TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 127, December 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: December 2020

SCIENCE FICTION

Your Mind Is the Superfund Site
Andrew Dana Hudson and C.Y. Ballard

The Executioner
Jennifer Marie Brissett

PARTY TIME!
Ben H. Winters

The Woman Who Destroyed Us
S.L. Huang

FANTASY

Ah Been Buked
Maurice Broaddus

The Salt Warrior
Kali Wallace

An Account of the Land of Witches
Sofia Samatar

Ann-of-Rags
P H Lee

EXCERPTS

The Blade Between
Sam J. Miller

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: December 2021
Arley Sorg

Media Reviews: December 2020
Carrie Vaughn

Interview: E. Lily Yu
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Andrew Dana Hudson and C.Y. Ballard

Kali Wallace

Ben H. Winters

P H Lee

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 Grandeduc / Adobe Stock Image

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: December 2020

John Joseph Adams | 191 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 127th issue!

Our first piece of original science fiction is a deep dive into pop culture that will have you rethinking your relationship with advertising: “You Mind Is the Superfund Site,” by writing duo Andrew Dana Hudson and C.Y. Ballard. Ben H. Winters brings us a twisted little piece of double-speak in his new story “PARTY TIME!” We also have SF reprints by Jennifer Marie Brisset (“The Executioner”) and S.L. Huang (“The Woman Who Destroyed Us”).

Our first piece of original fantasy this month is by Kali Wallace (“The Salt Warrior”), the story of a woman surviving her society . . . and its destruction. Plus, P H Lee is back with an original fairy tale: “Ann-of-Rags.” We also have reprints by Maurice Broaddus (“Ah Been Buked”) and Sofia Samatar (“An Account of the Land of Witches”).

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 E. Lily Yu. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from Sam J. Miller’s new novel The Blade Between.

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.

Your Mind Is the Superfund Site

Andrew Dana Hudson and C.Y. Ballard | 6366 words

“Ever consider killing yourself?” the gecko said. “It’ll save you one hundred percent on your car insurance.”

I was alone, but not. I tried to step on the creature, but my foot wasn’t there. I clenched my teeth, which felt like water. Alleyah’s Southie accent crackled a reminder of radio.

“Tracey, are you paralucid yet? Need another poke of DMT?”

I was back in high school—or somebody’s high school. The classrooms were vintage Sears catalogs and a spruce tree that grew sideways—not in a directional sense but just with a profound association with the concept of sideways. I climbed the tree and then fell. I fell for a long time, the gecko taunting me, before Alleyah got me moving with another call on the radio.

“Hurry up, comrade, I’m getting cold. I need you liminal. Remember your praxis.”

I returned to the high school.

“Done your homework, pariah boy?” the gecko asked. “Got your lunch plan sorted? Tough to keep it all straight, town after town after town.”

Panic crested, then subsided. I remembered that I was a grown man, a free adult with credentials to my name, my choice of work, a right to housing, healthcare, and three hot meals. I sat in the back of the classroom and cracked wise, untouchable by the stakes here. But there was something I was supposed to do . . .

With an effort that always seemed to cost me, I opened my other set of eyes.

The hypnogeography of Back Bay rippled into focus. Above me solstice stars swayed in the branches. I could see the black ice on the walk, the asphalt bike road, the dirty snow. I could also see untread desire paths, empty kissing spots, the social scars of homeless deterrent spikes that had once prickled the lawns. Two layers of reality.

“Fucking Geico.” I sat up, rubbed at the headache the vestigial had given me, plucked out the extra tongues that had grown in my throat. “Fifty years gone, but that lizard won’t die.”

“Yeah, but it’s not just persistence lately,” Alleyah said. She sat on a camp chair, next to my napping bench, but still seemed far away. “That, I could handle on my own.”

“Tell me what we’re dealing with,” I said. I couldn’t know the details of the work assignment while I prepped to go liminal, otherwise I might have brought all kinds of baggage in with me. “I need a couple minutes for the cocktail to settle.”

“Insomnia cases jumped last month. People all over downtown Boston, but especially Back Bay, were complaining of generalized anxiety, feelings of self-loathing and lethargy. The public health council canvassed the neighborhood, thinking they’d track down a chemical spill or something rotten in the microbiome. Instead, people complained about vestigials in their dreams exhibiting major sensory sprawl and really toxic messaging drift.”

“I got a taste of that, just now. Do your vestigials usually get nasty in the winter?”

“Would that mean something?”

“Depends.” I did some stretches, twisting in implausible directions, limbering up for the fights to come. “If it’s cyclical, we might just need to run off the worst offenders, like that gecko. If it’s a fresh memetic mutation, we’ll have to take out the new idea at the source.”

“Public Health’s new theory is mass seasonal affective disorder, plus a string of baseball losses that turned the public mood.”

“But you don’t think so. Why?”

“Pack behavior.” Even through the emotional lensing of liminality, Alleyah looked grim. “The vestigials—particularly the advertising mascots—have been . . . congregating. Like they’re forming gangs or even hierarchies. That part isn’t cyclical.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. This was bad news, could make for a tricky remediation. Still, I tried to reassure her. “It’s rare, but it happens. The public is constantly re-interpreting old symbols, subconsciously ranking them, grouping them into categories. When did you first see the packs?”

“A little over three weeks ago. The Geico lizard was leading a bunch of electronics brands in a march up Newbury Street. Hypnopomp union rules say never approach a pack of vestigials without a hypnocath as backup. So, I pulled some strings to have the health council call you. Took a lot of strings.”

“It’s usually like that.” I shrugged. Time for my pep talk. “What we do weirds people out, and council-types often don’t like admitting that anything is fucked up on their watch, even if it’s been fucked up for a long time. But you know and I know that building better dreams builds a better world. So let’s get you in here.”

Alleyah picked the sensors from my scalp. Her dark, small hands moved fast, though I couldn’t imagine she’d taken many people liminal before. Brought them out, maybe, or soothed uncathartic nightmares. That was the hypnopomp’s job—public health and safety patrols of the dreamscape. But just like in the waking world, sometimes peace officers needed to bring in a little muscle.

Shivering, Alleyah lay back, let me redo the setup, inject her with the cocktail. I rubbed warmth into my hands as I followed her progress from drugged to dreaming to lucid to liminal. She, too, opened her eyes.

“C’mon, we need to find that lizard,” I said. “The longest night won’t last forever.”

Finding the gecko wasn’t hard—in fact, he found us. No sooner had we gotten off the park bench than the little vestigial rolled up, backed by Chester the Cheetah and a pair of anthropomorphic M&Ms.

“Little night trip with the missus?” A menacing note had crept into the gecko’s Australian accent. “Want a holiday tour of the neighborhood? How about we take you along to the light show.”

“Get over here, tiny,” I said. “I think I can step on you now.”

“Who are you calling tiny?” The gecko looked affronted. “I’m an advertising icon!”

“Who’re your pals?” I asked. “You guys don’t look like you have the same target demo.”

“Last name business, first name nunya,” the red M&M said, and the three junk food mascots rushed forward.

The melee didn’t last long. Most vestigials aren’t fighters; the danger comes when they drag you out of liminal, peek into your anxieties, exploit your fears to keep you from lucidity. But I was at the top of my DMT run and in no mood to be distracted.

So I kicked in Red’s shell with my steel-toed boot, spilling crumbly chocolate onto the bike path. The oblong Yellow lurched at me, but I dodged, grabbed it by the wrist, plucked off its spindly arms, left then right. Then I cracked Yellow open over the park bench, peanut and all.

In the corner of my eye, I saw an orange streak high-tail it toward downtown. I turned back to Alleyah—the two candy creatures already fading from memory and the dreamscape.

“Wow, are you always that dramatic?” Alleyah asked. In the skirmish she had scooted forward and pinned the gecko’s tail with her foot. I grinned.

“Drama is the weapon of the hypnocath,” I said. “Now, let’s try this again.”

I grabbed the gecko from under Alleyah’s sneaker and shook its rubbery body in one fist.

“I don’t think you’re the kind of chap that toughs like that follow into battle,” I said. “So who’s really behind all this winter mob activity?”

“Oi!” the gecko squawked. “You best get out of here. The King of Brands won’t like you threatening his favorite reptilia squamata.”

Alleyah and I glanced at each other.

“Who’s this ‘King of Brands’?” Alleyah asked.

“Look,” the gecko said, “I’m going to say, ‘I can’t say anything else.’ Then you’re going to threaten me, and I’m going to say ‘he’ll do worse if I tell,’ and you’re going to say ‘wanna bet,’ and then you’ll have to pop me just to prove it. So why don’t we skip ahead, good?”

“Fine,” I said. I stuffed the gecko down my throat and swallowed it in one imaginary gulp.

“Great. Another victory for the revolution.” Alleyah rolled her waking eyes. “You just ate our only lead.”

“No,” I burped in birdsong. “I called his bluff. Word will get around. Now when we catch Chester, he’ll know better than to jerk us about. He seemed to have a bit more self-preservation instinct than these other three.”

Alleyah nodded, but then stopped, seemed to study me. “Are you okay?” she asked. “I’ve seen a lot of dreamers, in every phase of sleep, but all of a sudden you look . . . off. Blurry. Like you aren’t entirely here.”

“What I did to those spokescandies was solid enough,” I deflected. “Let’s look for Chester.”

“Well, we know which way he went,” Alleyah said, and pointed. Dusty orange paw prints zig-zagged across the dreamscape.

We followed the trail, sleepwalking up Commonwealth Avenue. Walking liminal was like slipping an antique VR rig over one eye. Or maybe it was like eating with a clothespin on my nose. I was still chewing, still tasting, but I didn’t lose myself in the meal. I could be clinical about the process—but only if I stayed on the threshold of wakefulness.

Around us, Boston boiled with dreaming minds. Emanations swirled out of brownstone windows like snow: glimpses of nostalgia, glossolalic carols, slack ideas, and free associations that we felt more than saw. Figments emerged from the rundown facades, glanced our way, called out with voices that tasted like rain or itched like porcelain. Sometimes they milled around in groups, and we could make out the oversaturated colors of advertising vestigials. None dared come our way.

Even warped by the dreamstate, I liked Back Bay. I’d spent the week before the solstice infiltrating the neighborhood. I picked up a work shift stocking shelves at the corner grocery. I subbed in for a sick kindergarten teacher. I directed traffic, waited for the bus, jogged waving at passersby. Half-familiar appearances that would be noticed but not remembered. It had been a good week, falling into a routine, starting to recognize people. Prep weeks were always good weeks. I tried not to think about what would happen after the remediation.

Dreams were community creations, not shared but co-created with neighbors, comrades, strangers passed on the street. I wasn’t a scientist, just a worker with a knack for lucid dreaming and imaginary violence. I only half-knew how it worked—something about plant consciousness and insect hiveminds. Humans shared reams of data via pheromones and info-rich body tics that formed an asynchronous network of phytochemical and social computation. People were connected in ways their waking minds never perceived.

But the more oneirologists learned about this network, the more they realized how much the old advertising and media regimes had damaged our collective psyche. Sometimes that damage coalesced into localized feedback loops that turned the hypnogeography against the dreamers.

A healthy neighborhood would teem with archetypes presenting as shadow selves, Tarot-forms, or populist characters. But through frosted windows and ivied walls, Alleyah and I saw surreal commercial breaks playing out in bedrooms. Campaign memes from forgotten presidential candidates intruded on sex fantasies. A neighborhood dog, curled up under a fire escape, endured a beating by the smell of Rubbermaid bins.

“Yuck, cross-species germination,” Alleyah complained. “Back Bay should have been prime post-rev real estate. ‘Palaces of public luxury’ and all that. All these mansions were converted into apartment blocks and cushy sharehouses, but the housing council can’t keep the rosters full.”

“I heard a rumor that the MIT Hypnomedia Lab did some experiments here, way back,” I said. “Back Bay was affluent and right across the Charles. Seems like a perfect target for prestige marketing. Any truth to all that?”

Alleyah shrugged. “All I know is that for decades, folks here have been waking up with logo afterimages burning behind their eyes, jingles stuck in their heads. This season, though, it’s gotten so bad that I sleep at home in Southie when I’m not working. Otherwise I start my day with an irrational need to buy dead products I don’t care about. And now . . . vestigial kings? Maybe MIT did do something. I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.”

“Good news is, when we take down the king, the rest should fall apart, and we can remediate—”

Alleyah grabbed my arm, pointed. “Look!”

Down the block an artist, asleep at her lightbox, was getting fucked by Chester the Cheetah. Alleyah and I pulled out spectral spray bottles and chased him off. In a cartoon blur, the cheetah was gone. While Alleyah soothed the dreamer back to empty slumber, I knelt and picked up the vestigial’s trail again. A few minutes later, we cornered the cheetah in an alley, juuling with Flo from Progressive.

Chester was fast, obviously, but I jumped him mid-toke. I grabbed his tail and shoved him up against the wall. Alleyah boxed in Flo with a razor glare.

“Slinking into sex dreams are we, Chester?” I said. “I don’t like this R-rated rebrand.”

“Man, I’ve always been dangerously cheesy,” Chester said. “And that chick grew up furry. She was into it. I’m a cool-ass cat.”

“Tell us where we can find your king,” I said. “Or I’ll mount your head—sunglasses and all.”

“Man, which king? The Burger King? The Vitamin King? The Candy Crush King?” Chester hacked up a puff of cheddar vape smoke and switched his accent from bluesy to mid-Atlantic. “You know, I’m something of a king myself.”

I began to tie a knot in Chester’s tail. “Don’t play with me, Chester. I don’t think you’re the kind of cat to stick his pelt out for that Geico twerp. Who’s backing the lizard?”

“I dunno, man. I never fuck with that holiday rush shit. I was just doing a solid for my girl’s little homie, alright?”

All eyes turned to Flo.

“I think that’s quite enough of that, don’t you?” Flo smoothed her starched apron. “This kind of behavior is not how you get worry-free savings!”

“Nice hat,” Alleyah said, trying to good-cop. Flo was wearing a floppy red cap with a puff of silver on top. “Maybe you can help us?”

“Thanks, it’s festive!” Flo said, chipper again. “So, you want to meet the King of Brands?”

“You know him?” Alleyah took a step forward.

“You betcha! We insurance types excel at watching out for the little guy. And the big guy. In this case, just the big guy.”

“Woah, babe,” Chester said. “You think your boss will like you blabbing?”

“Scat, cat!” Flo snapped. “You need a price check on your pay grade?”

“Where can we find him?” I demanded.

Flo smiled.

“If you’ve been good little boys and girls, then he’ll find you. But since it looks like you haven’t . . .” She winked conspiratorially and dropped her red lips into a knowing oh.

Then she grabbed me and dragged me deeper.

I was at home, whatever that meant, watching sweaty workmen move a series of precious, fragile objects. What if something broke? What if there was a fire, or a lightning strike, or I failed to bundle my home and auto coverage? Flood waters sloshed around my knees.

Alleyah was there; it was her home too. But she didn’t seem worried.

“This is going to cost the social housing fund a lot of work-hours,” she said, surveying the damage with interest.

I remembered reading about the old privatized insurance rackets—institutionalized gambling everyone had been compelled to wager in, or face random ruin. It was perverse, the opposite of solidarity. I started sorting through wet papers, trying to find my lottery ticket.

“Why are you stressed?” Alleyah said. “You aren’t even from here. Where do you live, anyway?”

“Don’t you know?” Flo asked sweetly. “Your thug here is a lonely, homeless nomad. He’s got nowhere worth insuring.”

I snapped back into paralucidity.

“Don’t worry,” Flo brandished her price checker tool, “we can still find the plan that’s right for you. Maybe some get-a-life insurance?”

I snatched Flo’s scanner from her hands, pointed it at her head, livid that she’d gotten the jump on me.

“The king. Where. Is. He.”

“At the tree,” Flo said. “He’s at the big spruce tree in the Common. A real fire hazard with all those lights, but hey, he’s got great coverage.”

I shot Flo between the eyes with the red light of her own weapon. Alleyah put her hand on my arm and pulled me back to liminal.

Flo was gone except for her apron and nametag. I scuffed them out with my shoe.

Alleyah was panting. She looked like she might throw up, or maybe grow a snail shell. Chester was long gone.

“That was too easy,” I said. “One insurance mascot throws itself on its sword, the other just gives up a location? I guess the word really is out. Trap?”

“Easy? You almost lost it there,” Alleyah said. “I had to go deeper than I like to get you out.”

“Do you want to wake up? I can go it alone. You can monitor me, give me the stim if I fall too far down.”

Alleyah shook her head. “If it is a trap, there’s no way you can do this without a hypnopomp.”

She was right. I had only made it through Flo’s attack with Alleyah’s help, and whoever the King of Brands was, I had to assume he could do worse. I needed her.

Together we trudged out of Back Bay and into the Boston Public Garden. It had started snowing, and fresh powder accumulated at our feet. Our footsteps crunched a music box melody. It was hard to tell what time it was, but I could feel the DMT cocktail thinning in my blood.

“Staying in town for New Years after this remediation, Tracey? We got some great shrinks at our public spas.”

Alleyah was making small talk to keep me from drifting. She meant well, but I’d had this same conversation with other hypnopomps—always trying to pimp me into care services I couldn’t stay in town long enough to enjoy.

“Can’t,” I said. “I have to get back on the rails.”

“Visiting family for the holiday?”

“Not this year.”

“Friends?”

“I just move around a lot.”

“So you are a nomad? Like that insurance lady said?” I sensed a note of pity in Alleyah’s voice.

“Hypnocaths are in high demand. You’ve seen what happens when capitalist iconography loses its context—all sorts of mutant, malignant weirdness.”

Alleyah walked in silence for a minute, and I could feel waves of indecision wafting off her like blue beach foam.

“You’re getting blurrier,” she said finally. “I think you should tell me what’s going on. Please.”

I sighed, but she deserved to know what to expect. “Ever wonder why they had to call me in from out of town? Why cities don’t keep hypnocaths on staff? Why there’s just a few of us, bouncing from job to job?”

“I figured there just wasn’t that much remediation work?”

I shook my head. “‘Remediation’ is a euphemism. Makes it seem like your mind is a superfund site, and I just clean it up, purify it. But however toxic they are, vestigials are part of us. Nobody misses them when they’re gone—we have a lot of mind, after all. But when I break them up, the community still feels that violence. And that has consequences.”

“The blurriness . . . it got worse after you took out Flo.”

“Boston is trying to spit me out. It’s not so bad yet, but it doesn’t like me opening these wounds, walking around in them, doing over-the-top nonsense to shatter some piece of the collective imaginary, even if it’s for everyone’s own good. If I do too much more, the community won’t let me back in, not for a long while.”

Alleyah looked stunned. “So, what happens in the morning?”

I shrugged. “We go get coffee. But if I stick around, I won’t be able to sleep. And pretty soon people would start feeling uncomfortable around me, even when they’re awake. They’ll edge away from me on the street, ignore me in the cafeterias, get hostile if I try to strike up a conversation. They can’t help it. I just feel wrong to them. The bigger the remediation, the more wrong I am.”

For another minute we just walked, passing statues, more statues than one park should have: George Washington, Wendell Phillips, monuments to 9/11, to the revolutionary worker, to the Good Samaritan who developed anesthetic ether. A couple of kids were camped out in a tent near the swan boats, dreaming of tearing paper and ringing bells.

“Why do you do this, then?” Alleyah said eventually. “Don’t you want friends, relationships? A home?”

My chest felt like a still block of marble, pulling me down. “What’s the old line?” I said wryly. “‘Ecstasy in the handclasp of a comrade’? I’m fine. I’ll sleep on the train.”

We passed more statues: Make Way for Ducklings, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, the Budweiser Clydesdales, the Starbucks siren . . .

“We’re going in circles,” I said. “Like our compass is spinning. Whatever is in the Common, it’s deeper. I think we have to get less liminal to approach it.”

Alleyah paused, then took my hand. “I’ve got you,” she said, but she sounded like she was saying it to herself.

With effort, we crossed Charles Street into Boston Common. The lawns of walking-moss were manicured, the public vegetable plots neatly mulched for winter—but something felt dangerous, contaminated, like the edge of a pit. We spiraled in and down, descending the rings of the psychic quarry. At the bottom, the dreamscape closed over us like a fog, a waterboarding shroud. We were numb to the sights and smells of the waking world. Lucid, but with the VR all the way over our eyes.

I knelt and touched the frozen ground. It was smooth ice now.

“Tracey . . .” Alleyah said. “What’s, uh, all that?”

I looked up. Across the plain of ice was a mass of shifting figures. Dozens of eyes glinted angrily, hungrily out of strange silhouettes: animals and objects, symbols and spokesmodels. An army of vestigials, standing between me and their king.

“Let’s go back,” Alleyah said. “Wake up. Regroup. We can find another way. You don’t have to do this.”

I took a deep breath, smelling the cackling laughter of the mob.

“It’s fine,” I said at last. “Let’s just get it over with.”

So I strode forward into the mob. There was no posturing this time, no banter. Just spitting and hissing and animated innards spilling out of primary-colored chests. I ripped the mustache off the Pringles man. I broke the neck of the Nesquik bunny. I stomped on Mario and eye-gouged Mr. Clean and tipped the Kool-Aid Man out onto the frozen ground, red sugar water mixing with hot vestigial blood. I strangled Tony the Tiger, headbutted Cap’n Crunch, and impaled Mr. Peanut on his own cane. Then I stole Captain Morgan’s sword and popped the inflated Michelin Man, and I kept cutting—through Ronald and Mickey and a dozen mascots I barely knew.

And then it was over. I was on all fours, panting, shivering, my hands almost slipping in the corn syrup bile. Alleyah ran up to me, put her hands on my shoulders, and I felt a little strength and connection return. Then, another chill—for from beyond the killing ground there came a deep belly laugh.

Across the sunken plain there was now a towering, conical spruce tree, rootless but propped up by a bulk at its base. Hot coals glowed in its crown.

