted villains. “Did you find Zafne out at the well with her friends?” Ostir asked after the girl had disappeared into the labyrinth of the orphanage.

“No, she was sitting on the stairs of the building,” Heast said. “I thought the town was deserted until I saw her.”

“That must be the first time she’s done the right thing since I’ve known her.” Ostir led the two of them into the hallway. “Ah, don’t mind me. She’s a smart girl, but I get cranky. The drought has made life hard.”

“But not impossible?”

“I guess that depends on who you ask. Nearly everyone left a week ago, but for me and the orphans here.”

“Why not take them and leave yourself?”

“And go where? I’ve no money myself.” Ostir attempted to sound casual, but his voice had a strained quality that caused it to echo strangely in the stairwell. Heast had heard the tone before in people with secrets to hide—and he knew Ostir Liss had secrets to hide. “But enough of that. We have two meals we share, breakfast and dinner. You’re welcome to join us for as long as you’re here.”

“It won’t be more than a few days,” Heast said. “But thank you.”

“The world is but a vision of what we’ve made. Isn’t that what the soldiers of Refuge say? I think I have it right.”

Through a window Heast could see a hill floating in the sky. It was broken and dry, torn out by a god thousands of years ago. There were three dead trees on it, dead like so many others he had passed on the road, like so much in his past. “There is no Refuge anymore,” he said quietly. “There’s just me.”

• • • •

What does a soldier become if he is no longer part of an army?

Aned Heast was thirty-three when he arrived in Juar. His entire adult life had been defined by the mercenary army, Refuge.

But there was no Refuge anymore. Heast had not lied when he told Ostir that. The banner that Refuge fought beneath would not be raised by a full army again until 1024. In the years before then, numerous captains would try to acquire the insignia to capitalise on its reputation, but Heast would never sell it.

The insignia of Refuge is not complex. It is split in half, the top of it coloured red, the bottom black. In the middle, there is an uncoloured map shaped in a globe. It is there, however, that Refuge became complex. The army has existed in one form or another for generations. The first iteration is said to have begun in the War of the Gods, thousands of years ago. Others claim that Refuge existed before even the war that ruined so much of our world, that broke our sun and turned our ocean black. Those people insist that Refuge was the creation of the God of War himself, that it was one of two armies he made to roam the world and engage in endless wars. Regardless of when or how it began, Refuge’s captains have always been keenly aware of the shifting landscape that they have existed in. Because of this, the map on Refuge’s insignia has changed as readily as explorers have found new parts of the world and cartographers like Samuel Orlan have added more details to world we know.

Refuge still exists. You note this in your essay, Mr. Quilas. You speak eloquently about the importance of the army. It was how you spoke about the world’s need for Refuge that convinced me to write to you, to correct your mistakes, when I might as easily have done nothing and complained to my wife instead of writing this letter. After all, Aned Heast is not the first Captain of Refuge to disappear from history. Few people remember Captain Denali, Captain Xanan, or Captain Ibori. To some degree, it is understandable. After all, it is not Captain Denali who destroys Gogair’s slave fleet, but Refuge. It is not Captain Xanan who rides into Ooila to confront the Innocent, but Refuge. It is not Captain Ibori who defends the lost royals of Faer, but Refuge.

But few captains have embodied Refuge like Aned Heast. All of the captains who came before him and who came after him have their own individual reputations, but none distilled the ideals of Refuge like Heast did. As a measure of the fear he struck in the rich and powerful, it is estimated that, in the last decade of his life, seventy-eight different assassination attempts were made.

• • • •

The young girl Zafne knocked on Heast’s door later that evening in Juar. The last of the broken sun was still up, but the first two parts were long gone. Somewhere before midnight, it would start to get dark, but that was hours away.

Heast had spent much of the afternoon asleep on a narrow bed. It had been a light sleep. His hand had never left the hilt of his ugly knife beneath the pillow.

He still held it when he opened the door.

“Ostir sent me,” Zafne said. “He said for me to bring you down to dinner. Did you drink any of the water?”

The clay jug was on the room’s one table. “No,” Heast said. “Should I have?”

She shook her head, but only just.

Heast did not press her. He didn’t need to. A young boy had brought the jug of water into his room while he slept. When the door opened, Heast had awoken, but had continued to lay still. The boy was white and skinny and wore a shirt that revealed a series of welts and cuts across his back. At the table, he spilt a little of the water when he put the jug down. It splashed over his hand. Without pause, the boy rubbed his hand frantically on the shirt and rushed out of the room, pulling the door loudly shut as he did.

In front of Zafne, Heast slipped his ugly knife under his shirt. She watched him do it without a word.

She led him through a new series of turning corridors and down a set of stairs into a large common room. She never rushed ahead of him, though Heast knew she was much faster than he was, and he appreciated that. Inside the common room there were nine tables. They were all long and they all had benches on both sides. The tables would’ve sat twenty or so people easily but only one was in use now, one in the middle.

Ostir sat there with nineteen ragged children around him. Heast recognised many of them from the well in the middle of town.

They sat quietly, but not peaceably. Many looked uncomfortable, hunched over the tables, or squirming to keep still. Very few looked at Heast or Zafne when they entered.

Zafne took a seat on one of the benches first. Children parted for her, made a spot that appeared to be her own. She was one of the few watching when Heast lifted his steel leg awkwardly over the opposite bench and pulled out his ugly knife. He set the knife down on the table before he sat down next to Ostir.

“You didn’t need to bring your own knife,” the other man said.

All the children were watching now. “I killed a man in Gogair with this knife,” Heast said, lifting the blade up. Its steel was the width of an adult’s palm and discoloured. The crosspiece was a simple piece of bronze, but it had lost all its shine. The handle had old, sweat-stained leather wrapped around it. “It was his. He owned it. He was a slaver. I must’ve been fifteen, maybe sixteen at the time. Not much older than those here. The slaver thought he could put a chain on me and take me to a market to sell.”

Ostir motioned for the food to be passed around. “The children don’t need more horror stories. They’ve heard enough already.”

He laid the knife back on the table. “Have they?”

“They have. And I’ve heard a lot of stories about you, Aned, but none of them—not one of them said you like to scare children.”

“I’m not here to scare children.”

“Then please show some restraint at the dinner table.” Ostir’s hand trembled slightly as he passed a bowl over. “I’m not trying to be rude, you understand. Why don’t you tell us why you came to Juar?”

The food was fresher than Heast thought it had a right to be. The water on the table was clean too, much cleaner than what the children had pulled from the wells. “I have a friend who lives in this town,” he said. “Well, lived, I guess. She sent a letter to me about a month ago inviting me to stay with her for a bit.”

Ostir forced a laugh. “A lover? That’s not fit for children either, I’m afraid. We’ll be forced to sing songs at this rate.”

“What was her name?” Zafne asked.

The table fell silent. Half the children stared at their plates, while the other half were torn between the girl and the two men opposite her. Before Heast could answer, Ostir stood and said, “This isn’t what we should be talking about,” but Heast did not turn his gaze away from Zafne. He saw the wound on her forehead again, saw how part of its scab had been torn off, as if she had been struck by someone.

“Ola Kidar,” he said.

No one said anything. Even Ostir’s voice failed him.

“She’s my mother,” Zafne said finally, said in a whisper. “She said she was going to write to you. She said you would—”

“Zafne!” Ostir found his voice harshly. “I think that is well and truly enough from you. You know better. You’ll only upset the other children.”

“—she said you would come,” the girl continued. “She said everyone deserves refuge.”

Ostir began to speak again, began to reach for his full plate, to throw it at her, or shatter it on the ground, Heast wasn’t sure what exactly, but it didn’t matter. The man’s words never found their way out of him. Heast’s ugly knife punched into his stomach. Heast, his hand still on the knife’s hilt, but with one hand grabbing the back of Ostir’s robe, tore the knife through his stomach, ripped it open with such sudden violence that its contents spilt out across the table. All of the children in front of him, Zafne included, screamed.

Not long after that, Ostir Liss, one of the founding members of the mercenary group Solitude, died.

• • • •

It is with some sadness that I note that your essay does not contain this scene, Mr Quilas. Instead, you write that Ostir Liss fled Juar in the evening.

I can understand why you did not learn about what happened in the orphanage. Aned Heast was a man many admired, but a man who kills another in front of children so bloodily and so violently . . . Well, he is not to be admired. Yet, it is true. Heast told me so himself. He saw nothing wrong with what he did. He called it justice. Whenever I remember his words, I think of how complex the human spirit is, Mr. Quilas. It is a gray thing, shaded darker and lighter here and there, a spirit that will always surprise and disappoint.

Ola Kidar sent Heast a letter two weeks before he arrived in Juar. Heast did not know how she found him. He did not ask. In his experience, people in need found the Captain of Refuge one way or another. In her letter, Ola described how a weary and battle scarred Solitude arrived at Juar a month earlier. At first, she wrote, the mercenaries were welcomed. The two co-founders of Solitude, Ostir Liss and Baelst Finn, had been born in the town. Ola remembered both from her childhood. None of the other soldiers in Solitude had been born in Juar, but a number had been born in Zoatia. There were close to eighty soldiers, Ola estimated. They were frequently drunk, unhappy, and given to argument. Yet, when Ostir and Baelst gave orders to take over the town, the soldiers of Solitude followed them.

Heast was on the other side of Zoatia when Ola Kidar’s letter arrived. If you look at a map, go to the city of D’jnak in the north. It is one of Zoatia’s largest cities. Heast was but two hours from it, on a drought-ridden piece of land that a friend owned. From it, Heast could’ve walked to D’jnak much easier than he walked to Juar. In it, he could’ve found soldiers waiting to be hired.

But Heast did not go to the city.

Instead, he took food from the farmhouse and a sword that was not his own from the back of the building, and left.

It was dark when Heast stepped outside. He did not tell those who were with him that he was leaving. He did not tell the witch, Anemone, who had been caring for him. He did not thank the friend on whose property he had been resting. He did not ask Baeh Lok, the sergeant who carried him from the battlefield in Illate, for help.

He simply left.

I asked Heast why he went to Juar by himself, but he could not explain it. Once, he said he’d been gripped by a madness. After his defeat in Illate, he said, after nearly all of Refuge had died, the world had become like soft prison around him. He would push at it and it would move with him. Nothing broke. Nothing split. Nothing allowed him to escape his grief and shame. He thought that both Anemone and Lok were caught in a similar prison. It was why they did not stop him when he left. They both would’ve heard him leave. He was sure of that. Just as he was sure that they would’ve both known where he was going. “I guess you could say we were all looking for a way out,” Heast told me. “One way or another, Juar was mine.”

In Juar, Heast dragged Ostir out of the common room. Once the body was gone, the children, led by Zafne, told him that Baelst Finn and Solitude had left the town a week ago with twelve wagons full of townsfolk, including their parents. The soldiers had argued with each other beforehand. Some of them didn’t want to leave. Some didn’t want to take the townsfolk with them. Some of them thought they should bring the children. In the end, Baelst shouted orders and they fell into line. The only one who remained behind was Ostir. He told the parents that if they tried anything, he would kill their children.

Heast couldn’t run. He would have, if he’d had enough mounts for him and the children, but he didn’t. Worse, Zafne had shown him the cells that Solitude had made in a number of the buildings. They weren’t anything special, just holes dug into the ground, but they were big enough to hold another hundred children and a dozen adults who were too old to be taken to the slave market. In the pits were the dirty bottles that the children had been filling by the wells when Heast walked into town.

He needed a plan.

You had only a very little of it right, Mr. Quilas.

• • • •

In the morning, Heast took Ostir’s wicker chair outside the gate. There, with the first part of the broken sun high in the sky, he pushed the legs into the dirt and sat down.

He could see Solitude clearly on the horizon. They were a ragged line of silhouettes riding beneath a piece of broken, floating land. There were fewer than he thought there would be. He counted forty-three, maybe forty-six, but not the eighty odd he’d been expecting. There had clearly been a split in the market. Heast wondered what Baelst and his remaining soldiers would think when they saw Refuge’s banners fluttering from the walls. Hopefully, they would think that Refuge had survived Illate.

Normally, Heast was a patient man. On that day, though, he couldn’t keep his hands still. It was his first battle since he had lost his leg. To disguise his nerves, he took out his ugly knife and sharpened it on a whetstone.

Heast was not afraid to die. The sentiment was different from wanting to die. The truth was that Heast had seen too much death to fear it. When he slept, he often dreamed about the Battle of Illate, about being carried off the field, and about the bone saw the witch pulled from her bag. It was the last two that woke him, not the deaths of his soldiers. Over the last two decades, he had come to accept that soldiers died, no matter how hard it was for him, or for their families.

But there were the children.

They would not be killed if Solitude opened the gates, Heast knew. They would simply be subdued and taken to the slave market their parents had been sold at.

On the horizon, two riders detached themselves from the ragged column and rode towards Heast. After a while, he could make them out. The first of them was a lean black woman. She had shaved her head clean and had a series of piercings in her nose and ears. Heast didn’t recognise her, but he thought, as she drew closer, that she recognised him. The other rider was a white man running slightly towards fat. He had thick, greasy black hair and bright blue eyes.

Before they reached him, Heast hit the wall of Juar with the base of his ugly knife. A moment later, the sound of marching began to seep out.

The riders stopped in front of him a few minutes later.

“This him, Jaz?” the man asked.

“Yes,” the woman responded without hesitation.

“Aned Heast.” The man slid off his horse with a practiced ease. “The Captain of Refuge. I had heard you were dead.”

Heast laid his knife flat on the stone. “You must be Baelst Finn?”

“My fame precedes me.” The Captain of Solitude laughed. There was a hint of pleasure in the laugh, a pleasure born of arrogance. “I have to say, you look like a man who is half dead. What do you reckon, Jaz? This a man who looks like he has had one foot in a grave?”

“All you white people look like that,” she said. “The Captain is no different than when I last saw him.”

“Even the leg?” Baelst took a step toward. “If you want to hide that you’ve lost your leg, you gonna have to do—”

“I wouldn’t get close,” Jaz said.

“No?” He glanced at Heast’s ugly knife and laughed again, but this time, the laugh had no pleasure in it. “No, I suppose you’re right. He does have a reputation for being a bit unpredictable. Still, I have to ask, Aned. I really do, because you see, you’re sitting here. You look like a ghost. You really do look like a man half dead. Did you and your soldiers really survive that forsaken country you rode into?”

“Just lost a leg,” Heast said, pointing his dagger towards it. “It slows me down a little. I don’t march as fast, or put up a banner as quickly.”

“Yes.” Baelst didn’t follow the knife, but kept his gaze on the man opposite him. “I can hear the marching. I saw the banners as well. Though, truth to tell, the march sounds a little off and your banners look a little ragged.”

“So do your soldiers. I thought you had more. More to put up a fight with. I don’t enjoy slaughter.”

“Slaughter?” Baelst’s hand dropped to the hilt of his sword. “Why don’t you go get Ostir before I cut you down you—”

“I want to hear what the Captain has to say,” Jaz said, interrupting. “Remember what was said before we came down.”

“What you said.” Yet Baelst lifted his hand from his sword. “I said Refuge was dead. I still say they’re all dead.”

“I want to know who you sold the people to.” Heast directed his words not to Baelst, but to Jaz. “You tell me who bought them, you can start earning back your honour when you ride from here.”

Baelst laughed. “Honour?”

“Soldiers don’t sell people. You and I, we’re in this profession to stop people owning other people. We fight to break cages. We die so others aren’t weighed down by chains. It’s on our honour to ensure that.”