Alleyah and I approached the tree. Grisly shapes dangled from the branches. I didn’t recognize any of them, but I knew they were the carcasses of unworthy mascots, those not even fit enough to be cannon fodder. Some were made of torn upholstery or warped plastic or stripped to bare wires. Others were 3D models that glitched and clipped. All were fake and lifeless, turned to ornaments.

Sitting at the base of the tree was a huge man. He looked like bloodspatter on fresh snow.

“So, you’re the King of Brands,” Alleyah said. For the first time that night, she seemed genuinely angry, pissed to see this cancer oozing in the heart of her city. “I thought I’d know you, but your brand recognition must suck. Who are you?”

His next laugh was a carbonated hiss.

“Who am I, little girl? I am a bit of a riddle, I admit. I am the generous judge, the creeping season, the gift that takes. I am the father’s voice before the father, the clutcher of children. I am the comet in the longest night, the unsleeping morning. I see all and learn nothing. I am the forgiven slave master, the decadent saint. I am the one who does not knock, and I am coming to town . . .”

The king came into focus. He was bedecked in stringy furs and crimson velvet, worn thin. But his cheeks were flush as cherries, and his smile was toothy white. One plump hand rested on the head of a docile polar bear, while the other held a sweating glass of Coca-Cola.

“I say you’re a mental health hazard and a third-eye sore,” I said. I had to find the wit and imagination for one last fight. “We’re evicting you from this common, Mr. Claus, and remediating this whole nightmare. I don’t care what delusion you go to, but you can’t stay here.”

“Leave?” Santa’s jolly chuckle came out of the ground, methane bubbles popping from the permafrost. “But naughty child, it’s almost Christmas. So many brands depend on me to make the black!”

“For us, it’s just the solstice,” Alleyah said. “Whatever made you manifest in the public subconscious now, there’s no path forward for any of this.”

Santa stroked his cotton ball beard. “It’s true you’ve tried to forget me. And that did hurt my feelings. After all my years of service, all the gifts I delivered—tossed aside like so much paper wrapping.”

“And that justifies this?” She pointed at the macabre spectacle of the spruce tree, and the fading massacre of the battlefield. “What do you want? Why put on this ‘King of Brands’ charade?”

“Ho, ho, ho!” Santa’s eyes twinkled with black holes. “No one ever asks me what I want for Christmas! I suppose that all I want for Christmas is you. I want you to let me out. Out of this town, out of this sad, sleepy fantasy. I’ll call off my all my helpers, leave your dreamers in peace—if you help me be real once more. Let me fly again to every house and chimney, so people can once again feel the spirit of Christmas warming their stockings!”

Alleyah and I exchanged a long glance. This was no normal intellectual property defense mechanism. This was something new, or perhaps very old, dredged out of the mud by some strange current in the zeitgeist.

“That’s not going to happen,” I told the hulking mascot king. “Maybe the real Santa could make a cultural comeback, but not you, not this corporate caricature.”

“Too bad.” Santa shook his head. “Then I’m afraid it’s coal for you this year!”

The tree exploded into hearthfire blaze. Red hot cinders shot towards us like shrapnel. I grabbed Alleyah and dodged deeper into the dream.

We waited in line at the mall. We were holding hands, brother and sister, loomed over by some parental force we couldn’t see. I didn’t want to be there—the colors looked like medicine, the ceilings were too tall, the crowd hurt my ears. The line shuffled us forward, until arms picked us up and set us on Santa’s lap. He had a different face, a haggy paunch, but it was the same man.

“And what can I get you, Tracey my boy?” the Santa said. “What do you want? Any dream in the world!”

I started to cry. I didn’t know what I wanted. Alleyah watched me, interested, and then she started to cry too. The Santa grimaced. His robe turned to musty fur, his hands to dull hooks and black pads. His lap distended, and then we were wrestling with the King of Brands’ bear, scrabbling away from its yellow jaws.

“Did you know that polar bears are one of the only creatures on the planet that see humans as food?” Santa’s voice boomed as the bear snapped at me.

“Did you know that polar bears are extinct?” Alleyah said, trying to get her toddler foot to connect with the bear’s jaw.

She was right, I realized. I rose to my full adult height and grabbed the bear by the scruff of its neck. With a heave, I shoved it out onto a melting ice floe, no land in sight. Its black eyes looked at me mournfully, its bulk shrunk to starving bones.

The mall’s fluorescent lighting warmed to an incandescent glow. The ceiling gave way to stars. The crowd milled around a holiday market.

“We’re back in the park! I think we’re out!” Alleyah clapped her hands. The icy quarry had melted, and holly-wreathed shopping stalls had taken over the Common lawn. “Come on, I visited one of these in Finland once.”

Some part of me understood that lucidity was slipping away, but it was hard for me to object. We bought wood-carved mulled wine and browsed peppermint kitchen goods, smiled at the sponsor booths: Dunkin’ Donuts, Capital One, Xfinity.

“Do they do this every year?” I asked.

“It’s tradition,” Alleyah said. “You gotta come out to see them put up the tree.”

“Tree?”

Alleyah pointed. “Look!”

Onto the lawn rolled a festively painted semi-truck. On its flatbed was a tall bristling spruce, laid out sideways. Santa waved to the crowd from the cab.

“That’s the tree from my high school!” I exclaimed. I turned, grinning, but she was gone.

I spun around, looking, then ran through the market, calling, “Alleyah? Alleyah?” The crowd danced around me, turned me back to watch the tree. It rose on cables till it stood upright. Then it began to grow taller and taller, sickening tall, until I was a mouse, then a flea, then a germ.

“Where is she?” I asked Santa, who was supervising the stringing up of lights.

“She loves this town.” Santa sagely tugged his fur lapels. “And her town loved this ritual. Don’t worry, son. Your local gal may have run off, but I can still guide you.”

“How?”

“Well, where do you need to go? We’ve got a nice partnership with JetBlue. Might I ask, when was the last time you were home for Christmas?”

I had never been home for Christmas. It sounded nice.

Home was a Hallmark house glowing in the center of a friendly wood. I opened the door to smiles and scented candles.

Since becoming a hypnocath, I’d stayed on the move, from job to job. In a way, this had been empowering; I was welcomed everywhere and obligated to stay nowhere. But the house drew me inside, sat me in a La-Z-Boy by the fire and the tree, which glittered with memorabilia.

Santa was there too, handing out packages to my half-familiar loved ones. A little boy tore one open and excitedly pulled out a vintage iPhone.

“The best part about Christmas,” Santa said, “was everyone got to be rich. Even if you were destitute every other day of the year, Christmas called on you to pretend for just one morning, to open your heart and pocketbook. People are Scrooges, but for Christmas they spent like there was no tomorrow!

“I know what you’re thinking,” Santa winked. “‘But they were poor and exploited the rest of the year! Christmas never fixed that.’ Well, you think your commoner’s paradise doesn’t have lies? Doesn’t it ask you to pretend you aren’t miserable, for the sake of a social compact? History is a dream you’ll never wake up from.

“I know you run hither and thither, only to be chased out for doing your job. I could help you, you know. I’ve seen the demise of ten thousand brands. A few more is nothing to me. I can do the dirty deeds for you, let you take the glory without the exile. All you have to do is take me into your heart, let me ride your mind like my sleigh. Let me ask you—are you happy?”

I was cozy in the armchair, feet pointed at the fire. There were presents and eggnog, tipsy relatives and laughing children. In the next room was a soft down bed, waiting for me. Outside, snow was packing in around my still body. But I could get used to Boston weather, if it came with a hearth. Why not stay home, where it was warm?

But there was satisfaction to a morning in the cold. Often I slept in the open air, woke up to a job well done. And I was free. I had housing, healthcare, and three hot meals—every day, not just once a year. Maybe I couldn’t stay, but I got to leave knowing that strangers, comrades, would rest better and live happier because of my work. I got to serve, and that was priceless.

“Yes, actually.” I got out of the La-Z-Boy. “I am happy.”

I grabbed Santa by the beard and dragged the King of Brands to the fireplace. With surprising ease I stuffed the old monster up the chimney.

I flew through the ceiling to finish him. In the chill air above Boston we tumbled. My fists pummeled Santa’s rosy cheeks. Santa’s teeth tore at my flesh. We fought like this for a long time, falling into forever.

“Tracey, I’m giving you the stim.”

The radio reverberated through the sky.

“Tracey, wake up!”

With final effort, I flung the King of Brands into the firmament. The stars parted for him, and he was gone, banished—leaving only the twinkle of his eye.

I opened my eyes. I was lying in the slush of Boston Common, Alleyah shaking my shoulders. Of course she had woken up when we got too deep. The morning above us was starting to lighten.

“Did you get him?”

“Merry Christmas,” I said. “Let’s go get coffee.”

The public cafeteria clattered with yawning workers, brewing tea and serving themselves toast and fruit. Folks complained amicably that drawing their once-a-month early shifts on the solstice might as well count as graveyard. We poured coffee, sat, sipped. We didn’t talk, just let the caffeine buzz away the DMT hangover, the sleepwalker exhaustion, the stim-crash. Everything was pleasantly solid and mundane. The walls were straight, the colors were fixed. The coffee just tasted like coffee.

“When does it start?” Alleyah asked eventually.

“Look around,” I said. The cafeteria had gotten packed, but we were alone at the longest sharetable. Bostonian eyes refused to meet my stranger gaze.

Alleyah seemed about to wave for everyone’s attention, but thought better of it. Instead, she got us metal to-go cups and tugged me out the door. We took the bus south and out to the end of City Point, to the little blue duplex where her parents lived with their best friends.

Alleyah’s family treated us to another, fuller breakfast, talking of council politics and pride in their daughter. Then came tea in the sunroom, then lunch, then watching their housemates’ kids snake a model train from room to room.

“You know,” Alleyah said. “You’re a lot more boring in real life. It’s been hours and you haven’t eaten anyone or done any backflip wrestling kicks.” She nodded at the playing children. “I bet they’d like to see some moves.”

I laughed. “Maybe in another generation we won’t need to imagine ultraviolent heroic bullshit as the solution to our problems. But for now, I guess it’s still rooted too deep, just like the brands. People need catharsis, I suppose. I like being able to give them that.”

Southie was a ways from Back Bay, but by midafternoon I could feel the avoidance creeping into my hosts’ body language—a wave of exclusion, rippling through the city. Still, it was dark again by the time we pried away, their hospitality pressing on where solidarity had failed.

“I don’t feel anything yet,” Alleyah said. “If you want to stay, maybe I can help others get over it.”

I shook my head. “Your subconscious will win that battle eventually. But I wouldn’t say no to you walking me to the train.”

The bus wouldn’t stop for us this time, so we trudged through the cold the couple miles to South Station Terminal. Along the way, I saw Alleyah start to waver, felt her edge away from me, compulsively check her watch. I wasn’t sure if this was the exile setting in, or something on her mind.

I liked train stations. The web of hypnogeographic connection was looser here. No one was your friend, but everyone was friendly. I had my bag in a locker; I’d learned not to return to where I stayed after a remediation.

On the platform, Alleyah’s gaze darted, but I could feel her trying to master herself. She took a deep breath and looked me in the eye.

“Do you think Santa will be back next year?” she asked.

“It’s a deep pit he left. He’ll return eventually if we don’t fill it in. You should pull some of those council strings, get new feast days on the calendar. Maybe we can give people new celebrations—while they find a better way to dream.”

Alleyah nodded, then clasped my hand. For a moment, I almost imagined I could stay.

Boston was a blur of lights from the near-empty bullet train. I lay back, watched the skyline blend and shift, like I was back in liminal. My eyes got heavy. Though I was alone, I felt myself multiplied into every house and window. When I slept, I didn’t need to dream.

©2020 by Andrew Dana Hudson and C. Y. Ballard.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Andrew Dana Hudson’s fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Slate Future Tense, Terraform, MIT Technology Review, Little Blue Marble and others, as well as in a variety of anthologies and collections. He is a member of the cursed Clarion Workshop class of 2020/2021 and is a fellow in the Arizona State University Center for Science and the Imagination’s Imaginary College. He lives in Tempe, Arizona. Find him online at @andrewdhudson and www.andrewdanahudson.com.

C.Y. Ballard is a writer, researcher, and devourer of science fiction and fantasy. She is an associate editor with Holum Press, based in Phoenix, Arizona.

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

The Executioner

Jennifer Marie Brissett | 2758 words

The day of the execution was the first and only time I’d ever been in a prison. It was a lot bigger than I expected it to be. There was more light in it, too. I thought it would be a dark place with screaming inmates yelling at me as I passed through. But that’s not how it was at all. Everyone fell silent when they saw me. My path opened like Moses parting the Red Sea as people moved out of my way. There were guards on every side of me as I walked through the prison. They guided my way to the death house in the backyard. I was Death personified that day, and everyone knew it. I felt kind of powerful. I looked up and saw these big, tough men who were afraid—of me. That’s what I became that day, Death personified.

I was warned not to look anyone in the eye that didn’t work for the State. So I kept my head down. It was hard not to look up, feeling the heat of so many stares on me. But I did as I was told. I was a good citizen. This was what the State required. My name had come up, and when that happens, you do your duty. That was how my family raised me. You don’t shy away from your responsibilities. You stand up and do what needs to be done. I took no joy in being there. I knew that this was nothing to be happy about. This was just something that had to be done. And my name came up. That was all there was to it.

They marched me into the back where there was a large green lawn. Inmates were working to cut the grass, and they, too, stopped to stare at me as I passed by. The sky was unusually bright that day. It was clear and blue as far as the eye could see. And it was so quiet. Like the birds themselves knew that it was a solemn day.

I had just had my second child a few months before. I would have rather been home with her. She was such a little thing. And a really good baby. I could hand her to anyone, and she wouldn’t cry. She’d just look up at them with wonder and lean into their chests, calm and pleasant. I felt so lucky to have a good home and family. It was the State that kept us all safe from the likes of the one that I was going to put down. The way I looked at it, this was little to ask of a citizen whom the State had given so much.

The death house looked like an old chapel with its small “A” roof and peeling window wallpaper made to resemble stained glass. Inside was quiet, and people spoke in hushed tones. There were prison guards everywhere. They, like the prisoners, stilled when they saw me.

The warden was there to greet me. He was friendly enough, businesslike, though. He shook my hand and escorted me to the lunchroom where a fine meal was waiting for me. The State sent a packet to my house with a return form requesting that I list the meal I would like to be served. I must admit that they got everything just right. Funny, I can remember enjoying the meal, but I don’t remember the meal itself. It’s like I have a memory of a memory about it.

While I sat and ate, the warden and the prison guards watched. It felt strange to be the only one chewing. The warden told me to eat up since I wouldn’t be able to have anything again until the next day. It’s the way the drugs worked. If you tried to eat right after taking them, they could make you really sick to your stomach.

When I was done, the warden and I had coffee together. This time the three guards with us joined in. It felt like I had become part of a ritual of theirs. I wondered how many of these executions they had attended. I wanted to ask but didn’t. We just all sat quietly together sipping at our coffee until it was gone or got cold.

The warden took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. For a moment I thought that he was crying. When he looked up, I saw that he wasn’t. He just looked tired. He put his glasses back on and laid his palms out flat on the table.

“Did you read the packet that the State sent?” the warden asked.

Yes, I nodded.

“Good. Well, I’m going to briefly go over the basics again of what is going to happen tonight. Please stop me at any time if there is something you don’t understand or if you have a question.”

I nodded again.

“We will take a little bit of your blood now. It will be used to create the drug cocktail. It will be prepared and injected into you in about an hour. Once you receive the injection, you are the State’s agent of execution. The drug will only affect the condemned. It is coded with his DNA and yours only. You cannot harm any other person with your touch. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“You have to answer verbally. It’s the law.”

I said, “Yes.”

The warden continued, “We will wait until midnight for any last-minute reprieves. If there are none, you will be escorted to the death chamber by these guards to face the condemned. Myself and the minister for the condemned will be in the room. A family member and a witness for the condemned may also be in the death chamber. He will be strapped down securely onto a gurney. You will be perfectly safe.”

I instinctively looked at the guards sitting with us. One of them lowered his head to avoid my eyes.

“He will be allowed to say his last words,” the warden said.

“Will he say anything to me?”

“The law states that a prisoner has the right to face his executioner. So he may say something to you.” The warden took off his glasses again and spoke softly. “My advice to you is to pay no attention to what he says. He doesn’t know you, and you don’t know him. Remember, you are not his judge or his jury. You didn’t determine his guilt or innocence. Others performed that function. You are his executioner. You are just performing your lawful civic duty.”

I must admit that I always just assumed that the man was guilty. I didn’t even know what he was condemned for doing. The packet from the State suggested that I not research the case, so I didn’t. Sometimes I think that was a mistake.

“When you feel ready, you are to physically touch the condemned.”

“How am I supposed to touch him?” I asked.

“Any way you see fit,” the warden said. “I’ve known some who hugged them and others who have just put a pinky finger on them. There is no right or wrong way as long as there is physical contact.”

“And that is all it takes?”

“Yes, ma’am. Death will commence at that point.”

“How long will it take?” It felt ghoulish asking, but I really wanted to know.

“Death may occur within a few moments. You are legally required to remain with the condemned until he is dead. Then you are free to go.”

• • • •

The night passed slowly. The lab technician who had mixed the drug cocktail was also the one to administer my injection. He made me roll up my sleeve and rubbed my arm with cool alcohol.

“This may sting,” he warned.

It did.

“You may get a slight fever tomorrow,” he said. “It will pass. You will be fine in a day or two.”

I unrolled my sleeve as he put his needles and things away. The area where I was injected felt sore and began to throb. My arm ached for several days after that. Such a small price to pay.

“At least you won’t ever be asked to do this again. The drug only works once. It will never work in you again. At least that’s something.”

“At least that’s something,” I repeated.

• • • •

I spent the rest of the afternoon in the lunchroom with the guards. They were good people. We talked about our families and showed each other pictures of our kids. We played cards and dominoes to while away the time. I couldn’t help constantly looking up at the clock. It seemed to be ticking slower than usual. I began to feel anxious as the sun came down. I had survived the weeks preceding that night by simply not thinking about ending a man’s life. After the sun came down, all that changed. What I was about to do was all I could think about. I was just a small-town mother of two. How had I become this agent of death?

• • • •

By 9 p.m. I was visibly shivering.

“I don’t feel well,” I said to my guards. “I want to go home.”

They just looked down. One of them said to me, “You’re just nervous. This happens to everyone.”

“But I feel sick to my stomach,” I said. It was no lie. My stomach was twisted into knots upon knots. I felt like I could throw up.

“That’s normal,” he said. “I feel like that every single time I have to do one of these.”

• • • •

By 11:30 p.m. the guards and I were all on our feet. The cordial feeling between us was gone. Now it was all business. The minutes passed like hours. Then it was finally time. The guards escorted me to the death chamber. My legs were moving on their own because I felt nothing. We entered the room, and it was like the warden said it would be. He was there standing next to a minister. And there was the condemned man. He was on a gurney, strapped down by many large belts. His arms were stretched out on two protruding extensions of the gurney, so that he looked like a man on a cross. He was just a boy, really. Maybe he was in his late twenties. There was something about his expression that reminded me of my little brother. He physically looked nothing like my brother, but the way he held his face and moved his head was just like him.

I heard a whimpering as if it were coming from an injured animal. There were two women standing behind a glass window. They were holding each other. One looked elderly; the other was young.

“Do you have any last words?” the warden asked.

The boy craned his neck to see the two women through the window.

“I love you,” he said. “I’m sorry, Momma.”

I felt my knees begin to shake. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be there. The boy looked back at me. He had soft brown eyes. He was not what I expected at all.

The warden nodded to me that it was time. My legs went completely numb. I couldn’t move. I could hardly catch my breath. My feet were like wet cement melting into the floor.

“When you’re ready,” the warden said.

Many moments went by, and I still didn’t move. I stared at the boy. My heart pounded in my chest. No one said anything. It was deathly silent. It was all up to me, and I couldn’t move.

The warden waited patiently, then he looked at his watch. I saw him wave his hand to the guards. And these men, these good men who I had spent the whole day with and shared pictures of my kids, grabbed me and forced me forward. It was then that I understood that the guards were not there just to protect me but to force me if I tried to refuse.

I fought them. I fought them hard. I waved my arms and scratched like a cat. A wild animal arrived in me that I never knew was there.

“Don’t touch me!” I screamed. And they backed away. The women behind the glass looked at me with a kind of hope and sympathy. I felt a flush of guilt and shame. I felt naked before them. I straightened out my clothes and passed my hands over my hair. Then I slowly stepped towards the boy. He looked at me with eyes that tore at my soul. I went over to him.

I said, “I’m sorry.” He nodded and swallowed.

I took his hand in mine. It was warm and soft. Then I backed away.

Minutes passed, and nothing happened. I felt a wave of relief. I had read in the packet sent to my house that sometimes the drugs didn’t take. I felt a joy then that I didn’t think could be possible. The boy smiled at me. He looked over at this mother. And she weakly waved back at him. My face was completely wet at this point. I wiped away my tears. Then the boy jerked.

He convulsed for a few moments, twisting in his restraints. Little pockets of foam appeared at the corners of his mouth. His eyes turned back so that they were all white. His body shook for a minute. He let out a deep sigh and closed his eyes. Then he moaned a little as if he was having a troubled dream. I could see his chest still moving. Then he jerked again, and he moved no more.

The warden came over and checked his pulse.

“Death occurred,” he said and looked at his watch, “at 12:27 a.m.”

I can’t explain the feeling I had then. It’s a feeling that has never left me. I felt hollowed out like a Halloween pumpkin, all carved out with nothing left inside. I had killed a man. With my own hand I killed him. I looked at his still body, and it was like there was nothing else. I couldn’t hear anything. I couldn’t feel anything. The guards unstrapped him, and his slack body flopped. I looked away. I heard someone let out a loud cry. I thought it was the boy’s mother. I was surprised to find that it was me.

• • • •

I could barely walk. The guards helped me out of the building and escorted me to the parking lot. Someone called to me. I turned around. It was the boy’s mother. Her daughter was trying to hold her back. She was coming at me. The guards stood in her way.

“I want to speak to you,” she said.

I said, “It’s all right.” Inside, I felt that even if she wanted to hit me, it was all right. The guards got out of the way, and the daughter hesitantly let the old woman go. She was short, so that I had to look down to see her. She looked up at me. My legs buckled, and I found myself on my knees before her. She took my hand—the hand that had just killed her son—and she held it in hers. Her small veiny hands cradled mine.

“This was not your fault,” she said. “I will pray for you and your family.”

Then she let my hand go and turned towards her daughter. They held each other and slowly walked into the night.

• • • •

My husband once told me that all the cells in a body completely change every seven years. Well, it’s been seven years since then, and I still feel the same. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it. I don’t talk about it with anyone. My husband knows to just leave it alone. I know I’ve been different. More quiet. I think about things more. I think about life more.

It’s a warm day today. The sky is blue as far as the eye can see. My eldest is playing in the yard with his little sister. I’ve been watching them laughing and tumbling around on the grass. They are so innocent. Their whole lives are in front of them. Their faces filled with only possibilities. His momma must have had days like this. Days when she looked out at her children, laughing and playing, and dreamed of what they might be.

©2009 by Jennifer Marie Brissett. Originally published in Warrior Wisewoman 2, edited by Roby James. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Marie Brissett is an author who once owned a indie bookstore. She’s been an artist, an engineer, and sometimes a poet. Her stories can be found in FIYAH Magazine, Motherboard VICE, Uncanny Magazine, The Future Fire, and other publications. Her debut novel Elysium (Aqueduct Press) received the Philip K. Dick Special Citation Award and was a finalist for the Locus Award and the Tiptree Award. Her upcoming novel Destroyer of Light will be published by Tor Books in the Fall of 2021. She lives in NYC with her husband and her cat. Find her website at www.jennbrissett.com

PARTY TIME!

Ben H. Winters | 2366 words

All I wanted to do, at the end of the day, was make sure Larry had a nice birthday.

I know, I know: Nobody likes Larry. But honestly? I’ve always felt like the fellas down in Dissident Thought Suppression get kind of a bad rap, you know what I mean? Okay, so Larry isn’t the smiliest face around the water cooler, but geez Louise—if you spent all your time scissoring open other folks’ mail in search of words or phrases indicative of anti-Party thought patterns, would you be Little Miss Sally Gumdrops?

My thinking was: Janet, if you’re the Office Coordinator for Positive Emotional Orientation for Sector Nineteen, then by gosh you’re the Office Coordinator for Positive Emotional Orientation for everybody in Sector Nineteen. Not just the Surveillance Techs, not just the Propaganda Dissemination team, not just those zany Sharpie-wielding goofballs down in Redactions . . . but everybody. No one else was going to do something special for Larry’s birthday, so it was up to me!

And yes, before you ask, of course I checked in first with Brett, our beloved and esteemed Sector Foreman and First Officer. (Geez! I’m ditzy, but I’m not that ditzy!) Although I managed to step right in the you-know-what when I did it. I just popped right into Brett’s office after lunch on Thursday, calling out “knock knock,” as breezy as you please . . . and it turns out Brett was right in the middle of conducting an Unscheduled Performance Review with Samir. Who, just between you and me and the fax machine, was not handling it in a professional manner. Brett is reading out the judgment of the Sector Committee, and Samir is, no kidding, down on his knees weeping and shaking and begging for another chance, and when Brett said that he had already certified the results and sent them up to The District, Samir basically started screeching and tearing big chunks of hair out of his head. I think he peed his pants. (Sorry! TMI! I know!)

Anyhoo. Samir finally crawled out, still sort of trembling, and when the sound of his desperate weeping had finished echoing down the corridor, I said, “Sorry, Big B! Just want to get the all-clear from you on throwing a petite soiree for Larry in the break room. Lunch time tomorrow. Sound good?”

And Brett—well, you know how he sort of stares at you for a long time before he answers? So he did that, and then he wrote something down, and then he goes, “Yes, Janet. That would be fine, Janet.”

And I go, “Great!”

And he goes, “One thing, though, Janet.”

And I go, “Sure, boss!”

And—you know how he talks super slow sometimes, and his words are full of that kind of sinister intonation, where it’s like, whoa, Brett, take it easy? Well, so, he did that, and then he said, “If, Janet, at this casual social event you are arranging, any person present should say or imply anything about the quality of my leadership, or that of our wise superiors at the District Level, or at the Level of Absolute Council, I hope that I will hear of it from you directly, Janet.”

And I go, “Roger that, big chief!”

And he goes, “And if you keep something for me, Janet, then I will know.” (And he took one of his big long pauses, staring directly into my eyes. Classic Brett!) “I will know.”

And then he stared at me, neither blinking nor moving his head, for—geez, I don’t know? Like forty-five seconds. Finally I just backed out of the room. Oh, Brett! Talk about a boss from heck, huh? (I am joking. That was a joke. Brett is an extraordinary Sector Foreman and First Officer. He is only to be admired and esteemed.)

Anyhoo. That night I spent an hour or more in my personal living quarters baking the cutest cake for Larry’s party. I even frosted it with the logo of the Dissident Thought Suppression team—and if you think it’s easy to use frosting to draw a person getting knifed in the forehead, you’ve got another think coming! I went to the Supply Store for streamers and stuff, and I even bought Larry a present—it’s a mug that says “You don’t have to be fanatically devoted to the enforcement of the State’s ideological program to work here . . . but it helps!” LOL, right?

So then it’s the next day, it’s almost lunch time, and I realize I totally spaced on candles! Oh, Janet! As I’ve pronounced repeatedly at Morning Confession of Flaws, I’d forget my own darn head if it wasn’t attached. So down I go to the storage closet on Basement Six, where the custodian Wayne used to keep all kinds of spare junk like that, until Wayne was found to be harboring an emotional connection with a Subversive Person (his son? I think it was his son) and sent to a Prison Island for reeducation.

(Good ol’ Wayne! What a sweetie. I wonder how he’s doing? Probably pretty bad.)

So anyhoo. There I was in the shed, rummaging around for birthday candles, when I hear these voices from the hallway outside the storage closet:

“I tire of this talking, all of this endless talking,” said the first voice. “It is time for us to rise up! To rise like the ocean! For the sun to rise on a new dawn . . . of action!”

“Oh there shall be action,” said the second voice. “We shall rise like tigers, and strike like vipers, until the world is burned down and made new.”

I’m inside the closet thinking: Well, that’s weird! I tiptoed over to the door of the shed and kind of peeked out, and who is it talking in all those similes but Marc and Wendy, from the Relationship Auditing Division! I don’t know them super-well, but we all went for beers that one time when it was Justin’s last day because Justin had gotten suddenly very ill and he kept saying he had been poisoned and we were all like, “Oh, Justin.”

“It shall be a glorious dawn, when our overlords are destroyed,” said Marc.

“Starting with Brett!” said Wendy. “Brett the tyrant!”

My heart was thumping in my chest. Could they mean our Brett? Beloved and esteemed Sector Foreman and First Officer Brett? They probably did. There weren’t any other Bretts in the office. There used to be a Brent, but that’s probably not who they meant.

I glanced at my watch and gasped: It was noon! I had to get back for Larry’s party. I stepped out of the closet, and boy was it awkward. I mean, what are you supposed to say when you’ve pretty much definitely discovered two of your sort-of work friends plotting a counter-revolutionary coup?

“Oh, hey guys!” I said. Then I just sort of sidled on past them, and rang the elevator button. “Come on. It’s party time!”

• • • •

Larry’s birthday party ended up being kind of a dud, to be totally honest with you.

Not too many people came, and Larry just grunted when he saw the cake. And he’d just finished blowing out his candles when all the Mandatory Screens came on, at top volume. Hostilities had been renewed against the terrorists in the Global South, and the department of Political Feeling was instilling furious vigilance by showing news clips of terrorists bayoneting newborn babies.

Which—and I’m totally not complaining, obviously—but it kind of kills the mood for a party, you know what I’m saying?

GOD DAMN DO I HATE THOSE TERRORISTS, though.

• • • •

Okay, so full confession: I ate the rest of the cake myself. It was the sort of thing that seems like a good idea at the time, but I spent the rest of the day going in and out of a light doze, waking up when the screens came back on, shaking my fist and screaming at the terrorists for a few minutes, and then dozing back off.

Long story short, I forgot all about that funny encounter by the supply closet, until suddenly everybody else has left for the day, I’m packing up my desk, and there’s Marc and Wendy standing right at my work station!

“So hey,” said Marc, leaning across my desk with this big funny smile on his face. “Don’t know exactly what you heard before. But whatever it was: we were just kidding about that.”

“Oh,” I said. “Great.”

What a relief! They were just kidding. I should have guessed!

“Unless we weren’t,” added Wendy. She was right next to Marc. She sat down on my desk, leaning in real close. They were both staring at me.

“What?” I said.

“No,” said Marc. “We were kidding. It was a joke.”

“Unless it wasn’t,” added Wendy.

“Right,” said Marc. “Unless it wasn’t.”

“But if we were,” said Wendy, “and we thought you were going to denounce us, then that would mean we would have to denounce you before you could do that.”

“Preemptive denunciation,” said Marc. “Isn’t that funny?”

“Yes,” I said. “Totally.” Although honestly, I didn’t really get it.

“Which would be so sad.” Wendy made a real big sad face, like a clown or a cat from a calendar. “Are we clear?”

I looked at them. They looked at me. “No,” I said.

“Okay, then,” said Marc. “Have a great weekend!”

• • • •

The weekend got a little kooky. It was that weekend, maybe you remember, when root vegetables were declared to be subversive, and everybody went crazy finding all the root vegetables in their house and taking them out into the street and burning them in giant piles, and then storming any grocery stores that were known to sell root vegetables, and burning the stores down and dragging the proprietors of the stores out to the street to be thrown onto the fire.

And somewhere in there, I still had Pilates and book club! The point is, the weekend just flew by.

• • • •

So I go in on Monday and I’ve barely had time to even think about that whole crazy thing with Marc and Wendy, and now I’m pulling into the parking garage and wondering whether I should have denounced them, and if they were going to denounce me before I could. Not to mention the fact that that obnoxious jerk Gerald had parked in my parking spot again, and I knew he was going to say he forgot, but I know he’s not forgetting. I know he’s doing it on purpose.

Geez Louise: Maybe I oughta denounce that guy, huh? For being a big jerk!

When I got to our floor, I could tell right away that something was going on. Three Gray Suits were making their way from desk to desk, telling everybody to report immediately to the conference room for a surprise meeting! It had all the markings of an Emergency Discipline Council, and my first thought was that whoever had been taking Elaine’s yogurt from the mini-fridge was about to get some well-deserved comeuppance.

But of course snack-theft does not rise to the level of Gray Suits, does it? This had to be about Marc and Wendy! Either they were about to come in for Discipline . . . or I was.

I made my way slowly to the conference room, walking very unsteadily even though I was wearing my most sensible pumps. I would know right away, as soon as I got in there—as soon as I saw the look on beloved and esteemed Sector Foreman and First Officer Brett’s face.

But he wasn’t there. Brett was nowhere to be seen.

And here’s the craziest part: When everyone was gathered around the table, one of the Gray Suits cleared his throat noisily and goes, “Brett Anderson never existed. There was never a Brett Anderson. Repeat that please.”

We did, of course. What are we going to do—not repeat a direct Brain Housekeeping command from a Gray Suit standing right in front of us?

“Brett Anderson never existed,” we all intoned. “There was never a Brett Anderson.”

This was frikkin’ wild! Beloved Supervisor Brett had been denounced. He was either dead or on the way to a Prison Island. Soon enough, the guys from Redaction slipped out of the meeting to go start removing all references to Brett Anderson from the office documents. (I, myself, stopped knowing who he was, and do not now know anyone by that name, so please don’t ask.)

I snuck a quick secret peek at Marc and Wendy, but they didn’t even look at me—they were too busy being super excited. They had done it. Their coup had worked! They were going to take over the office. Soon they would start striking like tigers, or biting like frogs, or whatever it is that came next in their scheme.

“The Sector Foreman and First Officer of this Sector,” said the Gray Suit, “The only one who has ever been or will . . .” And he paused, and I totally saw both Marc and Wendy step forward, and I thought, uh-oh! Awkward! “The only Foreman and First Officer of this Sector . . . is Janet Farley.”

Oh. Oh boy.

The room was silent . . . until my friend Elaine started clapping, bless her heart, and then someone else did, and suddenly the room was full of clapping, and people saying, “Janet is our beloved Sector Foreman and First Officer. Janet Farley has always been our beloved Sector Foreman!”

You can only imagine how I felt. What an incredible honor! What an enormous amount of responsibility that has to be discharged in exactly the right way to avoid being denounced or murdered! What a—what a—what an absolute thrill!

Anyhoo.

When the party was over, I went down to Parking Level 6, and back to that little shed, where no one ever goes. And—you want to hear just the zaniest thing? I started weeping for some reason, and then I sat there weeping, all alone, for a long long time.

©2020 by Ben H. Winters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben H. Winters is the author of the novel The Quiet Boy, which will be published by Mulholland/Little, Brown in the spring of 2021. He is also the author of the novel Golden State; the New York Times bestselling Underground Airlines; The Last Policeman and its two sequels; the horror novel Bedbugs; and several works for young readers. His first novel, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, was also a Times bestseller. Ben has won the Edgar Award for mystery writing, the Philip K. Dick award in science fiction, the Sidewise Award for alternate history, and France’s Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. His writing has appeared in Slate and in the New York Times Book Review. He also writes for film and television, and was a producer on the FX show Legion. He lives in LA with his family.

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

The Woman Who Destroyed Us

S.L. Huang | 10408 words

I know what they say. They say she was a pioneer. They say she helped millions of people live a normal life. They say she created the next stage of evolution for humanity.

I need you to understand how wrong that is. To understand what she is: a killer.

She’s destroying people’s minds, molding them into her image of what the human brain should be. And none of them complain afterward, because of course they wouldn’t. Their brains are made to be happy—and so they are. She’s washing out the human species into mindless automatons.

More importantly, she killed my son.

• • • •

Maggie decided on her plan during a sunny afternoon in early April. The weather had bloomed into the fragile clarity of a perfect spring day, the type of day that only came in tiny crystals before being smothered by summer. Maggie went out to get the mail, and instead sat down on her porch and listened to insects chirping and the breeze whistling in the old house’s shutters, and wanted to spit on all of it.

Perfect days shouldn’t be allowed to exist anymore.

Maggie closed her eyes and reflected on the irony life had flung at her. First, Henry’s diagnoses, and learning she did have the strength to love him, truly and genuinely. Not only the strength, but the desire. Throughout the years, every minute of every day that she’d scraped and scratched out on his behalf had been worth it—every anxious conference with his doctors, every time she caught him wistfully staring at other children playing and her heart broke a tiny bit more, every too-short accounting of funds that went to his care first and always.

She vaguely recalled the pain of giving up her engineering career, or of the day Henry’s father left, but it was an unfocused sort of pain, tempered by time and willingness. Or perhaps that long-ago pain was nothing now, compared to the bonfire that consumed her every time she recalled the day she’d lost Henry.

Her son, her real son, had vanished—replaced by an imposter wearing his face. And if she ever managed to get him back, he would hate her for it.

She wondered, sometimes, if she was being selfish. She’d told herself so many times she would do anything, sacrifice anything, if it would mean a better life for him. But that wasn’t supposed to mean sacrificing him. She’d always told nosy strangers that he was fine just the way he was, and she had meant it.

But that woman, she had seen how smart Henry was—Maggie had told people how smart he was—that woman had seen it, and had dangled such glittering promises in front of him. Seduced his brain for herself, all with her smug assumption that everyone was better off as carbon copies of her version of normal.

That doctor wasn’t even a real person, was she? All the magazine profiles were gleefully transparent about that. Proud, even. How she’d built her own personality by zapping whatever neural pathways she’d decided fit her concept of the ideal human. They’d had her up before ethics boards in the early days, for God’s sake, before enough rich dilettantes decided brain stimulation was the way of the future to start normalizing it.

She was destroying society, that doctor. Maggie didn’t know why more people didn’t see it. On her message board, the only place she still felt sane, she’d talked to a woman whose daughter had been turned down by every university she applied to. Ten percent of the kids at Harvard have an implant now, the woman had mourned. How can she compete? She came to me sobbing and asked if we could afford it. My healthy, energetic, brilliant seventeen-year-old daughter came to me asking for elective brain surgery.

The message board folk were on a spectrum, with some adamant the new technology was spitting at Nature and some who allowed it might be permissible to treat a proven medical need. Maggie stayed quiet when those people talked. Most of them didn’t have anyone who’d been judged to have such a “medical need,” the type that insurance would pay for, and they didn’t know any better.

Someday she’d get up the courage to write a post. A long post. Her story. Her manifesto, she supposed it would have to be called, at the length such a thing would run. But manifestos always had some sort of action at the end of them, didn’t they? If only she could figure out some way to disable all the implants, every instance of deep brain stimulation in the entire world. Dig a channel to send the course of humanity hurtling down a different path, bypassing this future entirely.

But even if she could do that . . .

Henry came to see her sometimes. Or Hank, as he called himself now. He would greet her and call her “Mom,” standing awkwardly with his hands in his pockets and eyes that were a stranger’s. Maggie tried her best to keep her eyes dry, to keep from staggering when the memories cut her: Henry tackling her with hugs so fierce they almost lost balance, Henry’s lopsided smile of accomplishment when he figured out some new philosophical concept, Henry collecting every flower in the yard and filling his room with them.

All Hank talked about was how good his grades were now, and how much money he would be making soon, and Maggie screamed inside her head about how much she didn’t care. She wanted his smile back, his love of botany, his penchant for memorizing any type of diagram and reciting it back to her with unadulterated joy; his painting and his laughter and the way he would challenge her to board games like he was preparing for the most serious battle in the world; she wanted Henry.

Any fantasies about tearing the implant out of his head crashed when she imagined what would come next. Henry’s eyes, filled with betrayal, with hatred at her, and then he’d go and get it put back in again.

But that crisp spring day, her body sagging on the porch like her bones had lost their will to hold her up, Maggie hit on her idea. She couldn’t save Henry. But she could show that woman, that monster, exactly what she had done. She could show everyone who gave that doctor such plaudits that the thing they so loved was nothing more than a phantasm.

She sat up. The cool air suddenly felt invigorating. I could do this, she thought. That doctor always claimed the implant didn’t make you different, that it just made you a truer version of yourself, but she was wrong, and Maggie could prove it. Because the doctor had an implant, too, and without it . . .

Well. Without it, they would all see. That doctor wasn’t going to be the same person. She’d be erased. She’d be someone else.

A squirrelly reticence wormed its way through Maggie’s gut. Was she contemplating murder? She knew how she felt about losing Henry, after all.

But no. The doctor was a programmed personality, nothing more: an organic AI that had been written over a real human’s brain. If anything, Maggie would be saving the person the woman used to be.

For the first time in two years, the edge of Maggie’s lips curled up toward something like a smile. She’d need that manifesto after all.

• • • •

She sold us on a miracle.

“I couldn’t get out of bed,” she told us, the same line she’s spouted in all those magazine profiles. Everyone knows her story, but she told it to us anyway, describing the endlessly circling thoughts that had crushed and trapped her, the compulsions that wouldn’t release her from mounting panic unless she scraped her hands bloody or hung onto every candy wrapper or broken pencil that crossed into her teenaged world. Such graphic detail—I wonder if she wrote herself a subroutine for stimulating creative language.

When deep brain stimulation became a possibility for her, she’d been circling her ideation for months, flirting with fantasies of razors and ropes. Her parents had tried all traditional paths for her, and all had failed. She described it as drowning. Nothing to lose. Nothing left but the one last gasping hope that she could be cured by new technology.

I don’t know whether I believe her. Her parents are dead now, and they never gave the magazine interviews she’s so fond of, but if I could speak to them, what would they say? Maybe they weren’t like me; maybe they didn’t love her as she was and hid their faces with embarrassment when people asked why their daughter was no longer in school. Maybe they whispered in their darkest, secret thoughts that life would be easier if their daughter killed herself, so when the marching future offered them the chance to kill her themselves and call it treatment, they jumped at the chance.

But Henry and I weren’t drowning. I told her that. I told her it was hard, but we got by, and that we were, mostly, happy. It was certainly true of me, and Henry assured me it was true of him, too. I told her he didn’t need fixing and we didn’t need miracles and I didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks, not with something as precious as my child’s brain, his person.

“It doesn’t change who you are,” she told us a dozen times, falsely. “It will just make him become more of the person he wants to be.”

In retrospect, of course she would say that. It’s the only way she can excuse what she’s done to herself, isn’t it?

I still almost said no. I told Henry I loved him exactly as he was, that I couldn’t fathom wishing him different without wishing him not Henry. When you know the whole of someone, even what others see as their weakest points are a part of what you love. That’s how I found peace with it after the first of his ever-evolving diagnoses, first ADHD and then the rapidly cycling correction to anxiety, bipolar, BPD, ASD, with each new doctor as likely to declare a previous misdiagnosis as to add another label to the combination they were medicating him for. But long before all that, when I was in shock after that first child psychologist sat us down and explained all Henry’s difficulties with school and with the other children weren’t just a phase . . . I asked myself if I would swap my boy for one the doctors described as “normal,” and the sick horror of the thought made it hard to breathe.

Because that boy wouldn’t be Henry.

I made sure my son knew all this. I made sure he knew it all, every day, especially the days after his father left, or the days I found him staring at university or job-hunting websites with an expression like someone had socked him in the stomach. And when he first came to me about DBS, I made sure he knew he didn’t have to have brain surgery, not for me. Not then, not ever.