“You really believe that shit, don’t you?” The Captain of Solitude spat into the dirt. “Maybe that’s what you say in Refuge. Maybe all that honour you’ve got keeps your bed warm and purse full. It doesn’t do anything for me. It doesn’t mean anything to Ostir, either, so why don’t you go get him before I cut you down.”

“Soldiers don’t sell people.” Heast pushed himself up stiffly. He was taller than Baelst, but not taller than the woman on the horse. “Isn’t that right, Jaz?”

Before she could reply, Juar’s gate cracked open.

Zafne stepped out.

The sound of the children marching inside the town rose. Like all of them, Zafne had changed into her own clothes, into the pants and shirt her mother had purchased her for special occasions earlier that year. In her hands, she held Ostir Liss’ boots. They hadn’t been cleaned since Heast had killed him.

“What is this?” Baelst paled. “You killed Ostir? You can’t do that. You’re not supposed to do that. You—”

A sword punched through his neck.

Jaz pulled her sword out and wiped it clean with a piece of cloth. As she did, the marching behind the walls missed a beat and stopped suddenly. With a glance, Jaz looked up at the banners again. Surely, Heast thought, she could see what they were made of, could see that they were bed sheets marked with paint, clay, and other materials that they’d used to make the red and black. Surely she could see that the colours weren’t right in places. But when Jaz turned back to Heast, she made no mention of banners, or of the flawed marching that was starting up again. Instead, she gave him the name of a slaver and his boat. “I’ll leave the carts and the gold on the road,” she said. “You can send your soldiers to gather them after we’re gone.”

Heast spent the next eighteen months hunting down all the townsfolk who had been sold into slavery. Zafne would accompany him until the end. Her mother was the last of the townsfolk to be found. The young woman would return with her mother to Juar, but only for a few more years. The world was too big for Zafne Kidar after that. She wanted to see more of it and she did. She became a mercenary herself and died at the age of twenty-two in the streets of Gogair. It was said that she died defending two runaway slaves, but I cannot tell you that with certainty, Mr. Quilas. Her mother told me the story when I visited her some years later. She only had the secondhand story she had been told. She told me it after she took me out to the grave of her daughter, a grave in a dry land on the edge of drought again.

No one would hear of Solitude after it left Juar. The remaining soldiers separated. Many of them would die in small and ugly skirmishes in the next half a dozen years, but a few would live on. Of the mercenary Jaz, there is no history I can point to that explains her end. In Leviathan’s End, where the details of mercenaries are kept, there is no record of her death. She has simply been lost to history, to people like you and I.

We have to be honest when that happens, Mr. Quilas. You and I, we are beholden to truth. In your article, you write that outside the walls of Juar, Heast duels Baelst and defeats him in single combat. You do not acknowledge his desperate plan, the long night spent creating banners, gathering tools that could function as poles, and organising children into formations that they could march in. Instead, you give over to a cheap cliché, that of duel outside of a town, a duel that Baelst Finn would never have agreed to participate in.

The truth is a delicate thing. When I was younger, I thought it was robust. I thought it would defeat all falsehoods if it was repeated enough. I thought that because I grew up hearing stories about how truth is always triumphant, but it isn’t, not really. The truth is fragile. It is easily altered by elaborations, deceits and simplifications. It so easily becomes a falsehood, a piece of misinformation, or outright propaganda. Yet, because it is presented to us as a truth, when we react to it, we react to it as if it were real. We base our actions and our beliefs on it when what we are doing is basing our lives on nothing—and it is against this nothingness that you and I must stand, Mr. Quilas, for I fear if we do not it will become the foundations of our world. Like Aned Heast, you and I must stand against the world we see others making.

I look forward to your reply,

Laena Kae.

©2020 by Ben Peek.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Peek is the author of seven books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Dimension Six, Nightmare Magazine, and various Year’s Best editions. He lives in Sydney, Australia.

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

What I Assume You Shall Assume

Ken Liu | 8468 words

Idaho Territory, Circa 1890

AMOS

The ray of light came over the eastern horizon like a sunrise, like the door to a dank jail cell cracking open, like the sweeping fiery sword before an angel of judgment. It elongated into a thin, bright, yellow wedge that washed out the stars and revealed the shining parallel tracks before it, dividing the vast, dark continent into halves, leaving behind the endless vegetal sea of the Great Plains and plunging heedlessly toward the craggy, ancient, impassive peaks of the Rockies.

Only then did the piercing cry of the steam whistle finally reach Amos Turner on the hill a half-mile away. His mass of untrimmed white beard and shaggy hair was momentarily illuminated, making his face—full of deep lines carved by the winds of many winters and summers spent in a saddle in the open—seem like a snow-capped mountain in the wilderness.

“Whoa,” Amos said, and patted Mustard’s neck as the mare snorted and skittered back a few steps. The ground trembled as the locomotive rushed by, pulling behind it cars laden with the goods and people of the East, contentedly dreaming of free land and fresh starts.

But to Amos, the train seemed a malignant serpent, a belching, unfeeling monster, a long and heavy chain that ended in shackles.

“Time to go on.”

Gently, he turned Mustard west and began the long journey into the unknown. Soon, the sound and light of the locomotive faded away, and he was again alone with his thoughts under a sky studded with brilliant stars, the way he preferred.

• • • •

The ponderosa pines and Douglas firs grew denser as the days passed. This used to be gold-mining country, and from time to time the horse and rider came upon abandoned mining camps next to streams, now full of the late spring meltwater. Some nights, Amos chose to camp in one of them, sitting alone amidst the abandoned shacks while he fed Mustard a handful of oats; chewed a rabbit leg or sipped venison stew; and puffed on his pipe long into the night as he sat by his lone fire, the light dancing against the shadowy cliffs of his face, the crackling of logs the only sound in the darkness.

This particular morning, the fog had rolled in, and Amos felt as though he and Mustard were floating in a sea. The deer trail that they had been following also seemed to dip and twist more than usual. Since he had no particular destination in mind, he allowed Mustard to go wherever she pleased.

“Slow down, girl,” Amos advised. “Don’t rush and hurt yourself.” He felt uneasy, being unable to see more than a few yards into the fog.

But Mustard liked the taste of the grasses and shoots along the trail, many of which were new to her, and she picked her way slowly through the mist and carefully sniffed each plant to be sure it wasn’t poisonous.

“Smart,” Amos said, leaning forward and lightly scratching her withers.

He looked up at the sky, trying to see the sun, but the fog refracted the light so that it came from every direction at once, and he could not tell east from west.

A passing breeze momentarily revealed a ghostly figure in the mist, like a fish seen through murky water.

“Who goes there?”

There was no response. Amos straightened in the saddle and reached for his Winchester. Is it a mule deer, a bear, or a Shoshoni hunter?

A stronger breeze tore away more of the mist, and a man appeared, standing between two trees. He was tall and lean, and there was a long white scar dividing his face diagonally. He politely tipped his hat to Amos, but Amos noted the gleaming handles of the pistols at his belt, ready to be drawn.

Amos drew back on Mustard’s reins, signaling her to back up. He kept the rifle pointed at the sky.

“Just passing through,” Amos said. “Fog here always this thick?”

The man between the trees chuckled. “It’s especially bad today.” But his voice held no mirth. “Not the best day for hunting,” he muttered in a lower voice.

The man’s tense posture hinted at something darker. Amos didn’t want to linger. “I’ll be on my way then. Anyone else down the trail I should know of? Don’t want to be shooting at shadows in the fog.”

“There are a few more of us if you go down that way,” the man said. “We’re hunting vermin. You don’t want to be hurt accidentally. Best you go back the way you came.”

Amos sat still on his saddle. “I reckon it’s best I keep going where I’m headed. You see, I’ve already been where I came from.”

“Suit yourself,” the man said. “But don’t get involved in business which ain’t yours.”

• • • •

As Amos went on, the trees grew denser, the trail turned more twisty and the fog thicker. Mustard moved forward gingerly.

He noticed bits of paper fluttering in the branches lining the trail. Reaching out, he took hold of a few. They were full of dense, tiny print, and appeared to be pages from law pamphlets of some kind.

Whereas, in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof . . .

. . . the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or, having so come after the expiration of said ninety days, to remain within the United States . . .

Like most matters pertaining to the law, the crooked, impenetrable sentences seemed to Amos to pile one upon another, twisting and turning, writhy and snakish, growing foggier and foggier the more he read. He threw the papers away.

Mustard splashed across a small stream. Amos gazed at the water, looking for fish. Maybe this would be a good place to camp for the evening. It was getting late, and Idaho spring nights were chilly.

A clump of bushes rustled somewhere up the hill.

Amos was just about to shout out a warning not to shoot, that he was no vermin, when the bushes parted, and a human figure stumbled out and rushed at him.

He almost shot at the figure before realizing that it was a woman, who wasn’t dressed like the Indians and not like the settlers either. She had on a loose, gray dress, cut in a manner Amos had never seen, long strips of cloth that wrapped around her legs like large bandages, and black cloth shoes.

A few steps from him, she collapsed to the ground, and a knife fell from her hand.

The woman thrashed and struggled to sit up.

They stared into each other’s eyes.

Amos saw that she was probably in her fifties, short and lean. Her clothes were drenched in mud and her left shoulder was a bloody mess.

Some kind of Oriental, Amos thought.

“Damn it,” the woman croaked. “Thought the words would hold you longer.” Then she collapsed and stopped moving.

YUN

Yun dreamed.

In her dream she was again fifteen, a Hakka girl lying—dying really—under the hot sun.

But she did not sweat. The field she was in was as dry as her body. It hadn’t rained for three years, but the governor still refused to release the grain from the Imperial warehouses.

All around her, the lifeless land was stripped bare, as though a swarm of locusts had passed over it. Every shred of tree bark, every blade of grass had been eaten, and the bodies of men and women were strewn about, their bellies filled with dirt, the last meal of desperation to assuage the demons of hunger.

Could it be? A line of ants appeared in the distance. She licked her lips, her tongue dry and heavy as a stone. She would wait until the ants got closer, and then she would eat them.

The ants came closer, grew, and became a line of marching men, their banners flapping and shimmering in the heat. She watched them approach, thinking they were like soldiers descended from heaven, like wandering hsiake that the traveling storytellers always spoke of, who toured the land to right wrongs.

“Drink, Sister,” one of the men said, and held a cup to her lips. She drank and tasted rice, as cool and nourishing as ganlu dripped by Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. She felt every pore in her body scream with the almost-forgotten pleasure of food and water.

“We’re soldiers of the Heavenly State of Taiping,” the man said. “We worship the Heavenly Father and Jesus, His Son. Tienwang, Jesus’s Brother, has been sent to deliver us from the Manchus.”

Yun remembered the tax collectors who had come the fall before, warning the villagers about the Taiping Rebels and their dangerous leader Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, who called himself Tienwang, the Heavenly King. Anyone who dared to oppose the Manchu Emperor and support the rebels—really just brazen bandits—would be put to death by being sliced a thousand times by a knife. And oh, of course the Emperor’s taxes still had to be paid, even if it meant taking away the last cup of rice left in the family’s grain jar.

“Thank you, Master,” she tried to imitate the unfamiliar words of the man. “If you give me another drink, I will join the Heavenly State of Taiping and become your servant forever.”

The man laughed. “Call me Brother, and you shall be my Sister. In the Heavenly State of Taiping, there are no masters and servants. All of us are equal before the Heavenly Father.”

“All of us?” This made no sense to her. The world was made up of chains, hierarchies, rules that ranked superiors and inferiors. At the top was the Emperor, his Throne held up by the noble Manchus; below them came the servile Han Chinese, with the Hakka lowest of all among them, their lot to till the rockiest fields. And a Hakka woman? She was like a worm, a nothing, barely worth the air she breathed.

“All of us,” the man affirmed. “Men and women, Han and Chuang, Cantonese and Hakka, we’re all equals. Tienwang even has armies made up of women soldiers, who can rise to become generals and dukes just like men. Now drink to your heart’s fill, and let us pray of toppling the Manchu Emperor and opening his storehouses so that all of us can eat white rice!”

And she drank, and drank, and the cold rice porridge tasted like heaven.

• • • •

Still drinking from the cup held to her lips, Yun opened her eyes.

A face, framed by unkempt hair and a bushy beard, hovered a foot or so from hers. In the flickering firelight, it looked like the face of one of the men who had attacked the camp, killed Ah San and Gan and the others, and then chased her all the way here.

She shuddered and tried to push herself away, but she was too weak and only managed to spill the water all over herself.

“Easy now,” the man said. “I won’t hurt you.”

It was his voice, more than the words, that calmed her. She could hear in it a gentle weariness, like an old mountain that had been worn down by eons of ice and water. She saw now that, though the man was white, he was much older than the five who had come to her camp.

“You a lawyer?” Yun asked.

“No,” he said, and chuckled. “Though I tried studying to be one, a long time ago.”

“Then how did you get through my maze so quickly?” she asked, gesturing at the dark, dense woods, the twisty trails, the thick mist that made the fire crackle and turned the sparks into glowing fireflies. She spoke slowly, so that he could understand her accent.

He looked around at the foggy forest again, like a man who suddenly found himself in an unfamiliar place. “This fog, the trees, the trails—you did all this?”

She nodded.

“How?”

“With these,” she said, and reached inside a fold in her dress to pull out a few sheets of paper, full of tiny, dense print.

Of course the man wouldn’t understand.

She sighed. So much had happened. So much to explain. Words, she needed words to help her, words in this beautiful, foreign tongue that she loved but would always wield like an unfamiliar sword.

“Excuse me,” she said, and struggled to sit up straight. Slowly, carefully, she bowed to Amos. She tried to put grace and deliberateness into her movements, as though she were sitting at a formal banquet, dressed in ceremonial armor draped with silk. “We haven’t met properly. I am Liew Yun, formerly a general of the Heavenly State of Taiping, and now placer gold miner of Idaho.”

• • • •

The five men had come to her camp in the evening.

Hey, Chinamen, said the one with the scar across his face. His name was Pike, and he had been threatening the Chinese miners in the valley all spring. Didn’t we tell you to get out of here last week? This is my mine.

The mine’s ours, Ah San explained. I told you, you can go to the courthouse and check our claim.

Well, lookee here! We got ourselves a law-abiding Chinaman! Pike exclaimed. You want to talk about the law? The law?

Then Pike explained to the Chinese miners that Congress had already decided that all Chinamen needed to be gone from these mountains and go back to where they came from. Indeed, all law-abiding citizens had a right and duty to deport—he savored the word—the Chinamen into the sea.

One of Pike’s men took out a sheaf of papers and shook them in the miners’ faces. These are laws, he said. Some old, some new. You Chinamen are scared of laws, aren’t you? Then you better pack and run.

Yun grabbed the sheaf of papers out of his hand and started to read from them aloud:

. . . and may be arrested, by any United States customs official, collector of internal revenue or his deputies, United States marshal or his deputies, and taken before a United States judge, whose duty it shall be to order that he be deported from the United States as hereinbefore provided . . .

I don’t understand, she said. I can’t make any sense of these words. Do any of you really understand them?

Pike’s gang gaped at her, amazed that she could read.

One of the men recovered. The law says that you have to pick up and leave before we make you.

Before we shoot you like vermin, Pike added.

Gan was the first to take a swing at him, and the first to be shot. Then chaos was all around Yun as deafening gunshots and flowing blood seemed to put her in another time, another place.

Run! Ah San screamed, and pushed her.

She saw Ah San’s head explode into a bloody flower before her eyes as she turned to run into the woods. Something hit her left shoulder hard and made her stumble, and she knew that she had been shot. But she kept on running along the deer trail, as fast as she could.