But he wanted more. And like the fool of a parent I was, I didn’t want to deny him.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” he said to me right before, squeezing my hand almost as tight as I was squeezing his. “I’ll still be me.” I almost begged him to promise.

Afterward, one of the handful of times he visited, wooden and humorless, he said, “I didn’t realize how much it would change me.”

He didn’t look at me when he said it.

• • • •

After a week spent online, Maggie had freshly swallowed every article and magazine profile ever written about Dr. Laura Chen. She’d also studied as much of the workings of the DBS implants as she could understand, hunting down research papers that were a little jump above the layperson. Her electrical engineering was rusty, but she’d done similar research before Henry had gotten his implant, and the more she read, the more conversant she felt.

Besides, she wasn’t trying to do any complicated neuroprogramming. She just wanted to figure out how to shut a unit down without hurting the person physically. The shutting down part looked relatively easy—DBS patients had as many cautions as people with pacemakers, and Maggie was reasonably sure that despite the unit’s shielding she could disable one with a homemade EMP soldered out of a flash capacitor. But the relative ease of that side of the equation meant it was standard for the individual frequency-generation algorithms of a DBS unit to be solidly backed up.

Especially someone whose implant programming was as complicated as Dr. Chen’s.

Deep brain stimulation worked via electrodes inserted far into the brain that produced electrical bursts in response to what they’d been programmed to view as abnormal neuron firing. But Dr. Chen had taken it far beyond “abnormal.” She’d been given her original implant under medical supervision, but after being inspired to enter the field herself, she began experimenting with her own neural pathways in college, tweaking the electrical bursts to increase her stamina, intelligence, and determination. DBS didn’t have any sort of pinpoint precision—neurologists still weren’t even sure why it worked as well as it did—but Laura Chen had been an artist at it. Later she went overseas to have more electrodes inserted so she could mess with her neurons in every lobe, and Maggie was willing to bet the code that now equaled Dr. Chen’s personality was very carefully protected.

Maggie would need some type of access. Preferably some way that would avoid her coming face to face with the doctor—she didn’t know if Dr. Chen would recognize a skeletal, graying woman as the pleasantly round mother she’d met two years ago, but best not to take chances. Luckily, in several of the magazine profiles, Dr. Chen had been pictured with her wife.

From there it was only a hop and a skip to a thousand social media updates and the name of the studio where the wife took yoga every week.

For some reason, it surprised Maggie that the studio was only half an hour away. It shouldn’t have, because they’d moved here back when Henry was commuting in every other day for testing appointments. Maggie tended to think of Dr. Chen as being far away and unreachable, somehow on another plane thanks to her fame, despite the fact that the young man wearing Henry’s face now worked for the doctor as a research assistant.

Maggie took a breath and clicked over to buy a yoga mat.

Her first day of class, she was struck by how long it had been since she’d been out of the house for any but the most necessary errands. She’d even been having groceries delivered, mostly stacks of instant noodles that she didn’t eat. A few women leaving the yoga studio greeted her on the way in, and Maggie had to think hard to shape the words of a suitably banal response.

She’d signed up for an open level class, and she got lucky: she recognized the woman she wanted as soon as she stepped barefoot onto the smooth wooden floor. Dr. Chen’s wife was a striking dark-skinned woman, taller than everyone else in the class, with a firm jaw and her hair the type of shiny black waves Maggie tended to assume existed only in shampoo commercials. Her confidence and grace were magnetic. Maggie thought she would have felt drawn in even if she hadn’t had other motives for being there.

She unrolled her mat on the next spot over and gave the woman what she hoped passed for a nervous smile. “Hi. I’m Maggie.”

The answering smile she got was open and welcoming. “Victoria. Nice to meet you.”

Maggie knew her name was Victoria, knew everything about her that could be gleaned from a public social media page. But she said “nice to meet you” back and then the line she’d planned as a nonthreatening conversation opener. “It’s my first day.”

“Oh! Well, Terrence is a fantastic teacher,” Victoria said. “He’s great at helping you work at your level. And you can go into child’s pose anytime, no judgment.”

Maggie didn’t know what child’s pose was, but she thanked Victoria and pretended to concentrate on smoothing down the curl of her mat.

She did, indeed, spend most of the class in child’s pose. Even lying folded double felt like it stretched her raw, leaching her pain into a puddle on the studio floor. She’d plotted out what she would say to Victoria after the class, too, but when she turned and tried to form words, she had to fight past a sob stuck in her nose and throat.

“I . . . I just moved here, and . . .”

“Sweetie, are you okay?” Victoria put a hand on her shoulder.

“I . . . I guess I’m a little overwhelmed.” The sob bubbled up, undenied, and Maggie swiped at her eyes and nose in annoyance. This was not what she had planned. But she pressed on. “Would you let me buy you a cup of coffee? I’m so new here and . . . it doesn’t have to be today, next time would be fine too, or whenever—”

“Oh, sweetie. I’ve got time now. Let me show you this great little shop around the corner; they’re a coffee shop and an antiques house, so all their tables and chairs are these interesting older pieces. You can buy the furniture, too, but I just like the vibe.”

Victoria put a hand on Maggie’s shoulder again and shepherded them out of the yoga studio, calling farewells to Terrence and the other students.

Maggie had more careful scripting in her head, but instead she ended up weeping her way through a latte and a slice of truly decadent flourless chocolate cake.

“I’m sorry, it’s just—I miss my son,” she whispered between sniffs, and Victoria “oh, sweetie’d” her again and drew all the right conclusions.

“You’re so kind,” Maggie said finally, sincerely, when she was able to wipe her tears away on a coffee shop napkin and not have them immediately replaced. “I’m sorry. I guess I needed a friend. Can you recommend—tell me what there is to do around here. Tell me about you.”

“Well, I’m an artist,” Victoria said. “Mixed media, mostly—I like exploring the place where painting and sculpture meet. My wife always says something poetic about fractional dimensions.”

“Like a fractal,” Maggie said automatically. “Something that isn’t two-space but isn’t three-space.” Like the surface of the human brain, she thought, but cut herself off before adding. So many wrinkles and fissures and complexities. Not flat. Not simple.

“Yes! Exactly,” Victoria said. “Are you a mathematician?”

“Engineer,” Maggie said. “Or at least, I was . . .”

“I so admire that. My wife is brilliant at all that, but I could never wrap my head around STEM fields. Just got the creative genes, I guess.”

“These days you could always get an implant for it,” Maggie said. Too soon, maybe, but when else was she going to get such a good opening?

Victoria hesitated. “Actually, my wife is a DBS researcher and neuroprogrammer. And there was a time I—but that’s a story for another day. You were asking about good ways to get yourself out of the house.”

Maggie was sure she hadn’t phrased it that way, but she was, she reminded herself, only playing a part. Who cared if Victoria felt pity for her rather than friendship? As long as it got her in.

• • • •

I’ve heard all the logical arguments. That DBS is elective and victimless, that it helps many and on the whole harms no one. And I haven’t believed in God for thirty years, so I’m not one to say it’s a crime against nature.

But I do think we have to give some serious thought to what it means to be . . . oneself. We all change over the course of our life, but is that equivalent to rewriting our neurology? How many neurons do we alter before someone isn’t the same person anymore? Before we’ve killed who they used to be?

The religious opponents of DBS sometimes call this soul. I think it’s science, but I agree with them for all that.

How long before less invasive treatments for any condition involving the brain start to be phased out as unprofitable, before society will no longer give any accommodations because “why don’t they just get DBS”?

There will be people who say what I’m choosing to do here doesn’t address any of that. That I should write books, or articles, or give speeches, not attack a single person just because I disagree with her.

They might be right. But sometimes a demonstration is worth a thousand words.

• • • •

Dr. Laura Chen had been far from the only doctor performing DBS in the country, of course. The surgery was all too common, and plenty of people got their treatment from someone who wasn’t the face of a movement. Henry had found her name online thanks to all those magazine articles, and he’d written to her before he even told Maggie he was researching. Dr. Chen had told them to come out and see her personally.

In retrospect, Maggie should have been suspicious. What kind of celebrity doctor tells a sixteen-year-old kid to see her personally, unless she’s trying to steal his brain away?

She’d relived that first conversation with Henry so many times it had become a specter in her head. She should have listened to her creeping foreboding, but she’d shelved her reservations and tried to listen to her son with an open mind. She’d learned from him so many times, after all—he read widely and thought deeply, and he’d changed her opinion on more than one occasion. Those long, rambling conversations were one of the many things that had made him Henry, one of the many things she loved.

But he’d never approached her with something so . . . personal. So frightening. She remembered the moment clearly: she’d been making dinner, and her hand had frozen on the handle of the frying pan she’d been taking out. The pattern of brownish scratches crisscrossing the Teflon had etched itself into her memory.

“Mom, have you heard of deep brain stimulation?”

Of course she’d heard of it. The news loved their clickbait headlines about each new twist in the proliferation of DBS. And when she’d seen that first article, the fleeting thought had crossed her mind, could Henry benefit? But the technology back then had been limited to extreme cases of OCD, depression, and a few other mental illnesses—clear-cut cases all, not the overlapping patchwork of combinations and question marks that Henry’s doctors argued over.

Back in the beginning, the DBS scientists had talked big, saying they had such hopes, that this might even be the key to treating previously intransigent personality disorders or neurological conditions that conventional medicine struggled to unlock. But nobody had predicted just how fast DBS would explode. The more the researchers and doctors managed to expand it, the more the funding poured in, and the more those clickbait headlines passed over Maggie’s dashboard.

It had gotten to the point where well-meaning acquaintances had begun asking. “Have you ever considered DBS for Henry?”

At first she’d politely explained that Henry still couldn’t be treated with DBS. As the years passed and questions got ruder and more frequent, she’d become grateful that this remained true, that she could shut down such brutally impolite good intentions with a simple statement of fact.

It was different saying it to Henry, though. “Honey, if you’re thinking . . . it’s still limited, and your situation is complicated. They can’t—”

“I know, I know,” he’d said, already gaining steam in his familiar Henry way. “If you look at what’s officially treatable via DBS, I can’t benefit yet. But I’ve been emailing with one of the premiere researchers in the country, Dr. Laura Chen. She’s pioneered a lot of the expansions of DBS treatment over the past generation. Before she started pushing the research, the field was in a state of nascent infancy compared to what it’s capable of now. And the best part is, she’s like a self-improving AI, because she essentially reprogrammed her own neurology to make her better able to reprogram people’s neurology. She—”

“That’s the best part?” Maggie couldn’t help muttering.

“It’s a testament to the genius of humanity,” Henry said, either missing or ignoring her sarcasm. “There’s a recursive beauty to it. Like a piece of art, except science.”

“I know who Dr. Chen is, honey,” Maggie had said. She wondered if the doctor would have understood what a compliment it was that Henry had just compared her to a piece of art.

“I emailed her,” Henry went on, barely pausing. “She’s more than a genius—she doesn’t submit to what others say are the limits of reality. I think she might be the harbinger of the next stage of human evolution. Making our species into something new and better.”

“Humanity doesn’t need to be made better,” Maggie tried to argue.

“Yes, it does,” Henry said, with his intense, peculiar gravity that Maggie loved even when it choked her up to see other people shy away from it. “Of course it does. What do you think the entire field of medicine is? Vaccines, cancer treatment, pharmacology—they’re all evidence of humanity’s agency in making bug fixes to evolution. Natural selection is nothing more than a long-term guessing game that has resulted in a flawed product that gets along as best it can. DBS might be the start of a true sort of intelligent design, one engineered by science. Cool, huh?”

Maggie often had this feeling when Henry got on one of his logical tears, the sensation of being bowled over by an ocean wave, trying to frame a response and failing utterly even though she knew in her bones what she wanted to say. Maggie was smart, she knew she was smart—she had been an engineer, after all—but Henry always presented his thoughts as such airtight arguments that she needed time to sort through what she actually thought of them.

The stakes had never felt so high, though.

“Dr. Chen thinks she might be able to help me,” Henry continued, and in retrospect, that was when it all slipped out of Maggie’s control. “She says we should come out and see her. She has all sorts of tests she wants to run on my brain. She says I can be her test subject.” He beamed. “It would be fascinating to see what my brain is doing on a mathematical level. If those algorithms can be rewritten, then I could stop being such a buggy program.”

The pan banged against the sideboard. Maggie put it down carefully. “You’re not buggy,” she said. “Human brains aren’t computer programs.”

“Why not?” Henry said blithely. “All we are is very complicated organic machines. Mom, let’s say you’d stayed in AI research and you’d built some sort of intelligence that was unlike humans but equivalently complicated. You wouldn’t hesitate to refine your own project, would you? Medical researchers are hoping to be able to do the same thing, only they’re working backward in understanding a complicated machine they didn’t create.”

“Henry, slow down, okay? You’re getting way ahead of yourself. We don’t even know this woman can help you.”

“Oh, of course not, not now at any rate. She’s told me as much herself. But there’s no negative value in acquiring more data, and great positive potential.” He reached over to pull a gingersnap out of the cookie jar and bit into it with a decisive crunch.

Maggie didn’t agree that day. She wasn’t so much of a pushover as that. She did her own research, staying up hours into every night, sleep she couldn’t afford to lose but collating information she couldn’t afford not to have. She asked Henry to show her the emails Dr. Chen had sent and then started emailing the woman herself, pages of questions and concerns that came back with prompt, detailed, and intelligent replies that neither over-promised nor treated Maggie like anything less than an equal.

And through it all was Henry, who had latched onto this idea like a limpet on a rock and talked of almost nothing else. He rambled on to Maggie about the latest research over every meal, about the new ideas Dr. Chen had sent him, about the unassailable logic of letting his brain be scanned every which way.

None of that was what convinced Maggie, however. Instead, it was the day his voice got quiet and he said, “Please, Mom. I want to do this.”

To Maggie, being a parent didn’t just mean she loved her kid unconditionally. It also meant she had to respect him.

Since he’d become old enough, she’d always told him he had a voice and a choice in any of his treatment. She told herself she had to live up to that. And he was right, wasn’t he? There wasn’t any harm in getting more information.

• • • •

There’s more controversy about elective DBS than medical DBS. Like plastic surgery: realigning a cleft palate or reconstructing a body after surgery passes without judgment, but those who choose to reshape their noses or breasts will navigate society’s stigma.

The arguments by legislators who’ve worked to ban elective DBS—whether successfully or not—have all followed a similar theme: fear. Fear of a society in which rewriting one’s brain becomes the norm rather than the exception, or of those who would use it to exacerbate qualities of greed or predation. Those who have testified before them in favor of elective DBS have generally made the argument for libertarianism and self-determination, that this is no different from altering one’s brain through meditation or therapy or hard work, and that any of these things could be considered “mind-altering.”

But I think Dr. Chen revealed what they all really think, in that one ill-considered news comment she “clarified” after all the flack. She was challenged on whether she worried that her advocacy and research would turn the whole world into a society of people with brain implants, all programming themselves to be whoever they wanted to be.

“What would be wrong with that world?” she said.

Those of us who object aren’t all afraid of new technology. We’re rejecting her image of the future.

• • • •

“I call this piece Transhumanism,” Victoria said.

Over the past four months, she and Maggie had graduated from increasingly frequent coffee dates to movies, museums, and beach trips. Maggie’s worry about accidentally running into and being recognized by Dr. Chen before she accomplished her goals had gradually faded; Laura Chen worked so much that the few times she was available for socializing it was easy for Maggie to pretend she’d come down sick.

She still didn’t know where Laura kept her backups. It was a hard thing to work into conversation, after all. But it wasn’t like it was a chore to keep spending time with Victoria. Maggie caught herself wishing at times that she could have a true friend like this someday, a girlfriend with whom she could argue about the actresses in television shows or go out for margaritas on her birthday. Uncomplicated.

If only it were real.

Maggie had continued to ask about Victoria’s art, on the theory that people always liked talking about themselves, particularly avant-garde artists who dabbled in relative obscurity. She’d told Victoria she wanted to go to her next exhibit, and Victoria had seemed surprised but gratified. Now they stood in front of a painting that spilled into three dimensions in the southwest corner, an abstract sculpture of a human torso with flowing hair. The daubed acrylic behind it was all shades of blue and green, and when Maggie looked closer, she caught the silver sparkle of fish.

Transhumanism, Victoria had said.

“It’s not the title I would have expected,” Maggie responded. She liked the piece a lot more than the title. “I would have pegged it for Mermaid.”

Victoria laughed. “People have such a narrow view of transhumanism. Like—they picture cyborgs and mechanical eyes and hands you can screw a flamethrower onto.”

“We have the mechanical eyes now,” Maggie said. “I don’t think anyone considers those people cyborgs.” It had become an accepted medical technology, the next generation of prosthetics. Maggie had no objection; she didn’t view useful medical tech as any sort of fallacious slippery slope.

“Oh, I know. I just think—everything’s sort of like that, isn’t it? Right now we’re foraying into what a generation ago we would have called transhumanism, except it’s not flamethrowers and chrome skulls, it’s . . . a natural extension of humanity. Dimensions we never imagined that integrate seamlessly with our daily lives. Like how no one could have predicted the way smartphones and social media would be just one more ubiquitous aspect of us, not something we think about every day as The Fancy Technology We Type Into.” She laughed again. “There I go, an artist trying to explain my art. I should know better.”

“No, it’s okay,” Maggie said. “Your wife’s work, I know. It must be important to you.”

“Yes. It’s . . . I sort of live it through her, in a lot of ways. The moral and technological questions she struggles with—it’s one of the main inspirations for my art.”

“I saw her post about DBS to your wall the other day—” They’d officially friended each other; it wasn’t stalking anymore. “You said she struggles with her work? I don’t—I mean, I’ve seen some of the articles about her. She always seems so confident.”

“That’s her public face,” Victoria said. “There have been . . . she’s had some hard decisions to make. This next piece is about one of them, actually.”

“Oh, my God,” Maggie said. She’d physically recoiled from the piece before she could stop herself. “Sorry! It’s just—it’s affecting—”

“I have to confess, that was the reaction I was going for,” Victoria said.

Maggie stood and took in the art. This one had an abstract representation of a person in it, too—a man painted on the canvas who screamed soundlessly into the void. Maggie fancied she could hear the wails in the jagged black that bled from his skull. The mixed media in this painting was at the top, a lowering cloud of crushing metal, and the whole thing felt upside-down in a way that made her brain want to vomit.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“A man named Andrew Track,” Victoria said. “This is . . . just between us, okay? Laura wouldn’t want this getting out online or anything.”

“Cross my heart,” Maggie said.

“He was a serial child molester and murderer. Vicious. I can’t even tell you how—what he did to those children—” Her face trembled for a moment before she firmed her mouth. “The worst type of person. When they caught him, he’d kidnapped a little boy, and he taunted the police with it, saying the child was still alive but they’d never find him.”

“And the police wanted your wife to—”

“Yes. At that time Laura was the only one who’d been doing the type of research they needed. Most DBS researchers hadn’t been looking into . . . that kind of thing . . . yet. The DA offered Track a deal much better than he deserved if he would plead insanity and submit to Laura’s experimental DBS as treatment.”

“I take it he said no.” Maggie couldn’t tear her eyes away from the abstract Andrew Track in the painting.

“He said no. He could have saved himself from prison, from a possible execution sentence, but he said no. He taunted them. Said if he was going down, he’d take the little boy with him. The prosecutors got a court order to give him an implant anyway, and they took it to Laura and said that was all the consent she needed.”

Maggie had painted nightmare moral hypotheticals about DBS in her head so many times, each designed to spiral to the conclusion of we do not want to choose this world. But hearing this had actually happened . . . it all felt too uncomfortably real, the future she was trying to push against already arrived and crashing around her. Like she was standing in the middle of a flood still claiming she could help stop a tsunami.

She wondered why she hadn’t heard of this case. Gag orders, probably. Hiding away the ugliness of power.

“I can’t say I’m comfortable with the courts having that kind of say,” she said, trying for a detached political take but unable to keep a small bite out of her voice, “but I’m glad they were able to rescue the boy, at least.”

Victoria gave her an odd look. “They didn’t. Laura refused to do it.”

“What?” Maggie said. The woman who thought they’d all be better off with implants? Had refused? When it would save a boy’s life?

She’d just been mentally decrying the court’s power to rewrite a person’s mind as a slide into dystopia, but now she found herself unreasonably angry in the other direction. Who was Dr. Chen, to give herself the power to decide who lived or died?

“It wrecked her,” Victoria said softly. Her eyes were on her art piece. “Not sleeping, not eating, every minute of every day obsessing about the decision. The prosecutors were trying to find some way to compel her, but she’d committed no crime. She just said she couldn’t operate on someone who hadn’t consented to it. But it tore her up inside; every night she almost broke and changed her mind. Until they found the boy’s body.”

Sensing there was more, Maggie waited, spellbound.

“That wasn’t the end for her. The family didn’t know who she was, but she watched footage of them obsessively, knowing she could have saved their son. Meanwhile, Track went to trial, and it was going against him hard. No one had any doubt he would be sentenced to death. Halfway through the trial, his lawyers switched to an insanity defense, and . . . it worked. He was condemned to a state facility and mandated to undergo whatever treatment they deemed necessary. By that time, DBS research had marched forward, and Laura was no longer the only one who could treat such a thing. So they ended up forcing it on him anyway.”

“Oh, God,” Maggie said. It was inadequate. “Did it take? I know it doesn’t end up working a hundred percent of the time.”

Victoria nodded. “It worked. They treated him. They fixed whatever . . . I’m not a doctor, but—I don’t know. They were able to give him empathy, remorse . . .” She swallowed. “He wrote to Laura. He’s still incarcerated in a facility, probably forever. I don’t know the legal reasons, but I guess they don’t want to risk the thing malfunctioning or him tearing it out of his head. But he wrote to Laura, and the letter was—devastated. Like he was begging her, even though it was all already over and done. How could you do that to me. How could you let me be responsible for one more death . . . He says he would do anything to bring that boy back, to bring any of them back.”

“He was a different person, though,” Maggie said. She had to keep believing that. “Just because the new him would have consented—”

“No. It doesn’t work like that,” Victoria said, with adamant firmness. “You’re the same person after DBS as before. That’s why Laura wrecks herself so much about it. She says it’s like time travel—trying to know how people’s minds might change and what true consent is, because—we’re talking physiological illnesses here that have refusing treatment as a possible symptom of that illness. But you can’t say that either, because that’s saying sick people don’t get to make their own choices.”

It had never occurred to Maggie that Dr. Chen had spent more than a second of thought on any of those quandaries.

Victoria misinterpreted her expression and gave a little self-conscious laugh. “Sorry. This takes up a lot of brainspace for Laura. And me too, I guess.” Her eyes focused on a point far away. “She got to the point, after all this went down—she wanted to try to rewrite her grief. She said she couldn’t bear it, wanted to program it out of her head. I told her no, absolutely not, that she had to work through it the usual way. I’m not sure if I was right or not. What value does pain give us, really?”

Maggie thought about the last two years. She wouldn’t rewrite an instant of her pain, because it paired hand in hand with her love for Henry. She couldn’t decrease one without dulling the other. “It makes these things important,” she said to Victoria. “Some things shouldn’t be taken lightly. We need to know that.”

“I’m not sure you need one for the other,” Victoria said. “Sometimes pain is just pain.”

• • • •

I’m absolutely certain now that forcible DBS is going on behind the scenes. Court orders we don’t hear about, people modified with no compunction as more and more doctors are able to program such implants. Does anyone really believe in an era when we call torture “enhanced interrogation” that we wouldn’t perform brain surgery on a Guantanamo Bay inmate in the name of national security?

This operation is already something a legal guardian can choose on behalf of a dependent. How many times has a child or dependent adult been forced into this “treatment” even when they would choose not to have their brains sliced into? How long before governments and insurance companies begin requiring it?

But it can be reversed, you might say. Ah, but here we come back to that same old circular question. Once a person receives it, they won’t want it reversed. The original is dead for good.

• • • •

Maggie’s phone rang just after two in the morning. She groped for it, still half asleep, disoriented enough to wonder if she’d slept the day away.

“Maggie?” Victoria’s voice was distinctive, even choked and tight with emotion. “Maggie, I’m so sorry. I’ve had a—it’s an emergency.”

“What is it?” Maggie managed to slur out.

“It’s Laura. She—something went wrong with her implant. She’s in the hospital, and they told me to get—the doctors, Laura’s backups—I don’t know what I’m doing. You were a computer engineering person, right? Can you help me?”

Maggie wondered, later, why Victoria had chosen to call her. Dr. Chen’s colleagues doubtless would have jumped at the chance to swoop in and render aid. But perhaps they were Laura’s friends and not Victoria’s. Perhaps, for something this intimate, Victoria had wanted someone she knew, someone she could trust.

Maggie told Victoria she was on her way and struggled into an oversized sweater and jeans. On the way out, she paused by her dining room table.

Maggie had never asked Victoria to her place. The house had been collapsing into cluttered disuse since Henry had left, and now Maggie’s homemade EMP was spread out across the tabletop, the pocket-sized device she could use to knock out Laura Chen’s DBS implant. She’d finished it months ago. She’d told herself she was biding her time, that there were still Laura’s backups, that she wasn’t in any hurry. After all, who knew what would happen to her after it was done, and she still had to finish her manifesto . . .

She hadn’t written a sentence on that for months, either.

Laura’s backups. This might be her chance. Her best chance.

Maggie didn’t know why that thought didn’t make her happier, why instead, it only left her with an empty chill.

It was because she liked Victoria. That was why. But Laura’s loved ones had to see, too. They all had to understand. Didn’t they?

Maggie hugged her sweater around herself, left the EMP on the table, and hurried out the door.

Victoria met Maggie at the door to the old-fashioned brownstone she shared with her wife, her makeup smeared and streaking down her face. “Come in—I’m so sorry to wake you up like this—I’m so sorry—I didn’t even ask; do you have to be somewhere in the morning?”

The only places Maggie had been in the entire past half year she’d gone to with Victoria. She’d sort of figured she would drift through life using her ex-husband’s alimony to cover the rent and going into debt for everything else, until she died or went to jail for Laura’s murder.

“I don’t have anywhere to be in the morning,” she said.

Victoria was too overwhelmed to give more than an incoherent picture, like the abstract daubs of one of her paintings. “They want—they told me to go get some specific file things off her server, but I don’t—I’m messing this all up.” Victoria smoothed out a scribbled-on piece of paper, one dotted with cross-outs and smears like her makeup. “I should have paid more attention before this. I knew this might come up some day. I should have had Laura make me memorize everything—”

Maggie took the paper. Her hands were shaking. Half the notes didn’t mean much to her either, but once she got a look at the server . . .

“Laura’s computer,” Victoria said. “It’s right there. She gave me the passwords, they’re on the bottom there—”

Maggie held the paper as if it might break and moved over to Laura Chen’s computer.

Figuring out the system turned out not to be that hard. The most difficult part was Victoria hovering behind her, rambling and asking questions, like was Maggie sure she was transferring the files over to the external drive correctly, and could she check again . . . Maggie marveled a little that she never felt the urge to snap at Victoria peering over her shoulder, but maybe she found the patience to cut a panicking friend some slack.

Or maybe she was patient because the guilt was already creeping up inside her. This would be so easy. She had access. Pull it all off the cloud, format and overwrite, she was rusty but it would only take a few keystrokes. Victoria wouldn’t even realize what Maggie was doing.

It was all right at her fingertips, everything she’d been working toward for so long.

She finished copying files over to the drive. The sun had come up, its natural white light filtering around the blinds and displacing the lamp’s glow. In a minute, Victoria would be going to the hospital to give the doctors what they needed.

Maggie had been befriending Victoria for months now—this was a damned lucky chance. If she went ahead with it all right now, the backups would still exist on the external drive; Maggie would still have time to think it over. If she didn’t do it . . . she might never get another shot.

This is exactly what you were looking for, wasn’t it? When you started playing this role? Access.

Her hands moved on the keys of their own accord, sweat starting all over her body. Format, overwrite . . . slash in the kill.

The next prompt hadn’t appeared yet. The system was working. It would take another minute . . .

“Thank you,” Victoria said. Her hands were curled around each other, squeezing until the knuckles went pale. “Laura changed my life. I’d be a different person without her. Literally, I mean—”

Maggie’s head jerked up.

“What? You have DBS?” She’d never noticed the bump of an implant, but Victoria’s hair might have covered it—

“No,” Victoria said to her hands. “I wanted it. I wanted it so badly. I thought it would solve—you could probably tell from the first time you saw me that I’m trans.” She paused and took an unsteady breath. This wasn’t news to Maggie—Victoria didn’t tend to talk about the grievances she’d faced in being accepted as a woman, but the few personal essays she’d written on the subject had come up during Maggie’s prior social-media haunting.

None of those essays had mentioned DBS.

“It’s how Laura and I met,” Victoria continued, almost too quietly to hear. “Almost thirty years ago, back in the early days when she was the one willing to take all the new risks. I went to her and—I don’t tell people this. But I begged her for the surgery. I wanted to reprogram my dysphoria. I argued, I yelled—I said it was no more invasive than matching my body to my brain with a physical transition, but it would let me keep my family . . . I told her she didn’t have the right to judge who I wanted to be.”

“You wanted it—and she refused?” Maggie said.

“She said of course it was my choice, but she wasn’t going to be the doctor who did it, and that was her choice. I called her a lot of names and cussed her out and said she was playing God by deciding who got to reshape their brains and who didn’t, and she said I was treating her like a surgical vending machine. ‘Surgical vending machine,’ that’s what she said. We had it out right there in her office, so loud that people came running to see if she was all right.”

Waves of emotion crested up, surging through Maggie in a flood. Shock, that Laura Chen had turned down a person who wanted to step into her brave new world. Anger, that Laura had seen Victoria was fine, normal, not broken, and refused, whereas Henry had been something to be fixed. And behind it all, uncertainty, washing through Maggie until she doubted her own mind.

“If it weren’t for Laura, I wouldn’t be me,” Victoria said. “Or—I’d be a different me. I guess either way I could have found a path, but—it’s like that cat, right? Both dead and alive, but I’m alive, and Laura’s got the implant but she’s her alive version and we’re both alive cats and—I’m not making any sense, am I, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

She was making too much sense. Quantum lives, Maggie thought. Neither real until the waveform collapsed. Andrew Track had fought against an implant with every vicious bone in his body, but the new Andrew wished it had been forced on him earlier. Victoria had begged for one and might not have regretted it if she’d gotten her way, but Victoria now was thanking every lucky star that she’d remained a woman.

And what about Henry? He’d never go back, but if he’d understood beforehand just how much he would change, would he have gone through with it?

Like time travel, Victoria had said. Whose choice did you listen to? The person now, or their hypothetical self?

What if those two selves disagreed?

No, Maggie’s brain kicked back. They couldn’t play that guessing game. You couldn’t base rewriting someone’s brain on consent that was a maybe. She couldn’t get lost in this, this twisty logic—

“We’re happy,” Victoria said softly. “I’m happy with who I am, now, and Laura’s got an implant but she’s alive and she’s her and she’s happy, and can’t we just be happy?”

She’d raised her eyes pleadingly to Maggie.

Maggie glanced at the screen. The prompt had appeared. Just like that, with no fanfare, the backups erased. She held Laura Chen’s whole personality in the external drive in her hand.

Can’t we just be happy, Victoria had said.

She reached out and put a hand over Victoria’s. “You can. And . . .” She swallowed. “I won’t stand in your way.”

Victoria’s expression had turned confused yet grateful, and Maggie’s brain tried to kick back with one more angry echo, but Maggie barely noticed. For the first time in years she felt light. Free.

She’d go home and chuck her homemade EMP in the trash. Then she’d make a graceful exit from Victoria’s and Laura’s lives. Leave them be. Leave Henry—Hank—be, as much as she’d always carry the pain of losing him with her.

Laura would realize soon enough that her backups were gone, and she’d re-download them and put everything back where it was supposed to be, and Victoria would be left with fond memories of the friend who’d come to her art exhibits and discussed philosophy with her and been a shoulder to cry on in the middle of the night.

The front door banged open along with a rapid knocking.

“Victoria? I just got your message, I’m so sorry, I came as fast as I could. Are you here? The door was open—Mom?”

Maggie had frozen in her chair as soon as the familiar cadence echoed through the house. Henry’s tall frame loomed in the doorway before a reaction had even connected in her brain.

“Hank, it’s okay, come in—wait.” Victoria’s eyes traveled back and forth between Henry and Maggie, the rest of her so still it was as if she’d been carved from glass. “She’s your . . . what?”

“What are you doing here?” Hank said to Maggie. “Did you—oh God, was this you? Did you do something to Laura?”

“No!” Maggie cried, outrage flooding her even though that had been her exact intention. “She had a malfunction. I’m just here to help—”

“This whole time,” Victoria cut in. “You—Hank’s told us about his mom. You knew I was married to Laura. You—” The shock drained away from her and whole body had begun to vibrate with anger. “Get out of my house.”

“I didn’t—” Tears flooded Maggie’s eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you, I didn’t know—I wanted her to understand what she was doing.” The ludicrousness of the argument fell across her like a weight, the idea that this woman whom Victoria described as being so torn up by the power she’d given herself, so deeply concerned with choice, would find anything new to her in Maggie’s paltry bitterness.

“I’ve tried to tell you, over and over again,” Hank said, his voice cold. “You could be trying to get to know me again, and instead you’re—what, plotting revenge against the doctor who saved my life?”

“She didn’t—”

“I don’t understand you,” Hank said. “Did you get some power trip off having me depend on you? Was that it?”

“No!” Maggie choked out. “No, I never—that’s not—you said yourself that you changed, you changed, I thought it would help you but not change you.”

“You can’t separate me from my disabilities,” Hank said flatly. “They were part of who I am. Still are. It’s like you expected the same person but with all the hard parts excised. It doesn’t work like that.”

Maggie was sobbing into her lap. She swiped the sleeves of her oversized sweater across her face, wanting more than anything to disappear, to get up and go, but her knees were liquid.

A hand touched her shoulder, hesitantly at first. But then Victoria knelt next to Maggie’s chair. Her hand became firmer, more comforting, rubbing careful circles on Maggie’s back. “Hank still loves you,” she said softly. “You broke his heart, the way you’ve shut him out. We think of him as a member of our family, too, now, and—Maggie, my mother said something to me once.” A tremor went through her voice. “She and I . . . we found each other again. It took a long time. My dad still won’t—I think my mom ended up divorcing him over it, when he wouldn’t call me by my name, wouldn’t invite me to any family events, wouldn’t—but my mom, she said, she said it was hard but that she had to accept that when our children grow up, sometimes they don’t turn out the way we expect. And we have to let go of that, the expectation.”

“But that’s not . . .” Maggie tried. If Henry had grown up—grown up differently, without all the hurdles, would he have grown into the man Hank was now? Only slowly, giving her enough time to adjust, to get to know the new him every time he evolved?

Victoria squeezed her shoulder. “I have to go to Laura now.”

“Wait,” Hank said. “Let me check the drive.” He cast a suspicious look at Maggie as he squeezed past her.

Maggie stumbled up and groped her way to the door. Hank and Victoria, bent over the computer, didn’t try to stop her.

Hank would figure out what she’d done. He was well on his way to becoming a neuroprogrammer himself, and doubtless knew Laura’s systems almost as well as she did.

Maggie hadn’t succeeded in destroying Laura. She’d instead destroyed any chance of being able to get to know Hank again.

The old echo of Henry’s loss panged through her. She was losing her son, again. And this time it was her own doing.

Somehow, with almost no memory of it, she managed to get home. The sun was well up now, warming away the chill of night, but Maggie was so drained she couldn’t even drag her key out of her pocket. Instead she collapsed on the steps to the porch, head on her knees, a sad mirror of the day she’d first embarked on this folly.

She must have moved at some point, but day blurred into night into day, and Laura Chen found her there.

“Hi,” Dr. Chen said, with the same brusqueness Maggie remembered. “Can I sit down?”

Maggie gestured with a soggy sleeve, and Laura Chen perched on the step beside her.

What are you doing here, Maggie wanted to ask, along with, strangely, Are you okay, did I kill you, I’m sorry.

She didn’t say either one.

“I worry,” Dr. Chen said, after a few very long minutes, “that you’re right.”

How would you know what I think? But of course, Hank would have told her; Hank who still knew Maggie as well as Henry had.

“I like who I am with DBS,” Dr. Chen went on. “I didn’t like who I was before. It was very cut and dried, for me. And I like to think that over the years I’ve tried to make good choices, but technology—sometimes there’s no right answer. I don’t believe there’s one way things are meant to be.”

Maggie never had, either.

“There are even clearer, possibly catastrophic dangers to DBS,” Laura Chen said. “It could theoretically be hacked, or used to disable someone instead of help them. There will be people who want to use it to eliminate people like me: queer feminist women who refuse to sit down and be quiet. The ways parents could misuse it if they find a willing doctor, it’s . . . you can imagine my nightmares. How other people decide to use it, I believe I bear some responsibility for that.”

“But you still believe in it,” Maggie said.

“Yes. I do. Very much,” Dr. Chen said. “But that doesn’t mean the hard questions go away.”

“Is Hank . . .”

“He says he doesn’t want to speak to you again,” Dr. Chen said. “Neither does Victoria, after Hank found what you’d been doing on my system. He fixed it all before I even knew it happened—I’m fine, by the way, I had some simple hardware degradation that’s been replaced and upgraded—but Victoria ended up so mad she told me to think about pressing charges against you. But I’m not going to, because . . . I understand. I can’t say I’ve never thought about—well. Everyone wonders who they would be if life had gone a different way. I understand. I wanted to tell you that.”

She stood up.

“I’m sorry,” Maggie whispered.

“It’s not okay,” Dr. Chen said, “but it is complicated. If you want to, I think you should start writing to Hank, even if he never responds. If he stays in the field, he’ll realize someday just how few right answers there can be. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

Change his mind. Because Hank’s mind was his to change, and his to reprogram if he wanted to, as he’d wanted to then and he wanted to now.

Maggie nodded.

“If you don’t mind some more unsolicited advice,” Dr. Chen added softly, “I hope you’ll talk to someone. There’s more than one way to reprogram your brain.”

• • • •

Dear Hank,

Dr. Chen recommended I write to you. I don’t know if you’ll read this. I don’t know if I hope you will or not.

I’m sorry.

I don’t know what to say other than that, that wouldn’t sound like an excuse or dishonesty. But I’m working on seeing your point of view, and not pretending I know what you—you at any time—would have thought. I’m working on . . . not knowing all the answers.

I’m moving. I’m going to go back east and try to build a life. Update my skills, find a job, leave the house, try to make some friends, maybe. Some days I’m optimistic I’ll be able to do it. Some days I’m not.

My therapist says that’s okay.

Oh, I’m seeing a therapist, and I’ll continue once I move back home. They also started me on antidepressants. I think it’s helping. As Dr. Chen says, I’m trying to reprogram my brain to be . . . more of who I want to be.

It just took me a while to get there. I’m sorry.

Maybe someday I’ll change me enough that you’re willing to give me one more chance.

©2018 by S.L. Huang, LLC. Originally published in Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Wade Roush. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S.L. Huang is a Hugo-nominated and Amazon-bestselling author who justifies her MIT degree by using it to write eccentric mathematical superhero fiction. She is the author of the Cas Russell series from Tor Books, starting with Zero Sum Game, and the recent fantasy Burning Roses. Her short fiction has sold to Analog, F&SF, Strange Horizons, and more, including numerous best-of anthologies. She is also a Hollywood stuntwoman and firearms expert, where she’s appeared on shows such as “Battlestar Galactica” and “Raising Hope” and worked with actors such as Sean Patrick Flanery, Jason Momoa, and Danny Glover. Follow her online at www.slhuang.com or @sl_huang.

Ah Been Buked

Maurice Broaddus | 4209 words

Monologue. Spoken by Viney Scott. Recorded at Parsons, Indiana, by John Henry Freeman, June 1935.

It’s best to leave some things forgotten.

Lord have mercy on my soul. Have mercy, have mercy, have mercy. I don’t know why you want me to talk about all this in the first place. This here’s a spirit stone, and I come out here to make sure it ain’t been covered up. Things need tending to. No, I suppose not all things ought to be forgotten. Feels like I done been around here some thousand years or some such; moving, settling down, and moving again. ’Course I ain’t been around quite that long, it just seemed that way when I got to thinking back.

• • • •

I was nine years old when I watched my Poppa be whupped to death. You ever been to a zoo? It don’t matter none iffen you couldn’t see the bars or chains. Look into their eyes and you could see that even beasts of the field know when they ain’t free. Being in a cage did funny things to the body’s mind.

• • • •

“What you staring at, nigger? Don’t you go on get no ideas about running off,” Young Marse Chapman would say to me when he caught me staring off at the hills. Then he’d crack that whip. Let it land right next to me to give me a start. I was the same age as young Marse Chapman. He had a special hate in him, even then. I tried to stay away from him in case his hatred was a-catching.

Lord help a colored who ran off, iffen they caught him.

Old man Marse Chapman was always away on business. He left the young marse in charge. Used to be that we had a colored overseer, Uncle Moses, running the field coloreds. Though black like the rest of us, with a little bit of authority, he forgot who he was and where he came from. But young Marse Chapman was coming of age and was eager to prove himself. Told Uncle Moses he was too soft on us and took over. Young marse was generous with the bullwhip.

• • • •

I did little jobs to help the field coloreds: toted brush and bark, rolled up little logs, carried water around to our mensfolk, and swept the yard. Mrs. Annalynn, old man Marse Chapman’s wife, took a shine to me early on, and I spent many a day on her lap. With my thick braids of hair and my knobby-kneed li’l self sticking out of the burlap sack that passed for my dress, she said I was the smartest colored in the Ohio River Valley. Few of us coloreds had anything to do with no reading or writing as weren’t no schools for us back then. And I wasn’t one much for figuring anyhow. My smarts were in keeping my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut. Sometimes I wondered whether Mrs. Annalynn was trying to make herself feel better by taking me on. Owning other folks twisted a body up inside as much as it twisted up those you owned.

Mrs. Annalynn straddled her horse like a man, one leg on either side, and I rode behind her. Old man Marse Chapman hated it, saying that it wasn’t none too lady-like. Mrs. Annalynn told him that he never seemed too terribly interested in ladies. Then she asked how Miss Clara rode. Not that she said, “Miss Clara”; but the dead need respecting and I don’t speak like that. They never spoke much about it after that.

• • • •

Aunt Clara.

We called everyone aunt and uncle out of respect, but Aunt Clara really was my kinfolk. After Mammy was sold, she watched out for me. When I asked her about the mole under my left eye, she said it was a black teardrop. I “cried for all of us,” she said.

The field coloreds called Aunt Clara a conjurer.

One time, Uncle Moses tied her up to be beaten. There she was, all spread out for everyone to watch. Even those who resented her light skin didn’t want to see her whupped. They feared for anyone who had to face the whip. But I saw her eyes. She weren’t scared none. She just stared all boldly at him, practically daring him to whup her. Then Uncle Moses turned and walked away, like he forgot where he left her. No one was allowed to touch her.

One day, a cough settled in old man Marse Chapman’s chest. A fever burned him up dead. Folks said he became a haunt, swore they saw his spirit walking about the shotgun houses. All I know was that Aunt Clara’s eyes weren’t so bold after that.

• • • •

I opened the gates for Mrs. Annalynn, then rode into town with her to buy supplies. Afterwards, she wanted me to sit with her in the kitchen. That turned a few heads, because field coloreds never was allowed in the house, and house coloreds never worked in the field. But Mrs. Annalynn said that I had “special dispen’sion.”