She heard more shots fired after her, more cries that suddenly became silent, and then, the sounds of pursuit.

She said a prayer to God and Guanyin each. I’m hurt. But I can’t die. Not yet. I still have a mission.

And she saw that she still clutched the pamphlets that the men had brought to the camp with them, pamphlets full of words that none of them could understand, words that made up laws they claimed said she was unwelcome in this land.

They were her last chance.

She ripped the papers into strips and scattered them behind her. As she passed, trees gathered behind her, the mist rose, and the path bent, forked, and curled around itself.

The sounds of pursuit scattered and grew fainter.

AMOS

“You can do magic with words?” Amos asked.

“Words hold magic for the desperate and the hopeful,” Yun said.

Amos looked at her, certain that the woman was mad. A general of the Heavenly State of Taiping. He shook his head.

When she had been asleep, her face had been relaxed and peaceful, almost smiling. He had thought she looked a bit like one of the taciturn but friendly Shoshoni women on the plains of Wyoming sitting around the fire on those cold nights he had sought shelter with them.

But now her eyes, feverish, intense, bore into his face like a pair of locomotive headlights.

A wolf howled in the distance, soon echoed by others.

Then followed the sound of a gunshot, and the howling ceased.

“They’re getting close,” Yun said, gazing into the dark mist. “It’s this fire. You’ve led them straight to me.”

Amos picked up the kettle and poured water on the hissing fire to put it out. Soon they were wrapped in darkness, lit only by the light of the moon through the fog.

“I can carry you on Mustard,” Amos said.

Yun shook her head. “I’m not leaving.”

“Why?”

Yun’s glance flickered to a small mound some distance away. Amos squinted and made out a conical shelter made out of chopped tree branches leaning against each other.

“It’s the gold, isn’t it?” Amos asked. “That’s why you ran here.”

After a second, Yun nodded. “We moved it out here when Pike’s gang started to harass us this spring. All the gold we’ve mined and saved for two years is here.”

Amos’s heart grew heavy. “You can always get more gold.”

She shook her head.

“This is not my fight,” Amos said.

“Then leave.”

Amos felt a wave of disappointment that turned into anger. He strode over to Mustard and mounted. Gently, he nudged the mare with his calves and rode away from the hill, away from the howling wolves and the pursuing men.

• • • •

Amos held Mustard’s reins loosely, lost in his thoughts.

She can’t let go of that gold, he thought. A fool. He had seen far too many die from greed out here.

In the years he had been wandering, he had grown more and more mistrustful of the hearts of women and men. Having more than a few of them together always seemed to lead to schemes, plots, robbery disguised as something more respectable. He would sometimes go warily to the towns to trade for goods that he could not do without, but he far preferred to be alone under an open sky, accompanied only by the howls of coyotes and wolves, dangers that he understood better and feared less than the dangers hidden behind the smiling faces of settled men.

In Kansas, he had seen the light of hope go out in the eyes of black families as they realized that they were free in name only. In New Mexico, he had seen the sorrow on the faces of the Indians forced to swallow their pride and anger as they learned of yet another betrayal. And now, it was the Chinamen’s turn.

He tried to push Yun out of his thoughts, but the grief and terror of her tale refused to let go. He shook his head angrily.

Every year, as the railroads expanded and ramified like the roots of some tenacious weed, they brought along with them the homesteaders, and farms turned into villages turned into towns turned into cities.

In his mind, Amos saw the railroads as chains yoking the land around him to an East that was full of noise and stale air and invisible bonds that weighed down a man’s spirit until nothing was left of it except the capacity for brutality in masses. Even the Chinamen were once welcomed out here, when the land was open and empty. But now that it was filling up and fewer mines were panning out, they became vermin.

Was it really greed? he thought. The look on her face when she had refused to leave wasn’t one of lust for the luster and weight of gold, but one of determination to live like a free woman, not hounded prey.

A Chinaman’s chance was bad enough. But a lone, crazy Chinawoman?

An image from long ago came unbidden to his mind. Help me, a young man’s voice croaked. Amos closed his eyes, trying to make the voice go away. Then he shuddered as he heard the gunshot again.

He opened his eyes. Somehow Mustard, who knew him better than he knew himself, had already turned around and was heading back the way they came.

• • • •

Amos dismounted, grabbed his rifle from the saddlebag, and walked over to Yun. The woman sat serenely and followed him with her eyes, not having moved since he left her.

“I knew you’d be back,” she said.

“Why?”

“You’re like a hsiake from back home in China.”

“What’s that?”

“A hero.”

Amos laughed bitterly. “I’m no hero.”

AMOS (1864)

The generals and politicians would eventually call it the Battle of Olustee, but for Amos Turner, it had been hell.

A young clerk struggling to learn the law in Boston, he had volunteered out of a sense of duty, a desire to end the sin that was slavery, the stain upon the honor of the Republic that the abolitionists denounced in the streets.

But in those Florida pine woods on that day, there were no beautiful ideals, no duty and honor, no God and country, only confusion and slaughter. Too frightened to even think, he charged mindlessly into hailstorms of bullets and screaming artillery even as his companions disintegrated on each side of him.

“Leave them!” He looked over and saw a white Union commander shouting at the remnants of some colored troops, who had barely been trained before entering the battle. The black men were reluctant to leave their wounded comrades behind, but the officer wanted them to haul away the artillery instead, in the hasty retreat.

Then the ground exploded near him, and Amos was thrown into oblivion.

When he awoke, it was evening. All around him, he could hear the intermittent cries of the wounded. Union or Rebel, they sounded equally pitiful. After a while, he realized that he was crying out, too, whether for rescue or the quick relief of a bullet to the head he knew not.

Then he saw the Rebels. In small groups, they scoured the field, methodically picking rings, watches, money from the wounded and stripping the clothes from the dead.

He saw some of the Rebels raise their bayonets and thrust down, and a cry would be silenced. The Rebels moved efficiently and mechanically, like marionettes.

They were murdering the wounded, Amos realized.

Desperately, he tried to crawl away, but his legs and elbows slipped in the mud.

“Help me,” a soldier nearby said, his voice rasping.

He saw that the soldier—one of the black men the Union commander had ordered abandoned—was very young, barely more than a boy.

“Quiet,” Amos whispered to him harshly. “You’ll draw them.”

The soldier turned his head and focused his eyes on Amos. “Help me,” he begged, louder.

A few Rebels turned in their direction.

Amos pushed the soldier down and crawled away as quickly as he could. He shifted a few corpses around and buried himself under them, praying that the ruse would work.

And then he forced himself to remain still as the men came closer. One of the Rebel officers stepped over the pile of bodies that Amos hid under and squatted next to the dying soldier.

“Help me,” the soldier said. “Please.”

“You dumb thing,” the officer said. “The devil has you now.” Amos willed himself to get up and say something, to stop what was happening, but his body refused to obey.

He heard the sound of a gunshot. And it echoed in his head for a long time.

Though many Union men were taken as prisoners on that day, very few were black.

Amos crawled away from the field in the night. He did not know for how many days he lay in a feverish dream, licking the water from the leaves that draped about him and sometimes chewing the leaves for sustenance.

When he was coherent again, he was consumed with shame at his cowardice. He was no better than the commander who had given the order to abandon the wounded black soldiers.

There was also rage, and fear. He could not understand how men who joked and drank and collapsed into fits of laughter over some bawdy tale could suddenly become automata, like interchangeable gears in a machine that they did not comprehend, and become as will-less as the guns in their hands. When the right orders were given, all men could murder in cold blood like devils.

Amos got up and walked west, hiding from anything that looked like an army patrol, until he had left behind the world of cities and laws and the men who crafted them and submitted to their power.

Was it not the world of strictly construed laws and glittering money and elegant clothes and refined speeches that had decided one man could be the property of another? Amos remembered. And it was that same world that had declared ritualized, anonymous slaughter sweet and fitting. It was that same world that would abandon the wounded, knowing what fate awaited them. What was the use of talk of freedom and ideals? Civilization was a lie, through and through.

And so he moved ever westward, searching for and escaping into the trail-less, wordless wilderness beyond the frontier line.

• • • •

“I don’t care what you did or didn’t do,” Yun said. “What matters is you’re here now.”

An owl hooted not too far away, startled from its perch.

“They’re coming,” Amos said. “We better get ready.”

He had already decided that the best spot for defense was between two fallen trees near the top of the hill. It would give them some cover and allow them to see the men approach.

“Get me there first,” Yun said, pointing to the conical shelter made out of sticks.

“It’s not gold you need right now.”

“It’s not gold I’m after,” Yun said impatiently. “It’s words. Magic.”

Amos had no choice but to help her over. Her legs were unsteady and her breathing was labored as they walked. She leaned into him, as light as a foal.

“Open it up,” she said. There was a natural authority to the way she spoke, as though she really was used to giving commands and having them obeyed.

Amos peeled back the branches to reveal a few wooden boxes underneath, on top of which lay a few bundles wrapped in oilcloth. Yun pointed at those. Amos handed them to her.

She unwrapped the bundles. They were filled with all kinds of printed material: pages torn from books, sheets of newsprint, picture cards with words on their backs.

Though worried about the approaching pursuers, Amos was intrigued. “What are they?”

She stroked the papers lovingly. “Another kind of treasure. Probably the better kind. Words I’ve read and liked.”

She picked up a page from the top and handed it to him. “I’m tired. Read it to me.”

By the faint light of the moon, Amos read:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.

“Wise words,” she said.

“Wise words are not enough,” he said, thinking of all the ugliness in the world.

“Are they not?” And before he could stop her, she snatched the page out of his hand, tore it into tiny pieces, and began to eat some of them.

“What are you doing?” He stared at her, dumbfounded.

“I am in desperate country,” she said, after swallowing, “and I need all the bravery I can get. But I will have nothing of resignation.” She spat out a wad of wet pulp.

And he saw a hardened set to her jaw that was new, and heard a strength in her voice that had been absent before. She seemed literally to have grown bolder.

“You read but do not believe,” she said.

“You do not know what I have seen,” he said. He thought of that young man long ago who had believed himself to be brave and noble until the truth was revealed to him.

She laughed. “I have seen words free the minds of men who thought they were slaves.”

YUN (1885)

The men who had rescued her brought her back to Tienching, the Heavenly City, capital of the Heavenly State, where she became a soldier just like all the other Taiping women. She was bright and worked hard, and soon she was selected to study how to read and write.

Her teacher, Sister Wen, was a former prostitute who had learned to read and write from her clients in Canton. She freely admitted that she did not know how to write like the scholars, only like a child. “But the magic of writing is strongest in the least skilled,” she said, “just as in the Bible it is the last that shall be first, and the first last.”

Sister Wen wrote the characters for the Heavenly State of Taiping on a slate.

“This is the character tien, which means ‘heaven,’” she said, pointing to the third character. “It is like a man standing with a beam over his head, which he must keep balanced over him.”

This made sense to Yun. It was her old life. A man was weighed down by the world of his superiors, and a woman’s burden was even heavier. Looking at the character, she could almost see the person’s back bend with the weight.

“It has been written this way for thousands of years, but no more.” Sister Wen erased the line at the top and redrew it, so that it tilted like the man was throwing off his weight.

“Tienwang decided that we can write ‘heaven’ like this, and already you can hear the Emperor in Peking quaking with fear.”

Yun looked at the character on the slate and felt her heart beat faster.

But still, she doubted.

“How can we just change it?” she asked. “Hadn’t our ancestors always written tien the old way?”

“Our ancestors are dead,” Sister Wen said. “But we are alive. If we want something, then we must take it and make it true. Have you ever known poor women like you and me to read and write, to fight with swords and arrows next to their brothers and fathers? Yet here we are.”

Yun could almost see the invisible strands of power rise from the slate into the hearts of all the men and women around her.

“If we wish to express that which has never been thought, we must create new characters. There will be no more concubines, no more bound feet, no more rich and poor, and no more shaved foreheads and queues to show our submission to the Manchu Emperor. We will be free.”

And Yun felt the ground tremble under her, and she was sure that the tremors could be felt in far away Peking.

• • • •

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

She chewed on the words and swallowed them.

“I saw a single character shake the foundation of an Empire,” she said to Amos. “And you dare tell me that words are mere words. Now, eat.”

She handed him a slip of paper.

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

He ate it, masticating the bitter pulp slowly.

She looked at him. “You could have left me to those men. Yet you stayed. Doesn’t matter if you want to be. You are a hsiake.”

A wave of heat rose from his stomach and suffused his body, gradually seeping even into his limbs and extremities. He felt as though he had the strength of many men flowing through him.

“Now, you see,” she said, her voice strong as a Douglas fir.

AMOS

As the shadowy figures crossed the stream, Amos fired his first shot. It hit the water near the leader and made a big splash, the water glinting white in the moonlight.

“Go back!” Amos shouted.

The man in the lead—Pike—swore. “I told you to mind your own business, stranger!”

“There’s been enough killing,” Amos said.

“It’s her hoard, isn’t it? What did she promise you? Don’t be foolish. We can take it all, together, and pay you your share.”

The stream, reflecting the moon, gave him light to aim by. Amos shot again, closer to Pike’s feet. The men scrambled back onto the bank of the stream, fell back among the trees, and returned fire. In the darkness, their shots thudded into the fallen trees Amos and Yun hid behind, and bits of bark and dirt rained down around them.

“Foolish,” Yun said. “They’re wasting bullets.”

“They’re wiser than you think,” Amos said. He showed her a handful of brass cartridges. “These are all I’ve left. If they keep on drawing my fire, I’ll run out before they do.”

Yun shuffled through the papers in her bundles. “Here, I knew this would come in handy.”

Amos saw that she was holding a small poster showing a colored drawing of a Fourth of July celebration. Someone was making a speech. In the background, fireworks filled the night sky.

Yun flipped the poster over: the words to the Star Spangled Banner.

She tore the paper into strips, wet the strips with her mouth, and wrapped a few of the words around the cartridges: red glare, bombs, rocket.

Silently, Amos loaded the cartridges. The added bulk of the paper seemed to not hinder the smooth slide of metal on metal, but he was afraid that the doctored cartridges would misfire.

Muttering a prayer, he aimed and fired.

The first shot exploded into a bright ball of red fire in the woods on the other side of the stream. Pike’s men yelped and rolled on the ground to put out the flames on their clothes.

The next shot turned into a series of explosions that was so loud and bright that Amos was temporarily blind and deaf.

The return fire from the woods ceased.

“They’re not dead,” Yun said. “But this will stun them and make them think twice about shooting. Maybe they’ll be more reasonable in the morning.”

“I suppose we’re safe for the time being,” said Amos, still not quite believing what he had seen.

Satisfied, she sang in a low voice:

“Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,

And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’”

Amos settled in for the standoff.

“Tell me,” he said, “what happened to your rebellion?”

YUN (1860)

The Taiping armies were invincible. Wherever they went, the Emperor’s forces fell back like sheep before wolves. Half of China now belonged to the rebels. Tienwang spoke of sending emissaries to France and Britain, fellow Christian nations that would come to the Heavenly State’s aid.

But, gradually, rumors began to spread of how the commanders and generals had taken concubines and hoarded treasure for their own use, even Tienwang himself. While food was still plentiful in the capital, stories described men and women starving in far away provinces, just like they had under the Manchu Emperor. There was even talk of how the other Christian nations said Tienwang was a heretic, and they would support the heathen Manchus, who were amenable to European demands for concessions, and not the Taiping.

The Taiping armies began to lose battles.

Now a general herself, Yun steadfastly refused to believe those stories. She was always the first to lead a charge and the last to retreat. She kept none of the conquered goods but shared them all with her sisters and brothers. She prayed and preached, and taught everyone in her army how to write tien with a tilted roof.

Still, the convoys of supply wagons from the Heavenly City dwindled, and streams of refugees stole away from the Taiping territories at night like rats leaving a burning building. Yun noticed that the banners of the other commanders were becoming tattered, their character for “heaven” drooping, falling back into the old ways.

One night, Sister Wen came to her tent in the middle of the night and woke Yun.

It had been a few years since Yun had last seen her teacher, who had stayed behind in the capital. She was startled to see how white the older woman’s temples had grown and how stooped her once-straight back had become.

Sister Wen wore a thick coat meant for a long journey. Yun’s heart sank. “You’re leaving?” Yun could not keep the anger out of her voice. “You would abandon the Heavenly State in its hour of need?”

Instead of turning her face away in shame, Sister Wen looked at her calmly. “You visited the capital a year ago. Could you tell Tienwang’s palace apart from the Forbidden City in Peking?”

Yun had no answer to that.

“It’s not too late to leave,” Sister Wen said. “You can still escape to the remote mountains and hide in the bamboo groves, where the Manchus will never find you and you can leave this world to its own ugliness.”

Instead of answering, Yun took her sword and wrote the character tien on the ground, the bar at the top tilted like a ladder to the sky.

Sister Wen stared at the character. She was weary. “When the heart no longer believes, the magic of words is useless.”

And that was the last time Yun saw her.

• • • •

“When Tienching fell a few months later, the Manchu slaughter turned the streets into rivers of blood: men, women, children, the elderly, the wounded, none were spared.

“I and a few others escaped to islands scattered in the East Sea, and made our way to the Philippines. From there we got on a ship and came to America.”

“So the magic of words failed,” Amos said. He was disappointed. The story had seemed like a fairy tale, one that he wanted to believe in.

“No,” Yun said. “We just picked the wrong words.”

• • • •

Yun and her companions had never seen so much empty land.

The wilderness of Idaho was pristine, absolute. In China, every mu of land had been worked on and shaped by the plow for generations, but here, there were no marks but those of God. It was an empty page waiting for old ideas to be thrown away and new ones to be written.

(Later, she would learn about the Indians who had once been here. Every story was more complicated than it appeared at first, yet hope sprang eternal.)

Refugees from every land, following every creed, had come with the dream of striking gold. In this place with no rules, they became violent, soulful, self-reliant. They fought with the land, with the Indians, with each other, and yet they also discarded old animosities, welcomed strangers, gave the newcomers aid and succor when they needed them.

Yun and the other Taiping survivors worked hard to carve a fresh life in their new home, and in the evenings, she studied the language of this new land, as hardy as her mountains, as pungent as her forests, as varied as her population, as rich as her mines.

Along with gold, she discovered words, bountiful and beauteous words that sang of a love of freedom that beat in sympathy with her rebellious heart. Nowhere else were men so ready to embrace new words—pogonip, pai gow, cowboy—immigrating from other tongues, arising from inventive minds, becoming respectable despite origins in error. Like fresh trails crossing virgin territory, new words allowed thoughts to travel to glimpse new vistas.

Yun read and savored and built up a treasure trove of words that struck her. She saw that no people believed more in equality, in the power of ideas, in the right to take up arms against tyranny, than the people of America.

And she saw where the Taiping had erred.

• • • •

With a stick, she began to write on the ground.

“There are countless ways to write the last character in the name of the Taiping, kuo, which means ‘state.’ Tienwang could have chosen to write it like this—

“—composed of the character min—that means ‘the people’—inside the four borders. But instead he chose to write it like this—

“—composed of the character wang—that means ‘the king’—inside the four borders.”

“So he created the Heavenly Kingdom instead of the Heavenly Republic,” Amos said. It was an old story, and a familiar one. Those who sought freedom were tempted by power instead, and became indistinguishable from those they sought to overthrow.

“For years, decades now, we’ve mined gold and sent it back into China, where the money has kept the fire of rebellion alive. Right now, there’s a young man back there, Sun Yat-sen, the greatest magician with words I’ve ever seen. His pamphlets have given the people faith again, and struck terror into the heart of the Emperor. The gold in those boxes isn’t for me, but for him and his revolution.”

“What if he fails? What if this rebellion, like yours, also turns dark? You said that the magic of words is fragile, subject to the corrupt hearts of mortal men. What good is a lovely name if you can’t live up to it?”

“Then we’ll just try again, and if that fails, yet another time. It’s not so easy to shake off heavy chains. The Taiping Rebellion failed the same year that a war ended slavery here. Yet this country still feels the shadow of those shackles. China may not be free from the phantom of the Manchu yoke for a hundred years. But my time here has shown me what is possible when men believe.”

“How can you say that?” Amos wanted to grab her and shake her. “Have you not seen how Congress has decided that you’re to be deported, like rats for Pike and his men to slaughter?”

Yun looked him straight in the eye. “And yet here you are, defending a crazy Chinawoman against the likes of them.”

“I am just one man,” Amos said.

“Everything starts with one person, a man or a woman.” She paused, chose her words carefully, and went on. “You doubt because you see only the ugly words, the words of hypocrisy and fear. Dark laws grow out of confused hearts that have lost faith, and I hope one day to see Congress change its mind. But the words I love I found not in the smoky halls of power in great cities, but in the wilderness out here, among lonesome rebels, refugees, men with nothing to their names but hope.”

Amos closed his eyes. She seemed to say aloud what he had only thought. The Western frontier, like a kite high in the sky, is where the ideals of the Republic take flight and soar, with the stagnant East pulled behind it like a reluctant boy.

She caressed the papers in her lap lovingly. “Words do matter. Their magic comes from one mind reaching another across miles and years, and what one assumes the other shall also assume, what one believes the other shall also believe. Words take root and grow in the hearts of men, and from there faith springs eternal.”

He looked at the pages, at the woman, and at the land bathed in starlight around him. And he seemed to see the land itself as a laid-open book, a record of the long and winding struggle toward freedom by one people—out of many, one.

Yes, it was true. Words did matter. A piece of paper from a court, a little novel, a proclamation, a few amendments to an old parchment—had these not torn a Republic apart and then sewn it back together?

AMOS

For a while, there were occasional shots from the woods across the stream, as though Pike’s men were trying to keep them awake. But even that had stopped an hour ago.

The eastern sky was growing brighter.

“I think they’re gone,” Amos said.

Yun let out a deep breath and almost fell over. Amos was quick with his arm and held her up.

“It’s been a long night,” Yun said. She sounded exhausted. “Well, if you think we’re safe, maybe you can patch me up.” She winced as she tried to move her left arm.

“I’m no doctor.”

“Not that way,” Yun said. She picked up another sheet of paper from her bundle, turned it over so that the blank side faced up, and handed it to him along with a pencil she found in the folds of her dress. “Write down how you want me to feel.”

Amos stared at the paper, surprised and confused. “I don’t know how. Why can’t you just do the magic yourself?”

“It doesn’t work that way. The magic of words comes from two people: one writes, one reads. I can’t just write whatever I want and make it come true—that’s just wishful thinking. I can pull out the magic of words others print in books, and it works just as well if they write it by hand. But the writer has to believe what he writes, which is why I had to wait till now with you.”

Amos took the pencil and wrote:

ALRIGHT

“Sorry.” He paused. “I always write it as one word though it’s supposed to be two. Let me try again.”

“Write it the way you like,” Yun said. “Dictionaries and schoolmarms care only for binding words down with rules, fitting them into neat little grids where they can’t move. If they had their way, there’d be no new words and no new magic. Who knows, maybe your shorter word will heal me quicker.”

Amos laughed. And he wrote some more.

O.K.

“Now that’s an American word, a real word of power.”

She took the paper from him, chewed it, and swallowed. Amos was pleased to see she had that contented, happy look again. A healthy glow returned to her face, and when she moved her arm again, there was no wince.

“See if you’re recovered enough to get on Mustard. When the sun’s up, we can get out of here.”

• • • •

While Yun shortened the stirrups and talked to Mustard to get acquainted, Amos sat by the fallen trees and flipped through the other papers in Yun’s bundle.

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him . . .

Limpsy, he thought. Yun is right. This is a land of new words and new ideas, always renewed by the endless wilderness in which man can find solitude and faith in himself—

A loud shot shattered the peaceful air like thunder. Mustard whinnied and reared up on her hind legs. Yun barely hung on.

Amos looked down and saw the wound in his stomach, from which blood flowed freely, then the pain doubled him over and he dropped his rifle.

Pike and his men stood in a semi-circle about twenty feet away.

“You didn’t think we’d try crossing the stream upriver and come up behind you?” he sneered.

“You’re right,” Amos said. He felt waves of dizziness and struggled to stay sitting up. “You got us.”

“Now you can die with your Chinawoman.”

From the ground, Amos looked over at Yun, still sitting on Mustard. She made no attempt to get away. Indeed, he could tell that she was thinking of coming over to his aid, even if they would both die.

He locked eyes with her, and then quickly glanced over at the boxes of gold, making sure she remembered.

He dragged his left arm listlessly on the ground, through the leaves, the bits of bark, and the dark soil, as though he was in too much pain to control himself. As Yun stared at him, her eyes full of fire, he traced out the strokes of the character tien: one, two, three, and then the last stroke, a defiant diagonal, like a ladder to the sky, like lifting off the weight from a limpsy heart.

Her eyes grew wet. But she nodded, almost imperceptibly.

What I assume you shall assume.

“Now, run!” Amos shouted.

Yun dug her heels into Mustard’s sides, and the mare leaped down from the hill, galloping away toward the woods.

Pike’s men scrambled to aim their guns at her fleeing figure. No one was paying any attention to the dying old man.

With every bit of his remaining strength, Amos snatched up his rifle.

Yun had wrapped three cartridges in the words of the Star Spangled Banner: red glare, bombs, and rocket.

He had shot two, and now the last one was levered into place.

He pulled the trigger, and Pike and his gang—along with the smiling Amos—disappeared in a great ball of fire.

YUN

When Yun came back, she saw a little charred crater where the fallen trees had been.

She jumped off Mustard, who sniffed the ground, whinnied, and then kept her head low. Yun knelt next to the crater and bowed her head to the ground three times.

“Today, I have seen a true hsiake,” she whispered.

The wind carried a few pieces of paper, their edges burnt, to her feet. She picked one up:

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

Author’s Note: The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (1850–64), or Taiping Tianguo, did indeed modify the way the character tien is written in its name; however, the particular modification presented in this story was used only on coins minted in a particular province for a brief period. In general, Wade-Giles is used instead of pinyin to romanize Chinese names in this story for historical reasons.

©2014 by Ken Liu. Originally published in Dead Man’s Hand, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he wrote The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings) and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, a collection. He also authored the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Ken worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Ken frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, the mathematics of origami, and other subjects.

EXCERPT: Trouble the Saints (Tor Books)

Alaya Dawn Johnson | 3561 words

“Juju assassins, alternate history, a gritty New York crime story . . . in a word: Awesome.” —N.K. Jemisin, New York Times bestselling author of The Fifth Season

The dangerous magic of The Night Circus meets the powerful historical exploration of The Underground Railroad in Alaya Dawn Johnson’s timely and unsettling novel, set against the darkly glamorous backdrop of New York City, where an assassin falls in love and tries to fight her fate at the dawn of World War II.

Amid the whir of city life, a young woman from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she’s hired to use her knives to strike fear among its most dangerous denizens.

Ten years later, Phyllis LeBlanc has given up everything—not just her own past, and Dev, the man she loved, but even her own dreams.

Still, the ghosts from her past are always by her side—and history has appeared on her doorstep to threaten the people she keeps in her heart. And so Phyllis will have to make a harrowing choice, before it’s too late—is there ever enough blood in the world to wash clean generations of injustice?

Trouble the Saints is a dazzling, daring novel—a magical love story, a compelling exposure of racial fault lines—and an altogether brilliant and deeply American saga.

Coming from Tor Books June 2, 2020.

4

I wore my best dress and my best knives and careful makeup, so I thought I might pass for twenty-five in the dim, smoked light of the Pelican. I hadn’t said yes, and I hadn’t said no. I was still Victor’s knife, for as long as the hands held out, or for as long as I could bear to use them.

The Pelican was a different world on Friday and Saturday nights. Then, Victor was in it to make money, as much as possible. We had a line like any other club, and men in dark suits to take your measure and pronounce you worthy. It was always integrated—Victor made a point of that—but the strange weekday crowd, the anarchist meetings and the Yiddish one-act operas and Japanese-inspired poetic dance plays and French expressionist cabaret that Tamara had spent the last two years curating, like some kind of demented talent manager who never quite got it through her head that the Pelican was a verifiable, bona-fide, bodies-in-the-dumpster mob joint, and who through sheer conviction had made everyone else play along until her mad vision had become as real as my knives—that world dimmed to muted pastels when the Long Islanders and Upper East Siders descended upon the Village with their wide sedans and straining billfolds. Those nights, Tamara still put on her tasseled pasties and twirled them with a python named Georgie around her neck, and she smiled, because she knew that as long as she did this job, Victor would keep letting her have her way the other five nights of the week. It suited him to court that air of dangerous exoticism, to let his white clients, both over and under the table, gawp at us and fear us. Even me—though he didn’t know it.

I walked past the line—checking for my boys in uniform—and smiled at the man behind the velvet rope. He must be new, or moved up from some other grunt detail, because I didn’t recognize him. He recognized me, though. The blood drained from his face. If I’d said “boo” I swear he would have fainted. He stumbled forward and unhooked the rope.

“This way, ma’am,” he said.

I smiled as kindly as I could, though it was clear he couldn’t tell. I walked through the doors, a little sick of the kind of woman they must imagine me to be, and by my own design.

In the twenties the Pelican had been an old Russian cigar club, and Victor had retained the mahogany paneling and leather walls while adding a few judicious modern touches: geometric glass chandeliers trimmed with chrome, Chinese silk curtains, and a gleaming zinc bar lit from behind, so that its rows of bottles glowed gold and green and amber. The stage was catty-corner to the bar, with a dozen round tables in between, but on nights the crowd wasn’t elbow to elbow the barman had as good a view as anyone of Tamara’s jungle dance. At ten, the place was bumping but not full up. I smiled at the regulars and noted the faces that meant Victor was here already—not on the floor, but behind the false bookshelf in the corner, which led to his office.

On stage, Charlie was going at it with his swing band, playing that new be-bop jazz that was catching like brush fire in the Harlem clubs, but was unusual in a downtown joint like the Pelican. On Wednesdays, Charlie got up on the Pelican’s stage to play with a little five-piece, wreathed in marijuana smoke like clouds. The Village’s most dedicated hepcats came to pray, close their eyes, and shake their heads and shout in scatting tongues. He called that be-bop too, but on weekends he played the down-tone version. Even then, the jumpy drums and circuitous, laddered chords made for hard listening and even harder dancing. I caught a few strains of “Tea for Two,” but his French horn veered off as soon as I had them, layering and riffing. Victor let Charlie have his way until eleven, enough for the Pelican to maintain its reputation for the avant-garde, but not enough to put off the paying white customers who came to enjoy big band swing and a beautiful girl dancing with a snake. Tamara wasn’t out yet. I wanted to talk to her, but she was as liable to be with an admirer backstage as she was to be alone, and the thought of putting off some amorous white boy who thought he was playing with fire was enough to make me feel old as Gloria looked this afternoon.