I think I was like a doll to her, someone safe for her to tote around and be her friend, who didn’t talk back, but could keep her company. I was still surprised when she asked me, “Do you want to live with me in the big house?” She had an odd, dreamy sort of look in her eyes, as if she were already lost in special plans. Or hopes.

“I want to be with my Mammy.” I don’t know what got into me. My Mammy had long been sold off. I couldn’t even remember her eyes.

Mrs. Annalynn grew red-faced, like I’d slapped her. Betrayed her worsen if I stole her prize cow and sold it to the neighbor she feuded with next door. Something cold replaced the light in her eyes. I knew that look from Uncle Moses’ face. That was the last time she asked me anything.

I couldn’t hate her, though. She just wanted a child to call her own again. No shame in that.

Only hurt.

• • • •

Most days blurred into the next. Lying in my pallet on the floor, I slept until the guinea fowls woke me up. Well, until the roosters joined in. An old bell donged on some plantation up the road a ways, then more bells added to it, like the clanging was on a morning stroll up the road. By four in the morning, young Marse Chapman straddled his horse, a big, monstrous, wild-eyed beast that had a devil in him. Riding down to us, young Marse Chapman picked ham out of his teeth with a long shiny goose quill pick. The rising wind carried the smell of sow belly frying past the shotgun houses. The smell of hoecakes and buttermilk soon followed. The kitchen from the main house had different smells coming from it: cakes, hams, chicken and poke, taters and good egg and pone bread. Most times, I was lucky to get li’l pieces of scrapback each morning. We worked from sunup to sundown in family groups, that way we could help each other when someone got behind.

• • • •

No, a spirit stone wasn’t like a headstone, though sometimes it feels like a grave marker. Aunt Clara taught me about them. A spirit stone kept a part of a person’s spirit so that they were bound to whoever owned the stone.

I dreamt that ivy took hold of it and dragged it away from me.

• • • •

Hills bumped up all around the Chapman house, and the land stretched on far as the eye could see. A creek, cold and bubbly, crept through two caves before it passed through the property. It separated the row of shotgun houses the coloreds had from the rest of the estate and emptied into the river.

The Chapman’s house, white and proud with all of its columns and iron gates, stood right along the road. A porch ran the full length of the house. Old man Marse Chapman rocked back and forth on the porch, sipping at his glass of lemonade while Aunt Clara fanned him.

I don’t know, maybe I was sixteen about then.

My favorite place was where the creek passed through the caves. It was near dark, but I wasn’t worried none. I was supposed to be fetching water, but folks knew I had a way of lingering whenever I went. Whispers carried on the breeze. I tell you what, my poor little heart pounded so hard, I thought it was going to jump out my chest and swim upstream. I knew they could only be one thing: patrollers.

Sometimes we called them buskrys, poor white folks who had no slaves of their own, but who tracked runaway coloreds. Iffen they caught a lone colored out by themselves with no pass—’cause you had to have a permission slip to be off or away from your marse’s property—they would catch you and whup you or just sell you to a trader themselves. Iffen they returned you to your marse’s, he’d turn around and give you a proper whupping for running off.

So, I held my breath and crept along.

I listened carefully, trying to figure out where they was coming from, then I heard this woman speak with a slow, deep voice that made you snap to attention. I recognized her voice, which boldened my steps to find out who she was meeting with. I crept and I crept, not noticing the drop off ’til I was already tumbling down.

“Land sakes, Viney,” Aunt Clara yelled at me. “You gave us a start. We thought them patrollers had us for certain.”

As I dusted the leaves and dirt from me, a round-faced little boy crouched behind her.

“It’s all right, Frederick, it’s just Viney. She’s clumsy and noisy, but we’re safe. Me and Frederick were trying to figure out how to get this here paddle boat ’cross the river. Think you could get him to the other side?”

Aunt Clara only worked in the house and wasn’t used to no real work, leastways so I thought. Maybe she worked one of her charms on me as she was so good at getting out of work.

“That li’l thing. I rowed bigger’n that for Mrs. Annalynn. I’m stronger ’n most men after working in the field for so long.”

“His mother’s waiting for him over the river.”

Frederick’s big brown eyes would haunt my dreams forever iffen I said “no.”

The current was strong, but it hadn’t rained in a spell, so we weren’t in for too much paddling. My skinny little arms trembled every time I set my oar to water. It wasn’t the cold that sent a shiver up me and gave me goose flesh, it was the whupping I knew young Marse Chapman waited to give me should I get caught. Too scared to dare whisper to Frederick, I locked my eyes on the nearing shore, focusing on what Aunt Clara told me to tell them when I reached it.

As I neared the bushes on the other side, I realized I never even thought about what might lay across the river. Never had no account to since my whole world was Marse Chapman’s farm. The world may as well have been flat with us threatening to fall off the edge. Other slaves talked about the other side of the river like it was the Jordan River and all freedom danced beyond it. I figured whatever was on the other side probably had marses and bullwhips and traders like anywhere else.

As soon as the boat bumped the shore, I started praying. Frederick clutched the back of my dress, wrapping up in the folds as if they were curtains. The dark had a funny way of pressing in on you from all sides. Even tree limbs seemed stark and unfamiliar in the gloom. I knew I wasn’t alone.

Hands reached down and started to pull me up. I swooned, nearly dead from faint.

“Menare.” I yelled what Aunt Clara told me. She said it was from the Bible. “Menare. Menare. Menare.”

“Shh, girl,” the bushes whispered with urgency. “We heard you the first time. Who else would be out here?”

That was when I first saw him. Zias.

Zias was a great big buck of a boy. No scars ran along his fine, dark skin, near as I could tell. And his soft, brown eyes had a sparkle to them. Full of hope. And freedom. Weak as I was, I slumped in his huge, strong arms.

“You hungry?” he growled. His gruffness held a gentleness in it, like he didn’t know how to sound tender. But he tried.

“Yes’m” was all I trusted myself to say. I trembled as I ate. I don’t know why. I wasn’t cold, and I no longer feared young Marse Chapman’s bullwhip.

I rowed poor colored across the river, most every Saturday afternoon and Sunday night, just to see Zias.

• • • •

Aunt Clara taught me lots of things about men and women. Told me that some marses handed out permission slips for colored to get married.

• • • •

I only knew Zias once. It was beautiful, and I didn’t need no marse’s permission for it.

• • • •

Young Marse Chapman, not so young by then, was quick to stop men. “Whose colored are you?” he’d always ask. Iffen the slave was reedy or sickly looking, young Marse Chapman would say, “You can’t see my gals. You ain’t good stock.” Zias belonged to Marse Chapman’s Uncle Silas, who started sending him around. Marse Chapman took one gander at Zias, tall and husky, like he was bigger and stronger than a horse. Normally, he’d have planned to use him as breeding stock, studding him worsen a horse. But Marse Chapman didn’t like how Zias and me snuck glances at one another. His eyes got full of the devil whenever Zias came around.

Young Marse Chapman’s big, mean self studied me. Not like he watched the other coloreds, but like I was a flower that he waited for the right moment to pluck. That worried my li’l soul. Nothing was more frightening than the devil showing mercy.

There was no room in his foul heart for anything close to love. Some folks whispered that young Marse Chapman intended to have me for himself. Maybe that li’l shriveled thing Marse Chapman called a heart pumped more of its hate through his veins not standing for anyone around him to have what he couldn’t. I was his prize, and he meant to have me.

Not long after dark, he came around the houses. The door to our shotgun house creaked open, waking all of us. We all knew what the midnight creak meant. Old man Chapman slipped in on more than one occasion, usually when Aunt Clara was on her monthlies. It was a roll of the bones who would be selected. I hadn’t been of age and had not aroused their attention. But now, he saw me with that look men got when they were heated up. He stood over my pallet. The other women rolled away, turning their backs and closing their eyes. Sorry for me, but relieved they hadn’t been chosen. He crawled on top of me, all pawing hands, his weight pinning me as he grabbed at me. All I could think about was the stirring in my belly. I clawed and gave him what for. He came away from the houses, like a scalded bear. Folks whispered about it all through the night. But all I could think was that, if you wounded a bear, you better kill it.

Lord Jesus, have mercy on this poor, old soul of mine.

• • • •

Every colored in the field knew that Marse Chapman was a thunder cloud waiting to break wide open and rain anger on us all. His eyes followed me everywhere, burning worse than the noontime sun. No one dared get near me, like I carried a “whupping plague” they could catch. He waited, patient as the wily serpent he was. Lord, how cruel that man was.

One day, without warning, young Marse Chapman spat and cussed something fierce, yelling about how we coloreds have forgot who was in charge. Leaping down from that big horse of his, he went after Zias. He didn’t care that Zias wasn’t one of his own. He was property, and Marse Chapman could always settle up what he owed. All the ruckus drew Mrs. Annallynn and Aunt Clara from the house.

All I thought of was how Poppa . . .

. . . was a big man, strong and tall like an oak tree. When he took my hand, he swallowed me up like Jonah and the whale. Poppa worked leather, and, on that day, as Poppa fixed Marse Chapman’s riding harness, the heat got to him. He fell over and tore the harness beyond repair. Now, iffen Poppa had been in his right mind, he’d have known Marse Chapman would have just had him make a new one. Uncle Moses had already gotten a talking to about damaging Marse Chapman’s valuable coloreds. With his heat-addled mind, all Poppa knew was that bullwhip.

So, he ran.

Uncle Moses got out those loud, slobbering hound dogs and chased after Poppa. He caught him down by the caves, trying to lose his scent in the water. Dragging him in front of all the field coloreds, Uncle Moses took a piece of iron with little holes in it what he called the “slut.” He filled the holes up with tallow and shoved it in the fire ’til the grease got sizzling hot. Then he held it over poor Poppa’s back and let that hot grease drip on his hide. Every time I close my eyes I could still hear that scream.

After that came the whupping.

Uncle Moses brought his arm up high and held his bullwhip there. All the field coloreds gathered around. We’d recognized that delighted glint in his eyes, like a preacher caught up with the Spirit. He waited until he had our full attention, and . . .

. . . let that whip fall hard on Zias’ back. The first stroke of that whip was always the loudest, the one that made everyone jump. Lord Jesus, that first lick. He let loose a soul scream, crying out for all of us. His skin split open, a busted seam along his back, sputtering blood like a gutted hog.

Zias’ back arched, drawing away from the bite of the whip. His knuckles turned white as he gripped the air. Tears rolled down his face.

Marse Chapman whupped him with the passion of a man knowing his wife.

Some turned away, they knew how things usually went: the thirty lashes, rubbing salt over his wounds, throwing the poor colored in the stock house, maybe chain him up a couple days with nothing to eat iffen the punishment was to be more severe.

Zias stared up at him, his soft eyes fading. Only two words formed on his lips. “Pray, Marse.”

Young Marse Chapman paused when Zias murmured that. From the confused look on his face, he wasn’t sure what Zias meant.

“You coloreds have forgotten how to work, and I aims to teach you.”

Young Marse Chapman hitched Zias to a plow. Slipping a bit into his mouth and jerked him about by it, he worked poor Zias like a mule, beating him bloody and sore. Zias never ran off, neither. I read it in his eyes: he feared iffen he left, Marse Chapman would only turn on me.

Suddenly, Zias’ big body slumped. Zias was dead.

Marse Chapman told us to leave him where he lie, as an example, and, iffen we moved him, he’d do the same to someone else. So no one touched him.

• • • •

Lord have mercy on my soul.

• • • •

To hear Aunt Clara tell it, when the universe was created, powerful stones soaked up the magic of creation. Like lightning striking the earth, they fell, bringing with them sparks of magic. Life and spirit fused, things of power. Lord, how she’d hunch over one of her chosen stones, painting it, doting on it like it was a baby. I wanted her to help me make one not too long after Zias died. It was a way to capture a piece of a person, to always remember them. I asked, “How do you know which stones have power?”

“You’ll know. It’s like the stone chooses you,” she said.

• • • •

Marse Chapman wasn’t through with me, especially not after he noticed the swoll of my belly. The devil was patient.

“Soon as your baby comes. I will have you. And then you’ll know The Swing.”

When it came to cruelty, he studied better than a scientist. Marse Chapman had heard tell of other farms using something like it to punish their coloreds. They stripped a body before they whupped them, always trying to find different ways to take your dignity. They wanted the world to see you naked. I knew Marse Chapman would take special joy in tearing off my clothes in front of the other field colored, leaving me plum naked and humiliated.

“And then I’ll sell that little nigger baby of yours.”

• • • •

The midnight creak didn’t send a shiver through me. I’d snuck out like I was due to help someone across the river. Instead, I went to the big house. Aunt Clara let me in but didn’t meet my gaze. I slinked up to young Marse Chapman’s room. Marse Chapman snored lightly beneath me, undisturbed by the creak because he never had to be. He slept sound, wrapped in his privilege of being born a Chapman. He’d known birthdays, his Poppa, his Mammy. He’d never tasted a bullwhip. He might find a love and have a child and be able to know them in peace.

He was allowed to dream.

The stone grew heavy in my hand. I smashed it down on his head hard as I could. Marse Chapman raised up out of bed, his arms flailed in his sheets like a ghost flapping in the breeze. I brought the stone to bear again, but the light had gone out of his eyes. He tumbled forward, toppling off the bed, bashing his head against the nightstand.

I was certain he went to hell, even though I didn’t know how the devil could stand him.

• • • •

No, I don’t know how I felt. Sometimes you were better off not feeling. Feelings could grind you up, leaving you nothing but . . . I feared the hate. I feared that hate might one day eat me up. The truth had a way of coming out, no matter how long you let a lie settle into you. So, I vowed I’d always remember how easy it was to hold a life in your hand and what not cherishing life could drive a body to do.

I waited all the next day for them to come round me up. I prepared myself to cross the Jordan and meet my Lord. But no one came. Mrs. Annalynn found him. Told everyone that he had a spell and fell out of bed. She walked right by me, glanced at my belly, and moved on.

• • • •

My spirit stone chose me, and I chose Marse Chapman. It was Zias’ grave marker since Marse Chapman wouldn’t allow no proper grave. So, now he watched over Zias.

• • • •

Lord Jesus, it was an awful business belonging to folks body and soul. Then one day, one of them Union boys, all tired and pale, came up to us.

“You’re free,” he said.

“No, you just having fun with us,” I said. I don’t think I understood what he was trying to tell us.

He didn’t have much patience for my foolishness. “You’re as free as I am.”

Lord, how we sang and danced. I wanted to move across the river to put the plantation behind me and explore the world. But the Chapman house was all I knew, and I was afraid to leave it behind. It broke and bowed everyone. They never walked the same, a bent to their spirit as if they’d never be quite whole. The fear would always haunt me. That fear of the night reaching out, covering my mouth and dragging me back to that life. At night, low moans and cries might snap you fully awake, each sob picking a scab on your soul. Just cause some law said we weren’t a slave no more don’t mean everyone obeyed it.

So I stayed, ministering to my spirit stone. A memory kept for safekeeping. A pain so deep, it lost all meaning. A bit of Marse Chapman’s spirit bound to it, to remind him that he was bound to me. Kept. Owned. In the cool of night, I could still feel the heat of his hate, but that was all right. I brushed the leaves from him and let him rest.

Lord have mercy on my soul.

©2017 by Maurice Broaddus. Originally published in The Voices of Martyrs. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A community organizer and middle school teacher, his work has appeared in magazines like Lightspeed Magazine, Weird Tales, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s, Cemetery Dance, Uncanny Magazine, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Martyrs. His books include the urban fantasy trilogy, The Knights of Breton Court, the steampunk works Buffalo Soldier and the award-winning, Pimp My Airship. His middle grade detective novels include The Usual Suspects and Unfadeable. As an editor, he’s worked on Dark Faith anthology series, Fireside Magazine, Streets of Shadows, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror, and Apex Magazine. Learn more at MauriceBroaddus.com.

The Salt Warrior

Kali Wallace | 4533 words

Angela found the saint at the base of the cliffs beneath the old watchtower. She had followed his trail from the village: a line of footprints braided with the chaotic, black-stained tracks of the raiders, leading to the cliffs. There he must have fallen, or leapt away in fear. The crumbling stones of the watchtower were marred with scars from the raiders’ lashing claws and teeth, striped with their fetid black ichor, but there was no sign of them on the switchbacks that wound down to the beach.

The cobbled beach was warm and rough beneath her bare feet. She was not wearing shoes, and she had tied her skirt up, revealing so much leg Skinny Father Mateo would have fainted with horror. The heat of the day was rising, and with it the breeze, carrying a lively smell, a gasp of green untouched by decay. For a moment Angela was giddy with the taste of it.

The moment passed, and despair returned.

“Hello?” said Angela. “Can you hear me? Hello?”

The saint lay facedown at the bottom of the cliff. His head and torso were in shadow, his legs exposed to the morning sun. His brilliant armor of burnished bronze, inlaid with flames of gold, glinted so brightly it stung Angela’s eyes. There was seaweed tangled in the joints and a smear of mud across his bottom. She probably wasn’t supposed to be thinking of a warrior of god as having buttocks. There was no ordinary man beneath the armor, or so the priests claimed. The saints gave up everything—their names, their families, their pasts, their faces, their skin, their flesh, their blood and all of its yearnings—when they chose to serve God.

So the priests claimed. He also wasn’t supposed to be able to die, not in the normal way, yet here he was, facedown in the sand. His sword was a long, dark line beside him. It was speckled with the raiders’ black-tar blood, but only a little. He must have fled more than he fought, running to the sea like a crab scurrying into a burrow, while the villagers screamed and died. The battle had not lasted long. Farmers and fishermen armed with hatchets and kitchen knives were no match for the towering, seething, slickly swift raiders who needed only a single blow to spill a man’s intestines and split his head like a gourd.

The saint was supposed to protect them against all onslaughts of evil, however they appeared. That was his only purpose, and he had failed.

“You were a coward,” Angela rasped, acid in her throat. “I hope the crabs eat you from the inside.”

She turned to leave him. Stopped. Turned again. For three days, she had been alone. The raiders had taken the survivors away in their slave-ships, from the oldest grandmother to the newest squalling babe, and left the dead for the scavengers who would inevitably follow. For three days, her only companions had been the corpses rotting in grotesque heaps, bloating and putrefying beneath clouds of gulls and black flies, with a stink that choked her every time the wind turned.

For three days, she had watched the horizon for the expected scavengers. When they came, they would be ravenous. She had tried to burn the corpses, to give the scavengers no reason to land, but every attempt ended with a splutter of weak flames dying beneath a coil of oily black smoke.

Angela crouched and scooped sand away from the saint’s shoulders and sides until she could turn him over. He was lighter than she expected; he toppled onto his back with a graceless clink. The armor was even more fine up close than it appeared from afar, with the gold inlay seemingly melted into the bronze in patterns so intricate they tricked the eye to follow every labyrinthine curve. There were subtle signs of imperfection: greening at the edges, dimples and dents, pockmarks of orange where the iron rivets were rusting.

With two fingers she scooped sand from the eyeholes of his helmet. She pulled a string of seaweed from the small, perfect circle of the mouth and shuddered when she noticed the reddish-brown stain on it. There had been no such stain when he arrived on the island, but a full year was time enough for her blood, and the blood of other sinners, to paint that gleaming metal.

She wiped her fingers on her skirt and tapped the side of his head, raising a dull metallic echo.

“Hello,” she said again. “Hello?”

From within the armor came a wet sucking noise, like surf dragging across stones. Angela jerked her hand away in surprise as a small crab scrambled out of one eye. It tumbled down the side of the helmet and fled across the sand.

The saint gurgled again, deep and damp and rough, and seawater seeped from the helmet. He made a sound much like a cough, one that shook his suit of armor and made the joints creak. Angela put one hand on his shoulder, the other behind his head, but before she could help him upright he raised one hand and grasped her wrist. His glove was leather beneath the plates of bronze, the fingers stiff and crusted with salt.

“Demon,” he rasped, his voice weak and wobbling. Within his helmet, his eyes were beetle-black and gleaming. “Demon.”

Angela twisted her hand free of his grip and rose to her feet. Disappointment and dismay were thorns in her throat.

“Well.” She brushed sand from her knees and took a step back. “The tide can have you, then. It’s better than you deserve.”

She strode away, the tightness in her chest caught somewhere between laughter and terror. If she was not doomed already, she had surely sealed her fate by speaking so disrespectfully to a saint. Skinny Father Mateo could have added another sin to her tally; the villagers would have whooped with delight. The healing wound on her forearm where he had spilt her blood into the chalice itched so badly she wanted to claw her skin away.

• • • •

She went about her chores for the day, half of her mind on her tasks, half on the empty horizon. She gathered herbs, collected eggs, turned dried fish in the sun. She carried firewood to her camp on the crest of the island’s highest hill; she had chosen the spot because it gave her a good view of the ocean. She would see the scavengers before they arrived.

Everywhere she walked, she avoided the long furrows the invaders had left behind. She didn’t know if the dark slime they exuded was their blood or some other secretion, and she had no desire to find out; the grass withered and the soil turned to ash everywhere it touched. She no longer looked at the corpses she could not burn; the sight of their torn, charred skin and bruised flesh turned to bloat was seared in her mind. She looked instead at what was left of the village. Burned-out homes, shattered hearths, vegetable carts crushed to splinters. The church was a skeleton of charred limestone. The glorious stained glass window that told the tale of the legendary warrior Caius sacrificing himself to the Green King had been reduced to shards that sparkled in the sun.

The southern well remained untouched and the water clean. For that, she supposed, she ought to give thanks. She owed thanks as well to the quick thinking of Fat Father Mateo, who had thrown the key into the cellar so she might free herself when the fighting began. Later, when silence fell over the town, she had emerged from her prison to find him dead on the church steps, his round, wine-rosy face torn to shreds by a swipe of claws. He might have died only moments after saving her. She had dug a grave for him, but when she tried to move his corpse into a wheelbarrow, black ichor spilled from his wounds, searing her skin with blisters and making her dizzy with its nauseating stench. She did not try to bury anybody else.