My feet took me to the bar without my asking and I leaned my back against it, watching for the dentist or my three soldiers, anyone to distract me from the barman shaking martinis just four feet away. Dev filled two glasses from shakers in either hand—at once showy and economical. One of the appreciative gentlemen bit off his olive and asked him what he thought of Hitler’s chances in Russia.

“Wait till winter,” Dev said. “It seems to me we’ll be in this by then, one way or another.”

“I’m thinking of enlisting, before my number comes up. Wouldn’t mind flying against those Japanese Zeros.”

“I’ve heard from a few who are doing that. At least you get a choice, they say.”

“That’s right—though are you likely to get called? You don’t sound American.”

Dev shrugged. “My mother’s British, but I got naturalized years ago. I’m as liable as you. But I’ll take my chances. Don’t think I’d care for army life.”

I tried not to listen, or at least to pretend like I’d gone judiciously deaf, but at this I turned my head, surprised into laughter at the understatement. He didn’t even eat meat.

Dev flicked a glance to the side at the same moment and our gazes snagged and held, a burr on clean cotton, until I thought some warm answer flashed inside him. Then he ripped me with a shrug and waved a greeting to Tamara, just come from backstage.

“The usual, sugar,” she called, shaking the bangles on her arms like maracas as she danced through the crowd. They cleared a path to get a better look; in high-necked satin or a grass skirt, Tamara always commanded attention. She was an earth goddess come to vibrant life, with brown skin, glossy hair, an ass like a naked peach and eyes like the bottom of a well. My resentment of her had only managed to last a weekend; sure, I had known from the start how she fascinated Dev, but he hadn’t been mine for a long time now and there was something about Tamara—the way she cared about everyone, the way we listened to one another—that had made us fast friends without me having hardly any say in it. Dev watched her face as he lit her cigarette.

“Well, that’s better,” she said, and, catching sight of me, “Sugar! Gorgeous as always, where have you been? Are you drinking? Of course you are. Make that two French 75s, Dev. Have you tried one, Pea? They’re my new favorite. Our Dev’s a genius.”

This flow of uninterrupted, low-throated chatter was accompanied by a peck on both of my cheeks, French-style, which I bore with a smile and a small shrug in Dev’s direction. Tamara admired no one more than the dancers of the French avant-garde, Isadora Duncan and Josephine Baker; she had no time for the fluttering weightlessness of the traditional ballerina.

She reached into a well-concealed pocket and pulled out a small blue hardcover, scarred with water and the multicolored mold of several continents. She pushed it across the zinc bar to Dev. A book of poems by Sarojini Naidu, who I had only heard of because Dev had mentioned her to me in an unguarded moment three years ago, after Charlie had played until dawn and the ten of us left weren’t so much standing as draped over tables and one another, buffeted by clouds from sweet spliffs whose spent butts crunched beneath our feet like roaches. His gaze intent upon Tamara, tears or sweat rolling down her cheeks while another man kissed up and down the soft inside creases of her joints, Dev had lifted his soft voice like an axe beside me and swung down:

“Shelter my soul, o my love!

My soul is bent low with the pain

And the burden of love, like the grace

Of a flower that is smitten with rain:

O shelter my soul from thy face!”

I caught my breath, hard. “What’s that?” I had managed.

He told me her name then. “An Indian nationalist and poetess from Hyderabad. They say I met her when I was younger, but I don’t remember now.”

Tamara had been with us for just a few months then, but I knew: not that he wanted her, because everyone wanted her, but that Dev would have her soon enough.

“I confess,” Tamara said now, smiling at her lover, “that poetry still ain’t exactly my bag, but there were two or three I swear I . . . well, I don’t know if I liked them, but they made me want to dance.” Dev lifted the book, gazed at the smudged and blackened gilt on the embossed cover. The Golden Threshold, I read. His eyes met mine for a fraction of a breath. Then he smiled at Tamara and hid the book beneath the bar. “I think that’s even better,” he told her. “You should dance it one Thursday night. Isn’t that something they’re doing in the Irish theater these days?”

Tamara nodded while her gaze shot beyond us, glowing distantly with calculation. She could not stop, our Tamara. With Victor she had found something better than a safe haven or a sugar daddy: she’d found someone who gave her power. Sure, Tammy had to sell a lot of herself, piece by piece, to keep it. I could tell her what the view was like from fifteen years in Victor’s back pocket. But like I had once been, she was still too young to care.

She was the mistress of the Pelican’s off-nights, the goddess of our integrated Village oasis, the bleeding heart of an artistic mecca that privileged the iconoclast and stylized and generously syncopated. She could be thoughtless in her majesty, she could even be cruel, but I knew the sweetness underneath it all: she fed the alley cats with scraps after closing, no matter how many times Victor told her to stop. She bought everyone drinks and cadged everyone’s cigarettes, in a proportion dependent on which member of her extended family currently occupied her spare bedroom. Her family, it seemed, was uniformly parasitic, and none as amiable as Tamara, who yet loved them all as genuinely as I had to suppose she loved me, or Dev, or those yowling cats behind the Pelican. She danced like an earthquake and she sang like a bullet, and some nights my heart felt bruised and overripe just to look at her.

I had never been that young, that beautiful, that good.

Tamara swam back to reality and shook her head to see me there. In a lower voice, not one for show, she asked me, “Everything all right?”

She squeezed my hand and I wished Dev would hurry with those drinks just so I’d have something else in my throat. “Got your cards on you, Tammy?” I said, hoarse.

She was surprised. “I always do. But you don’t usually want to hear what they say.”

Tammy had a way of reading not just the numbers, but your future from a regular playing deck. Even old Widow Baker had used her cards to play policy, but Tammy claimed the numbers carried your fate on their backs like firewood. She said an old conjure woman from Baton Rouge taught her the trick when she was living in Brooklyn, but you never knew with Tamara—she’d bet her life on those cards, but she liked stories, too.

“I had a dream. A second dream, Tammy.”

Dev finally handed us our drinks. She took hers without even glancing up at him. “As soon as I’m done here, we’ll go back to my place. I’ll light some candles, burn some incense, and do a layout in three sets. The cards speak clearly in threes.”

“It’s the hands, I swear it is. They want something from me, or they’re calling me to account, but for what? I haven’t done a job, Tammy, not for months, so why now—”

She put a finger on my lips. “Don’t you worry, sugar, we . . .” She trailed off and tipped her head, looked through me as though I’d faded out in front of her. I turned around and saw that my fellas had come after all, the three of them fine as new pennies: shoes shined, uniforms pressed, and hair smooth and stiff with the combined efforts of Murray’s pomade and a boar-bristle brush. I waved and they hurried over, but I didn’t have any illusions about my own appeal beside Tamara’s. What surprised me was how Tamara was staring at them—particularly my admirer from this morning. She took her drink from Dev without so much as a glance in his direction, and tossed it back like Romeo took his poison.

“Tammy?” That was my admirer, taller and broader than his friends, with the gap between his teeth.

Tamara shook her head, not in negation, but as if she’d been sleeping and wanted to clear the fog. “My God, my God, Clyde, what the devil—you got some nerve—oh, you’re looking—”

She would have dropped her glass if I hadn’t caught it for her, neat and easy. Jerry and his friend didn’t see it—they were too busy ogling Clyde, who had wrapped his arms around the best-looking girl in the city while she bussed him hard—but Dev did. He touched my hand. I shorted out.

He was the raw current and I the badly insulated wire; the room seemed to flicker and dim around me, leaving only my scarred hand and his fingers—darker, smoother—resting against my stark metacarpals. I heard his voice, faint and crackled, but it took two shaky breaths for the meaning to reach me and by then I knew that I’d betrayed myself.

“Someone’s looking for you,” he repeated slowly. Behind us, Tamara and her long-lost beau were talking over each other, discovering between them the story of how they’d come to meet in a clip joint years after leaving the small Virginia town where they’d met. Dev and I might as well have been alone.

“Must be Victor.” I pulled my hand away, so he couldn’t tell me any more, and drank the French 75, which at first tasted faintly of champagne and then of nothing at all.

“Victor?” For a moment I thought he’d touch me again, but Dev reached for a glass instead and poured himself a shot of that good bourbon. “I couldn’t tell. I don’t know that it felt like him. Are you two on the outs?”

The false bookshelf fell back into its recess and Victor walked out, his arm slung around the dentist’s shoulders, and Red Man a few paces behind them. I wondered what business the dentist had with Victor, but I didn’t care about him enough to ask. Victor spotted Tamara, lips locked with her soldier boy, and gave the smallest of frowns. She would hear about this later—Victor liked Tamara to at least tease availability on busy weekend nights. Certainly Dev knew better than to kiss her in public.

“Not on the outs,” I said, watching them, “he just wants me to do a job.”

“And you don’t want to?”

I started to answer, and then realized that I couldn’t. After all I’d done, what should my wanting have to do with my yes or my no? I didn’t trust myself anymore and now the hands had sent their second dream, their warning, another round of their dangerous luck.

“I’ve been asking myself,” I said, “what you would do.”

I hadn’t known this was true until I said it. It surprised us both.

Dev rested his lips on the edge of the tumbler. “That might not work as well as you think, Pea.”

Walter said that woman was murdering people like Dev and me for our hands. Stopping that evil was a pure and fiery purpose, and I craved it with the flat desperation of any junkie six months, three weeks, one night clean.

“I haven’t done a job in seven months.”

Dev started. The wrinkles spread like stars around the corners of his eyes and he leaned forward.

“How about that,” he said. “Six months more than you managed for me.”

“I didn’t . . . back then I still thought that justice . . .”

“You thought it was worth the karma.”

“Victor won’t let this one go.”

His gaze flicked over my shoulder, to Victor’s usual table. I didn’t turn around.

“Another French 75?” He pulled out a clean glass before I could respond. While he busied himself behind the bar, he said in a low, conversational tone, “Who is it now?”

“Some woman. Maryann West. Red Man—Walter says she’s—” I stopped short. How to explain without invoking the memory of everything that had gone wrong between us a decade ago? The day Walter tempted me with Trent Sullivan and his stolen hands; the night I left Dev to kill and the night he found me too late. Dev had waited until he washed the blood away to make it gently, perfectly clear that he wanted nothing more to do with me.

“Maryann West?” Dev repeated. His hand trembled as he filled my glass.

“Don’t tell me you know her?”

Dev shook his head once, an emphatic negation. “What does Victor say this woman did?”

And here we came to it. I felt as though I had waited months for this moment and now I only wanted to hide, or kill something. “The hands,” I said to my drink. “It’s happening again, Dev. She killed someone like us.”

His breath caught. “Now, see, that’s curious, Pea. Because the Maryann West that I know used to be Trent Sullivan’s girl. You’ll remember him—the fellow you murdered on his bed while his girlfriend screamed herself bloody in the bathroom?”

We stared at each other, long and hard enough for Charlie to finish his set with a tumble of notes. People jostled us, called for drinks, but Dev still stared and I couldn’t catch my breath. Maryann West was Trent’s girl? Impossible. Wouldn’t I have recognized her voice? But regret had amplified and distorted those screams in my memory. If she was really Trent Sullivan’s girl, it wouldn’t be a coincidence.

But after so much time, why would she commit the same crime that got her lover offed? For the first time in fifteen years, I wondered: had Victor always told me the truth?

Copyright © 2020 by Alaya Dawn Johnson. Excerpted from Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alaya Dawn Johnson has been recognized for her short fiction and YA novels, winning the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Novelette for “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” which also appears in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (2015), guest edited by Joe Hill. Her debut YA novel, The Summer Prince, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Her follow up YA novel, Love Is the Drug, won the Andre Norton Award in 2015. A native of Washington, D.C., Johnson is currently based in Mexico City, where she received a masters degree in Mesoamerican studies and sings in a blues band.

Book Reviews, June 2020

Arley Sorg | 3507 words

Big Girl
Meg Elison
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1629637839
PM Press, May 2020, 128 pgs

Meg Elison’s Big Girl comprises two original speculative stories as well as reprinted fiction, essays, and an interview with Elison by notable author and Outspoken Authors series editor Terry Bisson. Each piece, including the nonfiction, is immediately arresting, often through an interesting concept or line put right at the front, sometimes through something visual. Sentences are deliberate, composition is careful, and throughout there is an artistry to the writing which, on a craft level alone, is superb. With some pieces more than others, but at least once or twice in pretty much every piece, there are those stunning turns of phrases, those combinations of words which elicit an immediate reaction in the reader, from a smile perhaps, to a surge of excitement, to those moments which make you want to post them on Twitter with trembling hands. Perhaps more importantly than all of this, there is a distinct voice with a clear point of view, one which is sharp, clever, and powerful.

“El Hugé” opens the book, a story about a grotesque, prize-winning pumpkin, and a girl who gets entangled in a mission to destroy it. As an opener it’s a wonderful piece because it showcases Elison’s ability to capture mood and character in brief strokes. The opening line is immediately interesting, and the scene is set with efficient visuals. This story brilliantly embodies the personality of youth, especially frustration and senseless defiance, with a dash of wry humor. Set in the context of the rest of the book, it takes on new, deeper meaning.

Later in the book, Terry Bisson asks Elison if she ever wanted to be small. Her response: “My true form is fifty feet tall and made of gold, shrieking like Godzilla and eating entire oyster beds.” Short story “Big Girl” features a young girl who awakens to find herself huge—around 350 feet tall. She is so big she can’t be properly clothed or fed, and reactions range from hypersexualized to fear. The story is told in a fairly distant third person as well as through media pieces such as newspaper articles, Tweets, and other kinds of posts. On a surface level, it’s just a really cool idea and a fascinating story. But the story works on a number of more meaningful levels. Through exaggeration it examines the dehumanization of the different and especially the female different: among all the reactions, whether fetishizing or wanting to destroy, almost no one bothers to actually talk to the giant, and the tactic of the narrative mostly staying out of her head mirrors this. There is a stunning polemic here against the way we as a culture respond to the strange or the potentially threatening. There are multiple levels of consideration around the male gaze, the selfishness/self-satisfying to the seemingly kind but actually not helpful—such as the faux Times article, which is as much or more about the author and through soft implication how “wonderful” the author is, while serving no real purpose for the girl. In a variety of ways, people enjoy the spectacle of the girl; meanwhile, she is suffering tremendously. Moreover, she is utterly alone. The tale comes to a weird, unsettling, thoughtful conclusion, one which elevates the entire piece beyond what it already does.

“The Pill” might be mistaken as a near-future tale about a new drug which successfully causes rapid weight loss with a fair chance of death (1 in 10). And sure, that’s the premise. But this story is really about the demonization of fat people, on both a sociocultural level and an internalized level; and the absolute loneliness of someone who doesn’t feel like being fat is the evil that everyone else seems to think it is. It opens with the protagonist’s mother, who is so desperate for attention that she routinely enrolls in drug trials, and ends up one of the first to take the pill. The pill works and, despite the potential for death, mom pushes everyone else in the family to do it—the entire family is fat. Mom’s cause and aggressiveness clarifies her motives for the protagonist, who thinks upon a family photo: “ . . . we looked like a basket of round, ripe fruit. I kind of liked it . . . we all looked happy. Happy wasn’t enough, apparently” (quoted material used with permission of the publisher). She sees the urgency for thinness as nothing less than a betrayal, realizing that the things the mother hates are embodied by the things the protagonist is. The speculative element is ramped up as the pill becomes a national phenomenon, and almost everyone is taking it. The narrative then uses the speculative element as a lens to examine the ways in which society rejects and discards fat people, regardless of how any given fat person’s concerns. I won’t spoil where the story goes, because it’s beautiful and brilliant, and it makes me want to read everything Elison writes.