She had not found Skinny Father Mateo at all. She supposed he was in chains with all the others. She could only hope he was every day weeping and pissing himself with fear.

The day was waning, the sun sinking into the western sea, when she finally acknowledged the knot of guilt she had been ignoring all day. It was still there, rattling about her insides like a tiny stone in her sister Martina’s shiny wedding shoes, the ones Angela and Paola had sneaked out of her dowry chest and nearly ruined by tottering about the garden while their mother and aunts bent their heads over trousseau embroidery inside.

Paola and her ruddy-cheeked sons had died in the village square. There had been a trail of ichor over both of her legs, eating the flesh to the bone. The boys by her side had been crushed, their little chests caved in, their ribs snapped like splinters. Martina and her family must have been taken away, or rendered unrecognizable beneath wounds and blood. It was hard to look, after a while. Too many times had the release of gasses or settling of flies tricked Angela into seeing a twitching hand or fluttering eye where there was none.

Angela covered her buckets of water with clean cloths. She looked at the horizon one more time and found it empty.

She took the handles of her wheelbarrow and returned to the beach.

• • • •

It was better to think of her sisters as they had lived. She and Paola, so much younger than Martina, had been so jubilant and careless the summer of Martina’s wedding, little wisps of girls browned by the sun and crowned with messy braids, wobbling on the ill-fitting shoes and gasping with laughter as they pointed at each other and said, you’re going to marry Tomas, you’re going to marry Pedro, you’re going to marry Elia, every possibility more ridiculous than the last, until finally Paola had shouted, “You’re going to marry Brother Marco!” And the horror of it, the absurdity of it, the wickedness of it had stunned Angela to silence. Brother Marco was the eldest and blindest of the island’s monks, a man so stooped his spine was shaped as a goatherd’s crook, so ancient he could not remember the name of the bishop who had sent him to the island, and so holy that his gnarled feet rarely touched the ground. His cloudy white eyes glowed with pure light on the shortest and longest nights of the year, and sometimes when he spoke, if the words he mumbled were a blessing or a prayer, honey dripped in golden droplets from his lips. As a young man, Brother Marco had gone to the fog-cloaked islands of the far, far north to fight godless tricksters and barbarians, but unlike so many of that tragic war, he had returned fully human, more righteous than ruined, and beatific in his well-earned peace. A man who had given himself so completely to God would never marry—Paola fell to the floor, overcome with laughter at the very idea—but for a moment between the joke and the laughter, Angela had felt the whispered secrets of womanhood brush so quickly, so gently against the sacred murmurs of priesthood, a tantalizing frisson of forbidden contact between two worlds that could never meet.

When she was of age, Paolo had married Elia after all, happily, on a spring day, with a blush on her cheeks and ribbons in her hair. He was a good husband, a good father, a good brother to Angela when so many others had turned away from her. She had not found him among the dead. The invaders must have taken him away. He would hate himself for surviving his wife and sons. Perhaps that was the source of the raiders’ greatest victories: the hate that ate a survivor from the inside, as sour as the black slime that burnt through flesh and poisoned rich earth, with no way to free it but outward, in anger.

Only later, years after she lost interest in girlish games of make-believe, had Angela learned that there was no barrier of lace and silk, no wall of whispers and blood, that could keep the priests from prying into the domain of wives and daughters, however much they disdained it. Skinny Father Mateo had spoken on the matter at great length during Angela’s trial and sentencing, when she had been bound and kneeling on the flat paving stones in the village square. The day had been hot and cloudless, the air stirred only by the splayed fans of the old women in the audience. Angela’s knees had already been bruised and bloodied from kneeling through the accusation, the days of interrogation, the nights of imprisonment, and she had been so hungry and thirsty she had swayed in time with Mateo’s words, hearing them not as any language of man she knew but the dull roar of an animal out of a fable, with only choice accusations slipping through: seductress, temptress, devil, whore. Skinny Father Mateo, it had to be said, knew a great deal of very intimate detail regarding the particulars of Angela’s sin, the extent of her supposed devilry, the effect it had on good but unwary men. If Angela could do even one of the things Skinny Father Mateo had claimed, she would have struck him down with a lightning bolt right there in the square while he questioned the Bianchi boys so thoroughly one might have thought it was he, not they, who had stumbled upon Angela and Francesco in the olive grove, he who had hidden himself behind the summer-lush branches to watch the rise and fall of their bare skin, to hear the pant of their breath, to turn and run when it overwhelmed him, to tell everybody who would listen.

Skinny Father Mateo had smiled when he brandished the knife and sliced her arm open. The chalice had caught her blood, and overflowed, and still he smiled.

Francesco had left the island weeks ago, gone to sea with his uncle’s trading ship, which would spend the summer sailing between ports on the mainland. He was probably out there somewhere, alive, careless, not knowing the island had been attacked. Angela tried to remember why his smile had so enticed her. He was not the first man she had met in the olive grove. He was only the first who was so afraid of his mother that he lied and said she bewitched him and ran away to sea after they were caught.

It had not been his smile, Angela recalled, but his hands. Strong, large hands, warm and calloused when they touched her skin. He had hid his face in those hands throughout her trial. He had let Skinny Father Mateo speak for him.

• • • •

The wheelbarrow hit a stone and tilted to the side. Angela cursed mildly and righted it. She had reached the top of the slope, where the path rounded the watchtower. The sun was setting, casting the sea and land in burnt hues of red and orange.

She had thought, when she was imprisoned, that she would never see another sunset. Never see the shearwaters dipping and whirling over the shore. Never see the waves curl and spread as they crawled up the sand. She had thought her eyes would forget how to see color, her skin would forget the kiss of warmth, her belly would forget the contentment of a good meal.

She had thought she would die in the darkness until Fat Father Mateo had thrown the keys down the stone steps with the whispered warning: “The island is overrun, girl! Free yourself but stay hidden!” She loathed her own cowardice but heeded his words. She had stayed in the dungeon until the screams ended.

Her shadow stretched long and lanky on the beach, slithering beside her with a silhouetted wheelbarrow of its own, her constant companion until together they reached the saint. He lay on his side now, legs bent, arms sagging, as though even his armor had grown soft and pliable during the day. Angela rolled him onto his back; seawater dribbled from the gaps in his armor.

“Demon,” he rasped. His voice was weaker than it had been that morning. She wondered if he could feel thirst and hunger. “Demon.”

“Oh, shut up.” The thrill she felt at hushing the saint was small but satisfying. Angela sat back on her heels to contemplate the best way of lifting him. “Be quiet a moment while I think.”

In the end, she decided there was nothing for it but to heave him into the wheelbarrow like a lumpy sack of grain. He did not fit well; one arm and both legs hung over the sides, and his head was bent awkwardly to his shoulder. She wondered what happened to the body of a saint after death. They were not anymore men of lowly flesh and blood, or so the priests claimed, but she did not think that meant they were seaweed and sand. She placed his sword across his chest.

Whatever he was beneath his armor, he was heavy enough that pushing him across the cobbled beach and up the footpath took her so long that the sun was setting before she reached the old watchtower. With sunset came a cool ocean breeze that whispered gently through the fields and olive groves. When she reached her campsite above the village, Angela left him in the wheelbarrow to light her fire. Only when it is crackling and bright did she dump him to the ground.

He said nothing as she moved him around, nothing except gurgles and gasps of pain. She dragged him upright to slump against an orange tree with his hands open at his sides, both palms facing the sky, like the blind beggar from the Parable of the Queen of Mists. Angela left him there—as ignored as the bewitched beggar in the tale, until his own mother had spotted him on the roadside—while she put together her own meal. Olives, cured pork, apricots just shy of perfectly ripe. Red wine from Pia Annunciata’s deep, cool cellar. She had victuals enough to last her months, should she survive that long. The raiders had no use for food or drink; they wanted only slaves. Fat Father Mateo had once told her it was because they had been waging war for so long nothing but pain could satiate them. She drank wine directly from the bottle. She drank again. The night was dark now, the ocean a swath of silken black beneath the stars. The moon was a delicate silver eyelash; the raiders had attacked on the dark of the new moon.

“You want some?” She offered the wine to the saint.

His black eyes shifted in the depths of his helmet.

She lowered her hand to rest the bottle on the ground beside her. “Do you even need to eat and drink like a common man? Or does your faith and the blood of sinners sustain you?”

The saint coughed, twice, and made a sound like the beginning of a word, “ah, ah, ah.” He raised one hand and gestured.

Angela eyed him warily. “What? What do you want?”

Another cough, then he said, clearly, “Water.”

“Ah! So you can speak other words.”

She brought a bucket and ladle to the saint and set them aside to remove his helmet.

He grasped her wrists, and she startled, for his leather gloves were cool and damp and gritty. But his fingers were weak, and it took no effort at all to dislodge his grip and remove the helmet. The jaw dangled as she lifted it, squeaking on rusty hinges, and his face was revealed.

Eyes of a shimmering beetle-black. Long, girlish lashes of pure white, and untrimmed hair of the same color. A strong patrician nose. Surprisingly mulish lips, twisted in a scowl. A scattering of whiskers on his chin. His teeth were somehow too small and too sharp.

Something cracked inside of Angela, shock opening into dismay.

He was only a boy. No more than fourteen or fifteen. A hermit crab scurried out of the white hair above his brow; a clutch of sand flies fled from his right ear. He was only a child.

With shaking hands, Angela held the ladle to his cracked lips, but he tried to take it himself. His fingers were too clumsy in the armor, so she removed the glove to reveal pale and wrinkled skin beneath. He was missing his smallest finger. The wound was old, the scar uneven and knobby.

She handed him the ladle and sat again, a few feet away, where she had left her wine and the remains of her dinner. Her appetite was gone. She had never had cause to wonder before how the saints were selected, or if they were given a choice. The hermit crab raced into the grass and darkness. She did not think it would find its way to the ocean from here.

“Do you know what Father Mateo told us before you came here?” she said. She raised the wine jug, lowered it without drinking. “Fat Father Mateo, the kind one. Not the one who held my trial. He said no weapon of man or nature or the forces of evil could destroy what God had forged in the fires of His holy city. That is why, he said, that is why some towns believed it a blessing to be granted a saint, while others believed it a curse. And they were both right. He said—”

Angela lifted the wine jug to her lips and drank deeply. A year ago the villagers had gathered to watch the priests uncrate their new warrior. Skinny Mateo’s thin-lipped smile had been triumphant, but it was Fat Mateo who spoke the blessing as he pried the coffin-like box open and cleared the straw and sawdust away. When the holy warrior stood before them, gleaming and tall, no islander dared utter a word, not until Grandmother Magda, who had not spoken in years, had dropped to her knees, closed her eyes, and begun to pray loudly. Everybody else soon followed suit. Even Angela, and she had meant it at the time, meant it more than she had ever meant any prayer, although she did not close her eyes. She had not wanted to take her eyes off the gleaming metal man. In a moment of wild madness, she had been convinced that if she did, if she looked away for even a second, he would transform into a pillar of flame, and the flame would spread, would engulf the entire village, the vineyards and fields, the whole of the island, and burn until the sea boiled at the shores.

“He said you would prove a blessing for the good and a curse for the evil. Is that true? Have you been a blessing for the good people of this island? For my sister Paola and her little boys?”

The boy’s mouth quivered. His eyes were narrow and dark.

“Have you been a blessing for me? Did you cleanse my blood when you drank it down and pissed it out?”

“Demon,” he hissed. A dribble of spittle trailed from his lips.

Angela sighed. She wiped tears from her cheeks. She drank more wine and tossed another stick onto the fire. “I thought you might say that.”

She was still drinking, and he still drooling, when the night wind turned and brought a new scent over the island. It was not the scent of the burnt and rotting village, nor the scent of the sea, but something fouler, from festering wounds far older, and seas far deeper. With the odor came broken wails, a drift of laughter, a tendril of voices that curled and echoed like songs sung by a choir whose throats had long since forgotten the languages of mankind.

Angela stepped away from the fire to look over the sea. The scavengers came from the west, following the oily flotsam of the raiders. At night, from afar, the flotilla was a dark smear spotted with light. She could not see how far it stretched. She could not see if the edges churned and roiled where the scavengers took to the sea and swam for shore.

She could make to the caves at the base of the cliffs before they landed. She could make it to the cellar of the church. She could hide in the vineyard. She could hide in the crypts. She knew this island well. In the stories, the scavengers were always ravenous and animalistic, more hungry than clever. They followed their masters as mindless beasts, because there was nothing else they knew how to do. In the stories, they devoured the corpses of the dead and cracked the bones of children between their teeth.

In the stories, no village protected by a saint ever fell to the raiders.

She leaned down to pick up the saint’s glove. It was too large for her, but not as large as it had been on him; when she moved her fingers the metal plates clacked like the wings of fat summer beetles. The fit was almost comfortable. Sea salt had dried in the leather creases. She touched the white crust with the tip of her tongue.

“I’m going to need your sword as well,” said Angela.

The saint did not respond. His head lolled to the side; the spit on his lip had dried to a smear. The sand flies returned, speckling his face like a pox.

“Ah,” she said softly. “I don’t suppose you’ll miss it, then.”

His eyelashes, as white as his hair, curled over the purple smudges beneath his eyes. She had the sudden urge to lean over and kiss his forehead. She wondered if he had ever had a mother to do that for him. She had never thought about the mothers of saints before; they were supposed to belong to God and no one else. There were tracks of tears on his pale cheeks. She felt a pang of guilt at the pain she must have caused him, manhandling him into the wheelbarrow, dumping him to the ground.

“Rest well,” she whispered. She touched her thumb to his brow in a blessing.

She made no promises to the dead boy or to herself. She peeled the armor from his body piece by piece. With every dancing twist of the wind, the wails of the scavengers grew louder. They sounded human, then animal, then human again. It was better not to imagine what they might look like, or how their hunger drove them. Angela hummed to drown out their cries as she dressed herself in gold and bronze. It was a song she knew, from long ago, one she and her sisters used to sing while stomping grapes after the harvest. She could not remember the words.

©2020 by Kali Wallace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kali Wallace studied geology and earned a PhD in geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. She is the author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels for adults, teens, and children, as well as a number of short stories and essays. After spending most of her life in Colorado, she now lives in southern California.

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

An Account of the Land of Witches

Sofia Samatar | 6693 words

1. An Account of the Land of Witches

I arrived in the Land of Witches at the end of the season of furs. The sun shone, banks of chilly foam lay piled up in the streets, and the river emitted groans day and night as the ice broke into pieces, setting free the witches’ colorful winged boats. My master took a room in the Lean Hotel. This building consists of a single spire that twists up into the greenish, iridescent sky. Ascending to our room presented no difficulties, however, for the steps were endowed with a charm that eroded time.

This shaping of time is one of the marvels of the Land of Witches. I have never seen a people so rested and happy; for them, time runs opposite to the way it runs for us: onerous tasks pass swiftly, while a pleasure may last for weeks or, indeed, forever. I have seen Ygasit, the proprietress of our hotel, wash every dish in the place in the time it takes her to bend her full cheek slightly toward one shoulder, while Verken, the musician who became my particular friend, told me she once played a single note for a year without tiring of its beauty. The smallest child can roll time into a ball and chase it down the stairs or fashion it into elaborate paper chains. In the pastry shops, they drizzle time over the cakes. This molding of time, like all their miracles, is achieved through the Dream Science.

Once I had begun to practice the Dream Science myself, I was able to reduce my time beneath my master to almost nothing. No sooner had he climbed onto me than he would roll off again. Outside the window, the stars would shrink and vanish like ice.

• • • •

In the Land of Witches, everything tends skyward. Their beautiful boats, adorned with batlike wings, are as happy among the clouds as on the water; the first time the shadow of one of these gliding marvels passed over me, I shivered, for I thought it must be some giant bird of prey. Wonder overwhelmed me when I looked up to see little witch-children peering curiously at me through the boat’s glass floor. The vessel must have come recently from the river, for it sprinkled the air with droplets. One struck my cheek like a freezing tear.

Their houses resemble plants: many sprout rooms like parsley flowers, which sway on their long stalks when the wind blows. Others, like the Lean Hotel, strain toward the clouds. The witches wear tall headdresses, three to four feet high and bedecked with veils. I thought the adornment cumbrous until I realized that these veils, which float on the air like spidersilk beaded with dew, are in fact a means of catching the wind, the secret behind the witches’ extraordinarily light and buoyant footsteps. Their conveyances are many and varied: when not traveling by boat, or the headdresses that, in a strong breeze, can lift them from the ground, the witches skim over the snow on gold discs, propel themselves through the streets with a sort of javelin, or trot about balanced on huge hoops.

The streets of their city resemble a perpetual carnival. There is always a sound of bells.

They play on great flutes made of whalebone and harps as round as shields.

In the shadow of the mountains, there is a park called the Place of Mourning where, Verken told me, one such as I would spend months, perhaps years, if I were a witch.

• • • •

The Place of Mourning lies, I have said, in the shadow of the mountains, but this is only one of its locations. Like the entire Land of Witches, this hushed and tenebrous park is porous, its borders fluid, and its atmosphere transportable. I was hanging my master’s smallclothes out to dry behind the hotel when Verken approached me, dancing on top of her traveling hoop, her circular harp clasped firmly under one arm, and called down to me that I should spend a season in the Place of Mourning. When I ignored her, she alighted gracefully, her earrings clashing. Her hoop fell sideways so that it leaned against the wall of the hotel. “You are injured,” she said. I told her that she was mistaken. She reached out and took my wrist, her eyes abrim with compassion and light.

In the Land of Witches there is, every year, a Festival of the Dreaming, during which all the witches dream the same dream together. The dream may be very simple. Last year they dreamt they were taking a pumpkin cake out of the oven. Everyone awoke in tears.

The Dream Science obliterates distance as well as time.

“Let me help you,” Verken said.

At that I snatched my wrist out of her grasp. She was a witch, a musician, and a free woman, and I was not; but there were some things that I knew better than she. On the subject of offers of help, I was something of an expert. In my home city, my mother’s cousin had offered to help her in her poverty by taking her youngest girl child off her hands. He sold me to my first mistress, whose son, a university student, helped me by teaching me my letters. It would increase my value, he said, beyond my current use, which was to provide him with pleasure and sleep at his mother’s feet. When my lady died, her son sold me to a merchant, profiting greatly, as he had predicted, from my ability to read and write. This merchant—my current master—had two kind daughters who, when we were at home, treated me generously to cracked jewelry and cast-off gowns. I preferred to be on the road: to be shivering, here, in the cold sunlight, hanging clothes. “I don’t need help,” I said to Verken.

“Then let me give you a word,” said the witch.

The word she gave me was pomegranate. It was not only a word; it was a dream. In the Land of Witches, words open doors in the dreamscape. In the dream-language, said Verken, pomegranate means dusk and the rattling of dry leaves.

It also means winter. It means black bile and a cloister. It means a tooth.

“Dream of pomegranates,” Verken said, “and you’ll find yourself in the Place of Mourning.”

In the Land of Witches, each word is translatable into a dream. This is the foundation of the Dream Science.

• • • •

Once I understood what Verken had given me, I began to make notes toward a Dreamer’s Lexicon. Each day, when my master retired for his midday rest, I sat with the musician in the little grape arbor behind the Lean Hotel. I was quite warm now, for I made sure to dream of rabbits. Borrowed sun streaked the wall and made the grapes sparkle like earrings of green glass. Verken admonished me that to describe the sun as “borrowed” was a mistake. This was our sun, she said: the sun of the Land of Witches.

My hands trembled as I took notes, not with fatigue but with excitement. I could roll up my trousers, now that it was so warm; Verken admired my heavy ankle bracelets, and I gave her one, which she fixed to her headdress as an ornament. The next day she informed me that she had been to a marvelous place. What was my elation, and what my terror, when she described to me the massive walls of my own city, the triangular gardens, and the boughs of the sacred trees.

“Impossible,” I gasped.

“Not at all,” she replied, smiling. “It is only necessary to board a boat at the Quay of the Blackened Cod, and travel some few miles south, to where the orange groves begin. And, of course, one must have the proper dream . . .”

In the Land of Witches, life is not cut out of whole cloth, but resembles a series of pockets.

It is not true that there is no suffering there. Indeed, if there were no grief, there would be no need for a Place of Mourning. The witches know disappointment, and sadness, and sickness, and death. Nor are they immune to the cruelties of ordinary human beings. Verken, who traveled much in her search for new musical forms to enrich her repertoire, had once been captured by a strange people who, by flashing lights into her eyes and startling her with loud noises, prevented her from sleeping for five days. Unable to dream or to answer the questions posed to her in an unknown tongue, she sobbed hopelessly in a puddle of her own urine. By the sixth day she was exhausted enough to dream with her eyes open. In an instant she found herself in the Place of Mourning.

“There is enough cruelty in the world,” she told me softly, “to justify all the music ever made.”

I met her eyes. We had never spoken of my master before, but I knew that we were speaking of him now.

In the Land of Witches, one is always touching many lands at once. To raise a cup in a dream is to tumble down a hill.

“I have hurt you,” Verken said, on that grape-green afternoon when she described to me the streets of my own city.

“No,” I answered, weeping. “But my country is so far. It’s so far away. And now you say, in a few miles . . .”

“With the right dream,” she whispered, “you may get there in a few steps.”

She covered my hand with hers. It was warm as a rabbit’s pelt.

2. A Refutation of the Account of Witches

I, Taharqo of Qorm, jewel merchant, devotee of the Horned God of Mount Napata, member of council in the world’s most illustrious city, father of two daughters and now (for the gods are generous) a son, do submit to the public this refutation of the lies of my escaped slave, Arta.