“Such People In It” is another near future piece, this time tracing current political themes to an awful but arguably possible reality. My complaint with this story is mainly in the passive nature of the narrative structure: I would have liked for the protagonist to be trying to do something, to have some goal, some task he’d set out to accomplish. As is, the protagonist is mostly a set of eyes for the reader to experience the world. The eyes have a name: Omar. And, despite my complaint, the story is still very effective. It’s visually striking, grounded enough to feel real, and one section had me absolutely squirming—yet unable to put it down. In other words, it’s still masterful. What I especially appreciate is the variety of elements, from the points which are beat over the reader’s head, to the more subtle aspects requiring more reflection. It all comes to a satisfying conclusion, and feels like the author trying desperately to shake America awake.

Of the nonfiction, “Gone with Gone With the Wind” is an absolute must read. It’s a reflection on Elison’s realizations over rereading the novel Gone With the Wind. It takes the reader on a journey from her youth to adulthood and calls out the ways in which she interacts with the texts, from initially relating as a young girl in its coming-of-age aspect, to interrogating the way the story overlooks—or destroys—the perspectives of the individuals upon which the protagonist’s fortune depends. It’s an honest look at the author’s own biases and position in society, and an argument for self-reflection and the rereading process. In other words, it calls out for people to do better, and it does it by example.

I left this book hungry to read anything and everything Elison writes, not to mention eager to reach out and tell her how amazing she is. There is a wonderful audacity in these pages, as well as a frankness which sets Elison apart from many authors. Elison’s stories kick you awake, enrapture you, and by their end fill you with newly dawning realizations. Her naked honesty is breathtaking; and her skill is unquestionable.

Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles
Ellen Datlow, ed.
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-0525565758
Blumhouse/Anchor, June 2020, 480 pgs

Ellen Datlow is one of the most well-known, celebrated, and respected anthologists working today (besides perhaps George R.R. Martin, whose renown is mostly due to works other than his often quite remarkable anthologies). Datlow has been editing since the ’70s, joining Omni magazine as associate fiction editor in 1979 and taking over as fiction editor in 1981. Her first original fiction anthology was 1989’s Blood is Not Enough, comprised of the kinds of stories Ben Bova wouldn’t let her buy for Omni—in other words, horror. She has scores of standalone themed anthologies published, as well as long-running dark fantasy/horror series such as The Best Horror of the Year and the co-edited The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She has more awards nominations and wins than most people in this industry will ever see, from a number of award-giving bodies, such as Stoker Awards and Locus Awards, including five Hugo Award wins for best editor. She received a Stoker Life Achievement Award in 2011 for her work in the horror field, and her record-making number of World Fantasy Awards nominations and wins culminated in a Life Achievement Award in 2014. She is prolific: Final Cuts is one of at least three Datlow anthologies scheduled for 2020 release. For many authors, landing in one of her anthologies is as notable as winning an award. She is considered by many to be the foremost expert on horror short fiction.

Final Cuts collects 18 original stories generally around the idea of movies and the film industry. The pieces are by a somewhat diverse collection of voices across intersections of sexuality and ethnicity, though the bulk of the authors are white males; five authors identify as female; but none of the authors are Black. Most of the authors are well-established award-winners and best sellers in horror, as well as a few who are newer but have been recognized as notable, and a few who are well-known authors in genre in general. Christopher Golden, for example, Paul Cornell, Nathan Ballingrud, and so on. What this creates is a body of work which is solid throughout. Everyone in this book knows how to craft a story, they know how to make it cohesive, and in most cases, do excellent work with character and story. Readers could start with nearly any piece and count on finding a good tale.

Many of the stories are similar in that they look back to some specific era and style of moviemaking, and several of them feel less inventive as a consequence, especially when read one after the other. But, one of the most fun aspects of themed anthologies such as this is seeing different approaches to the same idea. In this light, stand outs include “Exhalation #10” by A.C. Wise, which is probably my favorite story in the book. A cop finds a video of a woman’s death in a crashed, abandoned car, and enlists the help of his best friend—who has uncanny hearing ability—to help him find the killer. Nice character details ground the story and give it life, while the overall vibe is perfectly moody, with an effective, continual rise in tension. The combination of brutality and imagery, as well as the tension, somehow reminded me of the movie Seven: a totally messed up narrative which drives you to keep going. At the same time, the brutality never feels gratuitous; it fits the theme and message of the story, and it is integrated into its overall purpose. The final resolution and message of the piece elevates what is already effective horror/thriller fare to make this one of the best pieces in the book. In the ARC (advanced review copy) it’s the third story but I recommend reading it in the middle or towards the end, as a climax to the overall selection.

“Drunk Physics” by Kelley Armstrong is a great addition to the newer movement of internet-based horror, arguably popularized by the 2014 movie Unfriended. Notably, it is also one of the few stories featuring female protagonists. One night at a pub physics doctoral students Trinity and Hannah decide to start an internet show where they get drunk and, only after being drunk, explain physics concepts to the audience. Solid storytelling and a charming voice combine with great interpersonal drama to drive this piece. The characters in this one are among the most relatable in the book, the sorts of people you might expect an author to say, oh yeah, those two are based on these friends of mine.

Laird Barron’s “The One We Tell Bad Children” is a truly remarkable work for two reasons. First, it takes the anthology theme and places it in a fairy tale alternate world which is full of fascinating tidbits of its own accord. Second, it’s written in an over-the-top style, one which, by most authors, would sound stilted and forced, but somehow works very well and provides a smooth fairy-tale read—as long as your vocabulary can keep up. It’s wonderfully dark, and takes the “cursed movie” trope to a different level. I loved the ending, and to be frank, it’s one of the few pieces with an ending which I didn’t entirely predict from the outset.

Perhaps the most truly sinister is “Lords of the Matinee” by Stephen Graham Jones. A man takes his ageing father-in-law to a movie and uncovers a terrible secret. Whereas many of the stories in this anthology draw upon monsters, demons, and the like—or a trip to the movie incites some kind of evil—in this piece, what is truly unnerving is the real, the possible, and Jones uses the speculative element of his story to take the reader there. If the goal of horror is to unsettle the reader, this is probably one of the most successful pieces in the book.

New authors who find success usually have to find it by clawing their way out of a slush pile. Their first few story sales have to stand out immediately, they have to get to the point quickly, and they have to leave an impression upon the reader which lingers. Many venues will have a budget to purchase a handful of original pieces and this is, generally speaking, the only way to make a story stand out in a “slush pile” of hundreds of stories. A side effect of anthologies comprised of established authors is that many of the authors know their stories will be read to their conclusions, and that they will probably be purchased. They don’t have to claw their way to get noticed; they don’t have to make a point quickly. This anthology falls into that category: most of the stories lack the innovation that newer authors hungry to get noticed often bring. All of the stories are “good” but most of them are predictable, and feature a slow build up to an idea reveal, rather than an idea at the beginning which the characters have to deal with, and which (this being horror) causes disaster.

Cassandra Khaw’s story stands out from the batch. “Hungry Girls” grabs the reader immediately with a great opening, not to mention interesting characters and situations. Word choices are cool, style and imagery are striking, and the narrators have a refreshing frankness. It’s about a sleazy low-budget filmmaker taking his motley crew to shoot in Kuala Lumpur and—well. It’s short and to the point and works very well, so I won’t spoil it here.

Richard Kadrey is another author who gets to the point, in “Snuff in Six Scenes.” The piece edges up to torture- or splatter- porn and is a fun example of a more violent sort of horror; not to mention, along with “Exhalation #10,” a testament to the breadth of what we call “horror.” Kadrey shows restraint by letting imagination fill in the actual gory details, focusing on the dialogue and the situation—the shifting relationship between the woman who has come to be killed, and the man who has come to kill her. It’s a clever, short piece.

Many of the stories deserve to be mentioned for one reason or another. “Das Gesicht” by Dale Bailey demonstrates masterful use of language to capture mood and atmosphere. Ballingrud’s “Scream Queen” evolves into something truly creepy, and is among the stories which are thematically stronger, speaking to dreams lost. Lisa Morton’s “Family” ties plot to character nicely at the end, taking the narrative to a thoughtful, interesting place. “Insanity Among Penguins” by Brian Hodge, told in a casual, conversational tone, has great character work, and is a fascinating, thought-provoking existential exploration on the nature of life via concepts of self-annihilation; also—it gets very creepy. “Cut Frame” by Gemma Files has a nice build of intrigue and makes good use of quotes and multimedia excerpts, as well as folklore.

Every story in this book displays a level of skill which speaks to the careers of the authors. Many of the stories are similar in their approach to the theme, but all of them are convincing, and a few demonstrate a staggering knowledge of cinema or horror. There is a reason so many readers place their faith in Ellen Datlow’s taste; and this book is good evidence that her taste has not faltered. It’s a worthy addition to the collection of anyone who loves horror short fiction.

Ring Shout
P. Djèlí Clark
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1250767028
Tor.com publishing, October 2020, 176 pgs

Simply put, reading this book filled me with joy.

In 1922 Maryse Boudreaux and her friends are monster hunters. They hunt Ku Kluxes: demonic creatures who hide amidst the Ku Klux Klan. Chef is an army vet, a big girl with a big knife; and Sadie is a crack shot with a rifle. After slaying a few monsters, they uncover a larger plot, tied to the showing of notorious film The Birth of a Nation. Maryse and her friends must uncover the plot and stop it before it’s too late.

Within just a few lines, I knew I wanted to read this book. At face value this is a great, imaginative dark fantasy adventure story. It’s well-plotted and structured, with enough familiar tropes to be comfortable and accessible, married to enough fresh vision to make it interesting. The escalation and pacing is right on. The monsters are nasty as they should be. Maryse is a wonderful hero, and the people who fill the story are far more than easy plot devices or protagonist accessories. Every character who takes the stage is cool and thoughtfully executed. Everyone pulls their weight and contributes to the story. The narrative is filled with people who are underrepresented, portraying them in ways which are respectful and positive. Real humor is grounded in real culture and relevant discussions, many of which reminded me of conversations I had growing up; all of which is to say the dialogue is great, and it had me laughing.

But what makes this story special is the way it deals with the era and its situations. It opens with Black female heroes taking action and feeling empowered. It focuses on their friendship, their group charisma, their agency. It doesn’t shy away from the nightmarish realities of the time and place: racism, lynching, and so on; and everyone in the story has been personally affected by hate. At the same time, the narrative focus is on strength—and it feels good. This is nothing short of a joyful celebration of Black culture, through music, through language, through stories, through people, through folklore, and more, all in the context of fighting hate and actual demons. It discusses hate and racism with frankness but never lets the negativity of those elements weigh down the story.

This book is also immensely educational in an easy, readable way. The way that the TV show Watchmen created a new nation-wide awareness of the Tulsa massacre, couching it in the context of a narrative in a way which made viewers race to Google to find out more, Ring Shout is deeply researched and rich with information couched in the natural course of the narrative; one can’t but learn while reading it, being entertained all the while, and come away from it edified.

Finally, there’s a thematic conversation around hate, and anger, pain, fear, and related emotions. It’s smart and heartfelt, without being sappy or overly simplistic. It’s an argument for a better way to deal with each other and relate to each other, and it argues by example, making great points.

A smart cultural conversation, awesome characters, empowerment, positivity, and more. Accomplishing so much in such a cohesive, unobtrusive way, while pulling off a solid story with engaging, often really funny dialogue, is nothing less than brilliant.

This book is a gift to American culture.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Media Review: June 2020

JY Yang | 1168 words

Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Produced by Hisashi Nogami
Developed by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch system
March 20, 2020

Welcome to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a game where, as esteemed writer Saladin Ahmed tweeted, “you can do fantastical things like visit friends and afford housing” (bit.ly/3cIo2cL). Over weeks unfolding in pandemic-scarred March and April, a wide swathe of homebound folk turned to Twitter to share their progress in the candy-hued life simulator game. In between grim reports of rising death counts and economic collapse, social media was inundated with brightly-colored captures of players’ cartoon avatars, contentedly building an idyllic life on an island populated with talking animals—decorating homes, planting elaborate gardens, fishing, and catching bugs. Despite the childlike nature of the game, the soft and hopeful aesthetic found broad appeal in times of hardship. AC:NH broke sales records, selling close to two million copies at launch in Japan alone; it has been the most commercially successful instalment of the nearly two-decade-old Animal Crossing franchise to date.

The game opens with you buying an island getaway package. Upon arrival on a beautiful but deserted island with two other new residents, you receive a tent, a plot of land, and sizable debt from its apparent owner, a raccoon-dog named Tom Nook. As the game plays out in real time over the following weeks, you slowly turn the island into a little town, expanding from a tent to a house, to a house with more rooms and then multiple floors, while building shops and amenities and inviting more talking-animal residents to live with you. Your island schedule fills quickly with chores: chopping wood, harvesting fruit, crafting tools and furniture. There’s enough to occupy hours at a pop, and the gorgeous environment makes it easy. Grass crunches underfoot depending on what shoes you’re wearing, and the ocean’s transparency changes according to the time of the day. The island’s museum—a combined insectarium, aquarium, and natural history museum—is a meditative, almost transcendental experience. There is an abundance of charm in the clever details of the clothes you can wear and the furniture you can build or buy.

Much has been said of AC:NH’s online gameplay. With the right Internet connection, players can visit one anothers’ islands in real time to admire their setup and wardrobe, shop at their stores, and trade resources native to each island. It was easily the best part of the game for me. When I was building a writing den, for example, I visited friends to find the right kind of desks and wallpaper, and sent another friend raw material to build me a bookshelf, which they had the recipe for. It was much-needed social bonding at a time where people were kept apart by pandemic.

And yet, for all its chill ethos and cute aesthetic, the core of Animal Crossing’s gameplay is transactional. Every item you put in your pockets, from iron nuggets to trash to live fish to furniture, can be sold for a price at the island’s shop. And while many of the basic in-game items can be crafted, many more, especially the fancier furniture and much of the game’s wardrobe, cannot. They have to be bought or gifted. Moving in new villagers costs money, building new bridges and ramps costs money. There’s the ever-present mortgage: The game pushes you towards increasingly exorbitant expansions to your home, which you will of course accept, because you need more space for the stuff you have accumulated. Your home and (to a certain extent) your island are ranked on the number of items you have placed in and on them, respectively, so the more things you acquire and put on display, the better a score the game gives you.

All this means you are heavily driven to accumulate capital to progress in the game. To do so, you are obliged to harvest natural resources from the land around you: fruit, fish, bugs, wood, stones, iron ore. Soon you start measuring everything you pick up by their monetary value: Why waste time catching low-value bugs which take up inventory space, when the right kind of butterfly will net you four times as much for the same effort? Then, you are strongly encouraged to take trips to procedurally generated nearby islands simply full of things free to catch, dig up, or shake out of trees. These Mystery Island Tours are often greatly profitable; some of them spawn valuable species of fish and bugs that are hard to find back home. As I carved holes into the wild landscape of one such island, I caught myself thinking: “There’s no need to fill this up, I’m never coming back here.” It’s the wet dream of the colonialist: endless pristine land belonging to no-one which you can turn to handsome profit.

Unlike in the real world, however, there are no drawbacks to this colonialist, capitalist enterprise you run. The island remains perfect-hued and unsullied, the soundtrack stays warm and happy, the sun sets beautifully at seven. Nobody judges you; no animals were harmed in this crossing. The biggest fantasy in Animal Crossing, then, is not the abundance of cheap airfare or the relative affordability of a mortgage, but the idea that conspicuous and ever-expanding consumption comes at no cost to anyone. The waters are full of fish whose stocks are never depleted, the islands you plunder from are miraculously uninhabited, and this land—your land, which you have settled upon—is free for you to denude, shape and urbanize as you fancy. It is the dream pushed upon us by late-stage neo-imperialist capitalism, made flesh. The whimsy invoked in Ahmed’s tweet is a cotton-candy cloak around the insidious set of base assumptions we have been taught. Buy, frack, dig, sell. Make. Upscale. Bigger is better, more is the dream.

In the excellent NBC series The Good Place, the major argument that develops in later seasons is the impossibility of making morally good choices in a universe with corruption and exploitation baked into its bones—the system by which we judge humanity is broken, because society is broken. There is, after all, no ethical consumption under capitalism. Animal Crossing strips away that dilemma by presenting us a jingly, upbeat world in which we are allowed to fulfil all our desires to buy and own with no ill effects. Perhaps the game is alluring precisely because it offers an idealized mirror of the broken society we have little choice but to work within and around. It is a capitalist Narnia, glimpsed through a looking glass, full of gentle landscapes and bucolic pleasures, bolstered by the ethics of hard work and productivity. It may not be what we need in these times, but it’s clearly what we want.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JY Yang is a queer, non-binary Singaporean author. They are the author of the Tensorate series of novellas from Tor.com Publishing (The Red Threads of Fortune, The Black Tides of Heaven, The Descent of Monsters, and the upcoming The Ascent of Heaven), and they have over two dozen works of short fiction published in places such as Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Lackington’s. They have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and Locus awards, and their work has been a Tiptree nominee.

Interview: Jessica Cluess

Christian A. Coleman | 3892 words

Jessica Cluess is a graduate of both Northwestern University and the Clarion Writers Workshop. After college, she moved to Los Angeles, where she served coffee to the rich and famous while working on her first novel in the Kingdom on Fire series, A Shadow Bright and Burning. These days, she sits around thinking about dragons far too much, and enjoys it. You can find her online at jessicacluess.com and on Twitter at @JessCluess.

House of Dragons, the first book of your new YA series, follows five outcasts from five royal houses who compete in the Trial for the dragon throne to rule Etrusian. Each outcast is accompanied by their dragon. Their call to the Trial is a departure from tradition, because it’s usually the oldest, most prepared children of each house who are summoned. What’s the origin story of the premise?

To be honest, the genesis of this project was a bit unusual. I was coming up on the end of my first series with my publisher. I wrote a pitch for a new series and sent it to them. They bought the idea, and my editor and I started work. But after a few months had passed and we found ourselves going in circles, we made a mutual decision to shelve it and agreed that I would write something else. My editor and the publisher couldn’t have been nicer about it, but I was definitely panicking. I was afraid I’d never finish another project.

So I woke up on the third day after we’d agreed to find something new, and I was laying in bed, cycling through my now-customary first thoughts upon waking: “You’ve made a huge mistake, you’ll never be published again, you have no other ideas.”

In the past, I’ve gotten my ideas for projects from an image that comes out of nowhere. The whole of my first series was inspired when I imagined a girl in Victorian dress shooting fire out of her hands. The images don’t have to make sense. So all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I got the image of this tall, regal girl in ornate dress picking up a sword and slicing off her sister’s head. I instantly sat up and wondered where this was going. Granted, it’s a real long way from picturing a girl slicing someone’s head off to a book about trials and dragons with five protagonists. But the image was all I needed—the acorn, basically.

The premise of five outcast weirdoes competing for the throne came about while my editor and I tossed the idea ball back and forth. We agreed that a trial of some kind would be a lot of fun to write. However, there are a lot of contest and trial books out there, and just having it be a dragon empire didn’t give the book enough of a hook. That was when I thought about what it would be like if I or someone else similarly ill-equipped got shoved into a contest for the throne of an empire. Then I considered how the least likely candidates would fare in such a situation. Then my editor observed this was like the cast of The Breakfast Club in a fantasy world, and I knew what I had to do.

I’ve seen this book described as The Breakfast Club with dragons meets Three Dark Crowns. I’ve also seen it compared to the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Do you see it falling in the same vein as George R. R. Martin’s books?

Nowadays, anytime you have a fantasy novel told from multiple points of view that deals with a succession crisis and involves dragons, you’re going to get compared to George R. R. Martin. I would say that if you like those elements of Martin’s work, you’ll probably enjoy my book.

However, there are major differences between us. I’m writing for teens, and therefore, the graphic sex, sexual violence, and incredibly detailed descriptions of feasts aren’t there in a way they are for a Martin book. I should also mention that the climax of my book involves a blond ruler burdened with glorious purpose riding on dragonback while roasting a capital city. When my friends and I watched the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, wherein a blond ruler burdened with glorious purpose rides on dragonback while roasting a capital city, everyone kept sneaking glances at me as I sat there with my head in my hands.

You like taking fantasy tropes and turning them on their head. In your Kingdom on Fire books, you put a new spin on the Chosen One trope. What trope(s) did you want to subvert or flip upside down in House of Dragons?

Subversion’s a dirty old word these days, and kind of rightly so. Again, see the final season of Game of Thrones for why everyone is so sick of it. When I did the “They think she’s the Chosen One but she’s not” thing in Kingdom on Fire, I did it less as a “screw you” to the trope and more out of simple curiosity. “Well, what would happen if they picked the wrong Chosen One?” was what kept me interested. I see what I do as less upending fantasy tropes and more looking at them from a different perspective. In Kingdom on Fire, while the heroine of the series isn’t the Chosen One, there is a Chosen One and she does save the day.

I’m not overly fond of subversion because I think it has a certain bratty quality when done poorly. This’ll get me pilloried, but that was one thing I didn’t like about the movie Knives Out. I appreciated that it wanted to take the Agatha Christie big house murder mystery and look at it through a new lens. I think that’s a good idea, but in execution, it felt like “Marvel as I put a spin on these tired old tropes, except sometimes I don’t.” I think we forget that Agatha Christie could out-mystery any of us any day of the week. The woman knew what she was doing because she spent a lifetime doing it. She codified those tropes, because they were highly effective and because she understood why they were effective. Like, the filmmaker understood that an inspector gives a big speech at the end explaining the mystery, but I don’t think he fully understood why, when the inspector isn’t the POV protagonist, it’s not that satisfying anymore.

I am by no means saying you should never experiment. Innovation is necessary to pump new life’s blood into a genre and keep tropes from becoming clichés. Different perspectives offer up a variety of ideas that we might never have considered before. I’m saying that going toe to toe with a master, or at least playing in her sandbox and claiming her toys as your own, requires a bit of humility. If you’re going to subvert, you have to understand not just what you’re subverting but what it does and why it exists in the first place. This is a super, super, super long way of saying I am not smart enough to “subvert” anything. It’s more that I like to play with tropes. As for House of Dragons, there is something I’m doing in terms of tropes, but I can’t say what it is because it’s the endgame of book two.

Ah, fair enough. No spoilers for book two. I’ll say, though, that it looks like one of your favorite tropes is the girl who has to hide her powers—if anyone finds out, she faces fatal consequences. It’s the case for Henrietta Howell, who can light herself on fire, in Kingdom on Fire. So it goes for Emilia of Aurun in House of Dragons. She harbors the magic of chaos, which can cause destruction or certain death for any nearby living creature, animal or human.

I mean, I’m very unoriginal. On top of that, I see a lot of myself in those types of characters. I know what it’s like to believe that you can’t share what you think or feel, that your natural impulses are wrong. Also, a deadly secret is a real good way to spice up the drama. That’s important.

When it comes to character, do you make a distinction between trope and archetype?

Certain character archetypes keep showing up in different stories across different cultures, because they get at fundamental truths of the human condition. As a storyteller, it’s useful to have a familiarity with those archetypes, because they help ensure your characters don’t all sound and think and act the same. Because House of Dragons is set up as the fantasy Breakfast Club, we start off with those very clearly defined character roles: the Nerd, the Jock, the Outsider, the Delinquent, the (murder) Princess. Over the course of the series, I’m trying to make it so that the characters become messier. What happens when the Nerd can’t fix things with her knowledge? What happens when the Jock needs to do something other than fight? How do you move outside of the archetype while still being yourself? As far as archetype vs. trope, I suppose the primary difference is the difference between “the Hero” and “the reluctant hero.”

Emilia is cast as the Nerd who can resort to some dirty moves during the Trial. Ajax (the Delinquent) is the jackass who steals. Hyperia (the Princess) is out for blood, even her own sister’s in order to compete in the Trial. That leaves Lucian (the Jock), the warrior who’s sworn never to lift a sword again, and Vespir (the Outsider), the dragon trainer who had to leave her girlfriend behind. These last two are the most noble-hearted of the group. Did you always have this in mind when working out the group dynamic?

I love calling Ajax a jackass. It is so apt.

I didn’t sit down and say to myself, “Okay, I need me a couple of sweethearts to counterbalance the assholery.” It was more like as the story went along, I saw what I’d need in order to move the plot forward, and who would need to do it.

I will say that I designed Lucian to be noble-hearted and earnest pretty deliberately. I see a lot of male protagonists, in particular romantic male protagonists, who are snarky and cocksure and kind of edgy. I certainly understand why that is appealing, but I wanted to present a genuinely kind, if still somewhat misguided young man who looks out for the people around him and doesn’t have an angle. As for Vespir, the moment I started writing her I went, “You are my cinnamon roll, you are too good for this world.” She has her flaws, of course, because otherwise she’d be insufferable. But I like writing people who are just genuinely good.

One of the lessons, if you will, that more grimdark fantasy seems to want to impart is that being a good person is the mark of a sucker, and that only once you grow up and get wise to the callous cruelty of life can you succeed. I see this as untenable and, frankly, as juvenile as the idea that life is a field of buttercups. As bad as the world is sometimes, and it can be so bad, if lots of people weren’t fundamentally decent we would be living in a reality that is even worse than I hope we can imagine. Sweet, kind people—who have flaws, yes—do exist, and they don’t always come last. I think it’s important that not everyone is a shark.

As the protagonists find themselves working together during the Trial, themes of imperialism and the spoils of war emerge. The priest and priestess who run the Trial are all for upholding the status quo of expanding Etrusia. Not out of defense, but because it’s always been done and has never been questioned. What do you think about critiquing imperialism with characters who have to work together instead of with characters who have to compete against each other?

One of the main reasons I wanted to make the magic system of this world order vs. chaos is that I think life is about achieving a balance between those two, not trying to crush one or the other. In book one, we see the problems that result from being a slave to order and tradition. One of the major issues the priests have, as you’ve said, is that they aren’t upholding tradition because it’s relevant and useful. They’re upholding it because it’s the way things were done in the past, and since things worked out back then, they believe they’ll work out exactly the same now. Of course, that’s not how life operates. Tradition is important, as is having knowledge of your past and understanding it. But you can’t live in the past, and you have to always be open to receiving new information and adjusting yourself to that information. That doesn’t mean you blindly accept anything new that comes down the pike. Book two will delve into the issues surrounding chaos and radicalization. But the moment you become complacent, you become unable to grow and to change.

So to get back to the five kids and their increased understanding of the major flaws that exist in their world, it’s sort of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The teens all have different issues with one another, and Hyperia is undoubtedly the biggest antagonist amongst them, but there comes a point where they realize that this world is more complex and troubled than they imagined and that the adults, at least the ones who currently have the most power, are not helping matters. There’s this moment of awakening that happens to all of them. Part of growing up is realizing that the world isn’t as easy to digest as you thought. It’s one thing to fight a bunch of other people to win a throne, but when you realize that you’re essentially rats in a maze, should you still be competing?

So, about Hyperia: With her cutthroat MO, she comes off as imperialism personified. Of the five, she extols the power of Etrusia the most. Lucian makes an astute critique of her: she takes orders without a second thought, without considering the implications. She could easily be the evil baddie of the group, but spending time with the others seems to mellow her out a bit. How did you strike a balance between her cutthroatness and her human side?

It’s important to understand where a character is coming from. That doesn’t necessarily mean you condone that character’s actions, but you have to see them as a human being. It would’ve been easy, maybe, to make Hyperia a guard dog of the empire solely because she’s evil, man. But I think it’s the job of fiction to empathize with everyone, not just those on the side of the angels. Empathize is not inherently the same as sympathize, of course, but you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of someone you fundamentally disagree with and see what shaped that person. Even the vilest among us have admirable qualities.

One thing I discovered about Hyperia early on is that she’s actually, in a weird way, the most selfless of the protagonists. She does horrifying things, like killing the only person she loves, in order to perform her duty. She is willing to sacrifice everything she cares about for the sake of doing the “right thing.” She wants only to serve the empire and the people within it. She doesn’t want to be empress because it will make her happy; she sees it as what’s expected and right. I also didn’t want to turn Hyperia into an ice cold Murder Girl. Killing her sister isn’t easy for her. She struggles horribly with it throughout the book. She’s not a sociopath, and she’s not without feeling. The fact that she has the capacity to love makes her, to me, even more chilling when she does horrible things. She wants to be conscientious and dutiful, and both of those are good qualities. The problem is that she takes them to an extreme, and I’m very wary of extremes. You cannot excuse what she does, but hopefully you can understand why she does it. The people who committed most of the great evils of history absolutely believed they knew what was right and were willing to pay any price to achieve it.

Talking about imperialism also means talking about place and setting. The fantasy Breakfast Club tours throughout a European-esque empire of dragons and magic. What’s your historical reference point?

While House of Dragons on the surface resembles a secondary fantasy world, it’s our world if the Roman Empire never happened and a dragon empire rose instead. If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice details like Karthago is Carthage, or the Hibrian Isles are the British Isles. Hyperia even summarizes the story of Coriolanus to the gang at dinner since she’s a Volscia, and Aufidius, the Volsci leader, is supposed to be her ancestor. That means my influences were all up in the air. I was popping around and grabbing what I liked. Having the dragon riders start in the Italian peninsula and then work their way out through Europe and Asia and Africa allowed me to have multiple cultures on display, and the riders marrying into the different areas they settled allowed me to have a diverse variety of people among the noble families competing for the throne. Lucian is from northern Africa, while Vespir and her girlfriend, Antonia, are Mongolian. But the way the world’s constructed means that race doesn’t create barriers; the class system does.

I love the details you put into the dragons. So many different kinds! And as we see in Vespir’s scenes in the aeries, there is a proper way to groom and take care of them. Dragons also reveal social hierarchy, the best ones, of course, being reserved for royalty. They can even experience flameout when they’re overworked. How did you come up with this part of the worldbuilding?

Making up the dragon stuff was the most fun I had on this book. These creatures are simultaneously symbols of great status and also, like, flying horses. Coming up with the practical Care and Keeping of Your Dragon was the best. I loved giving them little comfort goats for company. I’m a simple bitch. All I want is an awesome pet. I also liked juxtaposing how grand they’re perceived to be with how scary, goofy, bratty, and even cuddly they are. The difference between what is expected and what actually is becomes one of the running themes of the series. When it came to most things dragon related, I simply asked myself what would be fun to see. I also looked at the parameters of the story, of what needed to happen, and then asked myself how the dragons could work into that.

This being your second series, how does the experience of putting it together compare to writing your first?

In some ways, it’s easier, and in some ways it’s much harder. It’s easier in that I have better instincts for what’s working, what’s a plot dead end, etc. I understand how to save myself time and energy. It’s harder in that every time I sit down to write a book, I remember how difficult it is, how long the journey, and how much I’ll hate it before I’m done. House of Dragons 2 will be my fifth published novel, and I still feel like I’m relearning how to write whenever I open my laptop.

At the start of your career, you’d written an adult fantasy novel that didn’t get any response before you moved on to young adult fantasy. How has the YA crowd been treating you?

It’s five books in, so I can say they’ve treated me very nicely! It was so fortuitous that my adult fantasy didn’t get published, both because it could’ve been better and because the YA world has been so kind to me. I’ve made some of my best friends here.

What have responses from young readers been like to your writing? Do you have any favorites?

I was at an event a couple of years ago where this adorable little eleven-year-old girl came up and very shyly told me that A Shadow Bright and Burning was her favorite book. I melted. My first series was written for the younger YA crowd, like twelve to fifteen, because it was the story I would’ve wanted at that age. I’m always deeply grateful when an adult tells me they liked my series, but when a kid tells me that, it’s just the best feeling, because I wrote it for them.

So when can we expect House of Dragons 2 to come out? What can you tell us about it?

We’re aiming right now for summer 2021 to publish. I’m making the final big structural changes to the book as we speak, so I’m confident we’ll hit that deadline. As for book two, I can say that if book one was about winning a throne, book two is about keeping it.

Do you have other writing projects in the works?

I have another young adult fantasy I’m sketching out whenever I have time. I call it my “cannibal vampire mafia crime fantasy bodyguard romance,” which always gets a reaction of “Huh?” I also have several thousand words written of an adult fantasy novel, which I love. I hope to God it sells.

Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about House of Dragons?

I know that a reader has gotten to A Certain Moment in my book, because I always receive a text message that just says, “HOW COULD YOU?!??!?!” Then I laugh and make another martini out of children’s tears.

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: Julianna Baggott

Jude Griffin | 414 words

How did this story come about?

It started as a novel. This happens sometimes. You can imagine all those footnotes and how they get doled out in a plot line that runs over 300 pages? The main character here never appears in that novel, which was never sent out to editors. It remains one of those projects I stare at and rework and then stare at and then put away. I’m now staring at it again.

The way you crafted the historical references: Did their amenability to your storyline start to seem eerie?

The saying that if you have a hammer, everything is a nail came to mind. But yes, the connections just got easier and easier to make. And eerier. Sometimes writing feels like writing, but in the best of times it just feels like discovering.

COVID-19: We must be almost entirely out of vampires, no?

Cytokine storm—when I saw those words start to appear in the New York Times and Washington Post, I went cold. These kinds of viruses that can hijack your immune system become deadly on a grand scale—especially hitting those with the best immune systems. Like vampires.

The key, the desk, the Mission: Will there ever be an answer?

Yes, all of that is answered in the novel version, called Hive—which may or may never be published. There’s actually a scene in the novel that takes place on Hart Island where Rikers Island prisoners are burying some dead bodies—and, right now, they’ve started using Hart Island for some of those who’ve died due to COVID-19, which has been terrifying.

Your body of work is so sweeping, so agnostic of genre, so laden with critical praise: Do you sleep at all? Are you always making notes on ideas? Do you lament the brevity of your lifespan? (Seriously, you’re scary. In the very best way.)

Yeah, I’m a firm believer in sleep—and dreaming, especially courting weird dreams for fiction. People always ask me this question so I created an audio course called Efficient Creativity. The first one is free: bit.ly/3eVERTl. I’ve got a second course that just started, called Jumpstart, that helps get writers writing: bit.ly/3eVl1rb.

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: Marie Vibbert

Setsu Uzumé | 706 words

Fresia struck me as very cozy for a pirate, with her cat and her beanbag chair. How did she and this story come to be?

I have to confess that Fresia is nine-tenths me. I would for sure have a cat named Whiskey and a beanbag chair on my space pirate ship. My friend Ferret bragged that ever since he wrote a story with donuts in it, random people gave him donuts. I sat right down and wrote the title “Single Malt Spacecraft” with visions of free shots dancing before my eyes. We all have a little pirate in us.

This was such an interesting lens through which to look at time jumps, linguistic drift, and meme loss each time a person touches down in a different port. Did you picture the casks as time capsules, or did that theme emerge as the story went on?

Scotch whisky is almost certainly the greatest invention of western civilization, but it takes a criminal amount of time to make! I once got to attend a scotch tasting where the host had a 110-year-old bottle with a hand-lettered label. It was magnificent. Clear and bright as a summer’s day. I was transfixed. Here was the physical remains of a hand on a pen, and inside, the liquid distilled from a summer’s grain harvest a century ago. Aged whisky has always been a time capsule. Think about comics and ephemera and all the hostages time takes from nostalgia. “Maybe,” I thought, “time dilation stories don’t have to always be depressing. There’s an advantage to skipping ahead.”

The past is somewhere we can never return to. The future is somewhere we may never see. I love the juxtaposition of two yearnings, and I tried at least to end on a hopeful note, because we can see a better future. We have to grow it and harvest it.

What’s something in your life now that you love that someone in your youth told you wasn’t for you?

The scene at the start of this story is 100% autobiography. Yeah, I slobbered all over your twenty-one-year Glenlivet, Mookie! Way to not stand up for my side, Raj! I’m still mad. Revenge is a dish best served in professional publication.

Honestly, the surest way to get me to want something is to say it isn’t for me. As a kid it felt like everything I liked was “not for me.” Toy cars. GI Joe. Football. I even had some jerk tell me, “Girls don’t like science fiction. They like fantasy.” I’d like to say I beat him about the head and shoulders with his own copy of Dragonriders of Pern, but instead I probably said something like, “Huh, that’s interesting,” and went back to trying to read every Asimov book in the public library in alphabetical order.

Can you recommend a beverage pairing or flight for this story?

Start off with a messy wet swig straight from a bottle of Glenlivet 21-year. Don’t wipe off the rim. Then have a leisurely shot of Glenmorangie, at least a 15-year. Love the caramel notes. Now a shot of Laphroaig 12 for the peaty sharpness. Finish with a double pour of Bowmore 18. That bourbon barrel finish is what adds the complexity. Now you’re messed up enough you can have some blended scotch without feeling it. Famous Grouse is good. Cut it with Coca-Cola as you slip happily into unconsciousness.

What can we look forward to next from you?

My murder mystery “The Rooster of Io” will be in the next Amazing Stories, and my blue-collar robot revolution which everyone said I should change the title of, “On the Changing Roles of Dockworkers,” will be in Analog fairly soon. Plus stories in the Trouble the Waters and Detective Thrillers anthologies. I have a lot coming up and I’m always working to keep the slush piles full of me. Check out marievibbert.com for the full list!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent their formative years in and out of dojos. They like swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. They do not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Their work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find them on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Author Spotlight: Ben Peek

Setsu Uzumé | 1180 words

Armies are a staple of fantasy, conjuring images of both rampant, chaotic destruction, and close-knit, orderly families. Tell me a bit about this mercenary company’s name, “Refuge,” and how this story came to you.

Refuge comes from Australia’s treatment of refugees. For a long time, Australia has been awful to people seeking asylum, especially if they arrive here by boat. For the last twenty or so years, the country has opened and closed island detention centres whose main purpose is to torture its inhabitants. The goal of that torture is to assure people domestically that the government is “strong,” to force the refugees back to the country of their origin, and to frighten other refugees from making the journey to the country.

What the Australian Government does is illegal, of course. Everyone has the right to seek asylum. The right has been recognised for over a thousand years in one form and another, and around seventy years in a modern form. A lot of people, though, aren’t aware of that, or don’t care for the fact. It’s not really surprising. Governments of all kinds all over the world spend their time making demons out of the poor and needy, especially if they’re different to themselves. It’s all terribly frustrating. And in that frustration, I made Refuge, who are a military organisation whose code is that everyone has the right to asylum (or, as it is said in the story, refuge).

The story itself juggled around in my head for a while. I read a story about a Japanese general, I think, who held off bandits who came to raid a town by sitting outside it and pretending that he had an army. I have no idea where I read the story—I’ve tried a number of times while I was writing to find it, so if anyone comes across it, do let me know. But anyhow, that was the start of it. The rest didn’t come to me until I was reading about author hoaxes, and began to think about how fragile truth is, and how it is that we can believe something that’s not real and basically have that form a reality.

That was Zhuge Liang’s empty fort strategy.

Thanks.

Laena Kae’s perspective as a biographer seems to debunk the entire concept of a chosen-one narrative, while telling the same. Which stories have sparked a similar response in you, either to correct misconceptions or to add to a conversation?

I don’t know, really. I mean, Laena Kae is basically an unreliable narrator’s foil, a knowing narrator whose goal is to show you how nothing is simple, and how people are complex. I find that quite interesting. I see a lot of people hold various people up as if they’re ideal, or perfect, only to be betrayed by them when they discover that they’re, y’know, not. And the thing about Heast is that he isn’t perfect. He’ll never be perfect. He makes mistakes. He’s violent. He takes risks. He knows that one day he will die, and he expects you to know that you will, as well. Yet, at the same time, he is our hero. He believes wholly in the ideals that everyone is equal, that everyone deserves refuge, that another person cannot own another. He would die for you, no matter if you could pay him or not. He only has to believe you.

Like I said before, I was reading about author hoaxes while I was writing the story. I’m fascinated by hoaxes, by what they reveal about us, and by the response people have to them after the hoax has been revealed. Take Forrest Carter, for example. In real life, he was Asa Earl Carter, a member of the KKK and writer of George Wallace’s Segregation Forever speech, just to name a few things. He started a second life as Forrest Carter, Cherokee author of books like The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales and The Education of Little Tree. The latter he said was an autobiography and filled it with Cherokee ideals and words, but it was all a lie. Just as it was a lie that he gave money to Native American organisations. He was just a racist and a drunk who died in a fight with his son. But people still believe in The Education of Little Tree. They write about how it makes them feel good. How it teaches them things. It’s insane, really. Every one of Carter’s books that is sold is a book that a real Native American author didn’t sell, another person believing in an aspect of Cherokee culture that isn’t true, that a Cherokee person will have to debunk later.

And yet . . .

What’s the strangest fact you’ve come across while doing research? Did that detail ever make it into a story?

Do you know that Toni Morrison wrote an introduction to Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King? She called it amazing and other wonderful things. Her introduction is still on the NYRB Classics edition. Of course, scholars of Laye now believe Laye didn’t write the book, but that Francis Soulié, a Belgian author convicted of being a Nazi collaborator did.

It’s not the strangest fact, I guess, but it keeps a thread going here.

Are you still in contact with the psychedelic koala (bit.ly/3cNDeVK)? Was there a lasting impact from that encounter, or just a bruise?

Yeah, man, we chat all the time. It’s how I’m getting through this pandemic and self-isolation. You can never underestimate the need for a good psychedelic koala.

What are you working on now? What can we look forward to next from you?

I’m working on a new novel at the moment and I’ve a plan for some new short fiction, but—you know, I don’t know. I write this at the start of April, when the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to take off everywhere. I’m not sure what publishing is going to look like. I’m not sure who is going to be buying things, or if they’re going to be paying well, or badly. I’m not sure if there’s going to be a place for me, or authors like me, the ones no one seems to be able to easily decide is one thing or another. Or Australian authors, for that matter. For so long we’ve had to go overseas just to get by, and if those markets all crash out . . .

Hopefully when people read this, everything will be much clearer and I’ll look like a bit of a wanker who was worried over nothing.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent their formative years in and out of dojos. They like swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. They do not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Their work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find them on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Author Spotlight: Em North

Coral Alejandra Moore | 696 words

The taxidermy garden where this story takes place is so unique and vivid. Can you tell us about how the idea developed?

I wrote the first draft of this story at Clarion over the course of a week, and it actually began as three different stories. I’d been carrying around the idea of a woman whose partner was dying and had asked to be taxidermied and kept in the house after her death. Animals going rogue and trying to kill people was the premise of a novel I’d fiddled with. And finally I had an image of a girl taking her terminally ill aunt to bathe in a pool of alien-water. I was frantically trying to make one of these ideas work on its own, but nothing was clicking. At the same time, I was reading the brilliant story collection Alien Virus Love Disaster by Abbey Mei Otis and feeling inspired by how every story was so delightfully packed with weirdness. Two days before the story was due, in a sort of fever-dream panic, I decided all of the ideas were going to be one story. I think the unhinged-ness of the process made room for my imagination to really go haywire, as evidenced by the final outcome.

Raffi has a complicated emotional landscape that we see more and more of as the story unfolds. Tell us a little bit about your process of synthesizing characters and stories. How much of those interesting parts of her came out of character creation, and how much grew out of the world she inhabits?

Raffi was mostly a mystery to me at the start. I knew certain things about her: That when she died she wanted to be taxidermied inside her best friend who she was a little in love with. That she would look a bear in the eyes and say “come on then.” That she would have done anything for her aunt. Revising this story was a process of trying to better understand Raffi’s emotional landscape, as you put it so well. I made lists of questions about her and then tried to write my way towards answers.

In general, I don’t feel like I have a story until I have a character, but it often takes me time and drafts before I really understand them.

The story is set in Montana where the ratio of animals to people skews in favor of the animals, and the characters of this story are very cut off from the rest of the world. Do you have other stories to tell in this world set in other places, maybe where the balance is more in favor of humans?

I don’t have any other stories in this world yet, but maybe I’ll write some . . .

Throughout the story we see several of the statues in the taxidermy garden, and they are all a little different. Is there an underlying pattern to how Kay rebuilds them? Or are the differences we see just her growth in the crafting of them?

Kay is an artist—she reconstructs people based on her understanding of who they were, so each one gets a slightly different treatment.

What are you working on now and where else can our readers find your work?

This is my first fiction publication, but I’ve spent the past several years working on a short story collection, and hopefully some of those stories will be ready to make their way into the world soon.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?

Most of my stories draw heavily on my lived experiences, but this story felt like an exception. While there were elements that came from life—a nightmarish episode with a bear, a beloved aunt, my years living in the mountains—most of it was invented. Flash forward to the present where I’m quarantined in a one-bedroom apartment with my best friend and my girlfriend. I wish I’d written something with a happier ending.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Coral Alejandra Moore has always been the kind of girl who makes up stories. Fortunately, she never quite grew out of that. She writes because she loves to invent characters and the desire to find out what happens to her creations drives her tales. She is a 2013 alum of the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop and she has been published by Diabolical Plots, Zombies Need Brains, and Secrets of the Goat People. Currently she lives in the beautiful state of Washington with the love of her life and a dangerously smart Catahoula Leopard Dog where she rides motorcycles, raises chickens, and drinks all the coffee.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 231 words

Coming up in July, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Adam-Troy Castro (“The End of The World Measured in Values of N”) and Ray Nayler (“The Swallows of the Storm”), along with SF reprints by Tochi Onyebuchi (“Zen and the Art of an Android Beatdown, or Cecile Meets a Boxer: A Love Story”) and Annalee Newitz (“The Blue Fairy’s Manifesto”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kristina Ten (“Baba Yaga and the Seven Hills”) and Mari Ness (“Great Gerta and the Mermaid”), and fantasy reprints by Benjamin Rosenbaum (“A Siege of Cranes”) and Kiini Ibura Salaam (“Rosamojo”).

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 Alaya Dawn Johnson. 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: KT Bryski, Rahul Kanakia, Matthew Kressel, Sunny Moraine, and Benjamin Rosenbaum.

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:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

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Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

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 and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

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.