I purchased this Arta for no small sum in the country of the blacks. She was literate, and possessed a great facility for learning languages, which made her remarkably valuable to me on my travels—though, no doubt, her talents also aided her in her escape. Arta was well-treated under my protection, even affectionately so, amply fed (she had, like all her people, a predilection for sweets), clothed and petted by my own daughters, honored by me with several rich gifts (including a nose-ring of speckled jade), and beaten no more than was lawful. In short, she was a full member of my household. We called her Tan-Tan. In her loss, the kindness of my family has been scorned, the feelings of my daughters wounded, the burdens of my lady wife compounded, my business dealings hampered, my purse outraged, and my pride trampled underfoot.

As if this loss were not enough (and I intend to discover how it was done, if I have to hold the proprietress of the Lean Hotel over her own stove!), I have had to endure, for several weeks now, the interrogations of friends and even strangers who know that I have lately returned from the Land of Witches. For my eldest daughter (a charming girl, guilty of no more than the natural thoughtlessness of her sex), in going through my belongings after my return, discovered the infamous Account of the Land of Witches among my papers and made several bound copies of it for her friends. When asked why she had done so, she stared at me dumbfounded. “Why, Father,” she said, “it is a diverting story; how could it be wrong?” On the Plains of Khod, where my honored father spent his adolescence, there is a saying that any girl can match wits with an ostrich.

The results of my daughter’s indiscretion are well known; the Account of the Land of Witches has been copied all over Qorm; it is available for purchase at every bookseller’s, despite my efforts to buy up the copies, or argue to the merchants the falseness of the document. The nature of the so-called “Dream Science” is debated in cafés, and I have heard some philosophy students have taken to sleeping all day. I have therefore decided to ride before the storm, as the saying goes, and release my own, true document to the public.

Know then that the Land of Witches is a meager, muddy little country, cold as a spider’s affections and dull as paste. The “river” of which my slave writes is an icy sludge, the Lean Hotel more of a stick than a spire, and the streets of the city narrow and stinking. There are no flying boats—if there were, the inhabitants would all fly away at once and settle in some more comfortable location. The wind comes over the water like a spear. I never heard bells; perhaps they were drowned out by the yapping of the dogs.

The natives of the Land of Witches are uniformly stupid and their language as nonsensical as the yammering of goats. Not even Ygasit, the greasy, gap-toothed proprietress of the hotel, can speak more than ten words in any civilized tongue. I depended on my slave Arta to conduct any business at all, for, with her gift for mimicry, she was soon chattering enthusiastically with the witches—who, I was disappointed to learn, believe that ornaments can only be given away, and not bought, making them utterly worthless as customers.

“But where do you get the jewels to give your friends?” I asked Ygasit through my slave. The witch laughed, her eyes twinkling through the gloom (for we stood in her kitchen, the fog of her noxious cooking as thick as soup), and answered that she received them from other friends.

“But where are they made?” I demanded.

Arta repeated my question, and, when Ygasit had finished spitting out words as barbed and slimy as fishbones, informed me that the witch—who, mind you, was clad in a grimy apron, and reeked of onions—considered my question indelicate.

“No one asks where they come from,” Arta said. “They are considered tokens of love, and no one asks where love comes from, or where it goes.”

She kept her eyes trained on my beard, as usual. She never met my eyes. I thought her expression respectful then; now, I remember it as sly.

The prodigious idiocy of the witches, who wear jewels but will not buy them, might have left me entirely bankrupt, save that I happened to have picked up some perfumed soaps in the south, and these the witches liked and purchased gladly. I therefore determined to stay until I had sold all of my small stock, in order that the trip should not be wasted. Each day I walked through the dirty, freezing streets to the little market where the witches do a great deal more talking than buying. How well I remember the snaggle-toothed children watching me from a balcony, their eyes gleaming like those of starving beasts. My slave told the truth about the witches’ headgear: both sexes wear towers of knotted cloth on their heads and sway through the streets like giraffes.

In short, a more miserable and useless country can hardly be imagined. This alone should be enough to disprove the existence of any “Dream Science.” If it were possible to travel by means of dreaming, believe me, no one in the Land of Witches would get out of bed.

If you are still determined, reader, to take seriously the scribblings of a duplicitous, scheming, lawless runaway slave, then at least consider the contradictions of her narrative! How could she be warm, and the rest of the city freezing? Why, upon our arrival, did we experience the city as freezing, when someone was surely dreaming that it was warm? How, precisely, does one travel by dream? Why does Verken claim to have dreamt first and traveled afterward, in one case, and in another to have traveled the instant she dreamed? How could a child cut time into paper chains? And how can the Land of Witches be everywhere at once—as one must assume my slave to be claiming, since her Place of Mourning shifts its borders? It is all the most tiresome nonsense! A shifting border is no border at all.

Here is the truth: My slave Arta, a most valuable piece of property, has been stolen by a witch called Verken, who probably planned to steal her from the moment we arrived and took to loitering about the hotel for no other purpose. This Verken is a tall, loose-limbed woman with a headdress of dirty red-and-orange cloth, who pretends to be a musician. This she certainly is not; for the sounds she drew from her barbaric harp, as she lounged barefoot in the arbor, resembled nothing so much as the farts of a gazelle. Ygasit, I am convinced, was an accessory to the crime, for, when questioned, she would only frown and repeat “No good, no good,” pressing my shoulder with a thick finger to confirm that she meant I, and not the thieving Verken, was in the wrong. I departed the Land of Witches in a cold fury; but I intend to return in a hot one. I am even now assembling a company of fighting men. I will go back to the Land of Witches, and if I cannot retrieve my property, I will at least make sure that no one dares call Taharqo of Qorm a fool.

3. A Refutation of the Refutation of the Account of the Land of Witches

Another fruitless day at the embassy.

Coming home, the taxi passed one of the usual crowds. Only a few people wept openly. The blast must have occurred several hours before. A pair of trousers hung on a dead electric wire, as if it were washing day.

Now the evening turns blue. The heat dissipates.

My brother met me at the door. I shook my head. This is all we require, now, to communicate the essentials: no, there’s no progress, no visa, not yet, I can’t get out.

• • • •

“You shouldn’t have come,” my brother says, not for the first time.

I know. I know.

• • • •

Once it’s dark, I pretend to sleep. Lie on the bed with my face to the wall, the sheet over my head. I can hear the scrape of my brother’s plastic slippers on the floor. Voices, too, the voices of other people come to visit. Neighbors, aunts. Once the sun goes down, there’s nothing to do but talk. They exchange news and warnings and advice. Somebody has a pain in his stomach; my brother pulls a bottle of precious soda from under the bed. Warm American soda in the warm night, not to quench the thirst but as medicine. Slowly moonlight fills the air of the city like milk. It’s bright enough to read by. It glows through my sheet. In the distance, every so often, interrupting the conversation, blasts like dishes breaking.

• • • •

The “Account of the Land of Witches” is a document with no catalog, an orphaned textual fragment with no archive. The appearance of the words “Napata” and “Qorm” (Kerma) led Augustus Kircher to date the “Account,” quite convincingly, to the ninth century BCE; however, the version of demotic Egyptian used, with its distinctive “swallow-tailed” plural markers, is found in no other extant text, making all attempts at dating the document uncertain and inconclusive. And if the text’s place in time is vague, its place in literature is equally so. Is it simply an unusual autobiographical record? Or is it (as Kircher surmised—“autobiography being unknown in the Kingdom of Kush”) some sort of occult text, written in a coded language known only to the priesthood? Do the first two parts (the “Account” and the “Refutation”) form a thesis and antithesis, and the third (the “Dreamer’s Lexicon”) a sort of synthesis? Are we looking at the sole trace of an ancient religion? Or does the “Account,” rather, disprove, or at least complicate, Kircher’s claims regarding autobiography?

This dissertation takes the position that these possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and that the “Account,” the “Refutation,” and the “Lexicon,” taken together, can be read as both autobiographical fragments and the foundational scriptures of a spiritual tradition heretofore unknown . . .

• • • •

Pause.

The sun goes down. No moon tonight.

“You’ll wreck your eyes,” my brother says.

He’s right, it’s too dark to see, but that doesn’t mean I can’t write. Tomorrow I’ll find these lines flung across the page, running over each other like the footprints of armies that have met by night.

I don’t work on the dissertation in the dark. I just scribble these private notes. I can’t risk writing important ideas in an illegible scrawl. I fear losing my only chance. The perfect thought, the one moment when a customs agent softens in a good mood.

“All right, miss.” The stamp. I dream about it.

I call my professor in Madison on my brother’s phone. My own ran out of credit long ago. The connection’s tentative, full of holes. I’m on the starlit roof, my brother crouching beside me.

“Hello? Hello?”

My brother watches anxiously, without moving.

“Hello!”

My professor’s voice, happy and worried, frayed across the distance. I’m catching every third syllable. He’s had to give my class to another graduate assistant, he couldn’t keep on teaching it himself.

“I understand,” I tell him. I wonder if he hears “I . . . stand.”

“When you get back, we’ll figure out a way for you to keep your assistantship. Has there been any progress?”

No. No.

“You gave them my letter? My phone number?”

Yes.

“Well. Don’t lose hope! And keep working. Think of it as a writing holiday!”

A small shudder in the distance. Another blast.

He says something I can’t make out.

“What?”

“Stand up,” my brother snaps, “you’ll get a better signal.” He can’t understand this conversation in a foreign tongue but he interprets my panic, the rising tone of my voice. He hisses at me, he says I need to move into that corner, where there’s a narrow view of the sea: that’s where the signal’s always best. He’s cursing now and yanking on my arm and I can only hear my professor’s voice as a series of broken yelps. I’m standing and stumbling, swamped in my brother’s impatience, the charcoal scent of his clothes, and I ought to be angry because he’s only making it harder to hear, but I’m everywhere at once in this moment, at home and yet magically transported back to campus by my professor’s voice, and I’m happy. I’m so happy.

• • • •

What does it mean to dream of a visa?

• • • •

I used to think of air travel as a sort of Dream Science. The dry cocoon of the plane was a zone of sleep. Then you’d wake up in a different country, in the long snake of the customs line, the windows full of pearly foreign light. It seemed easy, like sliding into a dream, even if sometimes you tossed and turned on the way, even if they made you empty everything out of your bag. The indignities themselves had a dreamlike quality, absurd: the room where a stranger patted down your body and rifled through your hair.

My plan was to visit my brother and then travel north in search of the home city of Arta, the writer of the “Account.” Then I’d go west to Khartoum. I’d pay a visit to the museum, then make my way to the ruins of Napata . . .

Everyone was worried about me: my professor, my uncle, my friends. And I laughed. I was filled with the spirit of the dream-travelers, Arta and Verken. I came home. And home was crumbling, a trap. I couldn’t go anywhere I’d planned. So I gave up my trip. I’ll go back to the States, I said . . .

I’ll go back. But they wouldn’t let me on the plane to London, and so I couldn’t get back to Chicago, and so I couldn’t get back to Madison. I begged them. I’m a student! But there was something wrong with my papers, I never knew what. You need a different visa, they said.

“You should really go to an American embassy,” the agent clucked, frowning over my papers. But there’s no American embassy here.

Sometimes I see the world traversed by jagged lines of borders, like the cracks across a broken windowpane.

Can you see anything through that window? Do you recognize the world?

Don’t touch it; you’ll cut yourself.

Tonight, on the radio, an old Sudanese song. The kind my father used to love. I sat in the dark and cried. “Why did you have to study history,” my brother said.

• • • •

Notes toward a dissertation. The location of the Land of Witches—if such a place exists—has confounded scholars for over a century, ever since the document, written on papyrus, was discovered in a grave at Kuraymah (where I can’t go). It is clear enough that the merchant Taharqo was a citizen of Kerma (where I can’t go); as for Arta, the author of both the “Account” and the “Lexicon,” most scholars believe she came from Bahr el-Ghazal (where I can’t go), though I will argue that her home was more likely in modern Somaliland (where I can’t go). It is possible to make claims, however tentative, about these matters. The Land of Witches presents a more serious problem. Was it, as Kircher thought, somewhere in Europe (where I can’t go)? Was it in China (where I can’t go) or even Siberia (where I can’t go)? What can be determined from the tantalizing and fragile clues we are given: bells, giant hoops, a river, and snow? Is the Land of Witches locatable by anyone—or by everyone? Is it a complex hallucination? A state of mind?

• • • •

I lie on my side for hours.

Don’t talk to me. I’m trying to sleep.

I’m hot and then cold.

I don’t go to the embassy anymore. It’s too dangerous, and in any case they wouldn’t admit me, or anyone else. Nobody gets out now. The borders are closed.

I can hear my brother and the others talking down the hall in the communal kitchen, over the clacking of mortar fire and the crackle of boiling ghee. I chew on the sheet, but I won’t cry. I hate myself for not getting up. I’m appalled at the way I’ve sunk when my brother keeps moving, calculating, scheming. Money tied up in a sack inside his clothes. He wants me to call my uncle in Canada again, the one who’s paid for my education. I can’t, I can’t face him, the scolding, the pain in his voice, his rage at my arrogance, my stupidity, the way I’ve thrown the family’s resources away. “You’ll die there,” he said the last time we spoke. The ground shakes, and I think he’s right, but there’s only a brief lull in the kitchen conversation. The sound of frying, the smell, doesn’t stop at all. I think of how my mother ran away six years ago, to the camp. And how she ran back again, unable to bear it. She spoke to me of the dirt, of her fear of snakes and lions on the journey. Never her fear of men. The stars would shrink and vanish like ice. By “mother” I don’t mean mother, I mean the aunt who tells me “I am your mother now.”

• • • •

I hesitate to write this but I have begun to travel in dreams . . .

• • • •

Faces at checkpoints. Your father drinking tea. The explosion, the gap in the wall. You can see his leg. Suddenly Canada. Wind across the St. Lawrence River. There are no flying boats. Oh, Sagal, don’t come home. The phone pressed against your ear in the student union where someone is walking by with a pitcher of reddish beer. Crows in the sky like the broken pieces of someone who thinks, I could be, I should be, dead. What does it mean to dream of these things?

• • • •

Notes. Toward.

• • • •

Pomegranate. In an instant she found herself in the Place of Mourning. I return to my dissertation, and it looks completely different. I can’t understand it anymore. Oh, I understand the words, but I can’t comprehend why somebody would write them. It all seems so obvious: the chapter on gender, the chapter on animals, the chapter on the trace. I can’t work up the energy to reflect on the controversial translation of the word “cloister,” or even the fate of Taharqo of Qorm. “Did Taharqo ever return to the Land of Witches? Is it possible to identify him as the ‘southern lord’ described by an anonymous Egyptian scribe, who, ‘together with a vast company of mercenary soldiers, was swallowed by that pale crocodile, the Sea’?” This work, which used to excite me, now seems utterly remote, featureless, like a desert seen from an airplane window. While the “Account” itself, the “Lexicon,” and even the “Refutation”—these brim with light. Each word translatable into a dream.

• • • •

I was in a building. It was made of brick. Every few steps a patch of grass. Old men were working at little desks. My mother offered me 7-Up in a gourd. There was a camel in the background with a saddle of aluminum foil.

The kitchenette in my dorm room had gotten smaller. I dropped a dish in the sink and it broke. I turned on the garbage disposal to grind up the pieces. A man stood behind me holding a wire, his face wrapped in a keffiyeh. He said everyone acted like me, that’s why the disposals were always getting broken.

I decided to go to the Land of Witches. “I’m going,” I told my mother. She grunted and told me to lie down. She offered me 7-Up in a gourd. “Don’t get up,” she said. Her necklace glinted in the moonlight that fell through the bars of the window. Who gave you that? I tried to ask.

My father was drinking tea. The wall crumbled. I was out back, at the tap in the courtyard. I was trying to wash out his socks. Money fell out of his sock and I cried. Crows flew low, close by. Their wingbeats whispered, “You will wear a black wedding dress.”

I decided to go the Land of Witches. “I’m going,” I told my brother. He was muffled in an enormous coat, with sandals on his feet. “Come with me,” I begged him. “Dream of pomegranates.” His feet were ashy and I realized we were standing in the snow.

• • • •

Winter. Black bile. A cloister. A tooth.

I am going to the Land of Witches.

“I’m going,” I told my brother. He grunted and told me to lie down. He brought me a cup containing a few tablespoons of American soda that turned circles on my tongue, flat and sweet. “Don’t get up,” he said. Moonlight fell through the bars of the window and glinted on the gun against the wall. Who gave you that? I tried to ask. I think it was my father. Against my throat I could feel the gentle, comforting irritation of the thin gold necklace he gave me before he died.

I remembered my brother’s face the day I came home, that desperate brightness, every muscle tensed to keep him from slapping me.

Tonight he was all softness, touching my hair while the city shook. I clutched his hand. The noise grew louder and louder. A terrible clatter approaching. In the inferno of sound and light I understood why my dissertation had failed. No one can practice the Dream Science alone. Everything depends on the Festival of the Dreaming, when all the witches dream together. “Come with me,” I shouted at my brother, “dream of pomegranates.” He shook me off and crawled to the gun by the wall, moving like a snake or an orphaned child. When I rose from the bed he screamed at me to stay down. I crouched but reached for my papers on the table. Everything shook and I could read my writing in the leaping light. “Notes Toward a Dreamer’s Lexicon.” “Dusk,” I screamed. “The rattling of dry leaves.” My brother was shouting, the city was shouting, the sky was shouting. How will we fall asleep in this noise? I thought of Verken dreaming with her eyes open. “Dream with your eyes open,” I told my brother. The gun was at his shoulder, his gestures expert, fluid. My voice was raw. I tasted blood. Lightning. The door opened.

4. Notes Toward a Dreamer’s Lexicon

Pomegranate: Dusk. The rattling of dry leaves. Winter, black bile, a cloister, a tooth. Dream of pomegranates to enter the Place of Mourning.

Rabbit: Springtime. Erotic love. Silk sleeves. Ease after a long illness. Green.

Ice: The hidden life of things. Music, especially bells.

Bat: Magic. A holy place. A child.

Parsley: A feast.

Veil: Gentleness. A curtained window. Dawn.

Javelin: Movement, possibly from fear. A pounding heart.

Ostrich: A woman with plans. Dream of ostriches to enter the Place of Tents.

Fur: Unspoken longing. Lamplight. The river.

Boat: A new friend. A change in weather. Domestic uncertainty. An illness.

Cake: An intimate event.

Spider: Intellectual endeavors. A wound.

Wrist: Failure. Attachment to sorrow. A conspiracy.

Urine: Forgetfulness. Stone. A torch.

Cup: A fall.

Grapes: Jewelry. The Place of Emerald Noon. An exchange of gifts.

Pumpkin: Tears. Relief. A project begun at the proper time.

Fog: A walled city. The cry of a miracle vendor. Home.

Additional notes by Sagal Said

Milk: Moonlight. Mother. Toil. Circular thoughts. Buried rage. A hand.

Charcoal: Alchemy. Transfer. The sea at night.

Tea: Father. Exploding plaster. Ordinary death.

Gourd: Discovery. The act of overflowing.

American soda: Economic exploitation. Frustration. Healing. Love.

Wire: A threat.

Dishes: Whole: A beach. Broken: A storm. Disintegration.

Necklace: A gift. A chain. Constraint. Return. A debt.

5. The Travelers

We set off on a windless, moonlit night, a night that often returns to us, skimming along our pathway like a boat. At times we have even boarded this boat and passed into our own point of departure, into the beginning of our journey. Of course this origin moment is never the same. We find the identical silent town, the familiar moon suspended among the mobile towers, but passing on tiptoe through our Diviner’s old apartment, we discover a row of spoons laid out on the carpet. These spoons were certainly not in this position on the night we left. We debate their meaning in whispers so as not to wake the household. The Mountaineer is for going on, the Harpist for exploring the rooms. Meanwhile, the Diviner discovers a flask in the otherwise empty birdcage. She takes a sip from the flask, which makes her shudder, and announces that we must descend the ladder. Sure enough, there is a ladder outside the window. The Mountaineer goes down first. The Diviner leaves a lock of hair on the couch for her son to find in the morning.

I, of course, have taken some paper and a bottle of ink from the cluttered old desk. As our Scribe, I am always in need of these materials. At the bottom of the ladder we find an afternoon in an insect-haunted restaurant that smells vaguely of scorched rice. This suits me very well, as it gives me the chance to arrange my papers at the table while the others order food. The Archivist and the Diviner argue over a word on one of the peeling posters, whether it means “palace” or “chair.” Among the papers I have taken I find a few penciled diagrams, perhaps the schoolwork of the Diviner’s son, and a number of notes on the kingdom of Kush that may have come from the hand of our own Sagal. Immediately the blue outside the skylight intensifies. The waiter brings us rice cooked with tomatoes, an oily mess we devour with delight in the suddenly splendid atmosphere, the atmosphere of a morning after dreams. The Archivist leans forward and stubs out her cigarette in excitement (a cigarette made, alas, with a scrap torn from my records—the Archivist thinks she’s returning them to the source of all dreams, while I mourn their loss—part of our longstanding argument about hope and cyclical time). The Archivist swings her legs down from their resting place on her enormous pack, which sits beside her on the floor, and plants her feet, ready for business. She seizes my pen and begins making notes on the notes, cross-referencing. “Museum,” she mutters. “Crocodile. Wedding. Trace.”

This is how we travel. The Mountaineer strides before us. The Archivist follows, cheerful under her pack. This pack, stuffed with paper and tied all over with sheaves, bundles, and scrolls, weighs nearly as much as the Archivist herself. Short and stocky, her cheeks blasted by wind and her eyelids creased with sun, she looks more like a mountaineer than our Mountaineer, and we often joke together that we must be the most athletic members of our respective professions ever known. Her strength derives from the pack she carries, mine from the wagon I haul behind me, on which our drunken Navigator moans in his sleep. At intervals he wakes to gaze about him in childish happiness and let fall a few precious words concerning his dreams. He is such an excellent Navigator that no one minds his infirmity, or the astounding cunning with which he acquires all manner of liquor and drugs, though it is annoying when we have to go uphill, or worse, through mountains such as those which have surrounded us for two days. Then our progress seems agonizingly slow, as the Mountaineer, who despises haste as much as idleness, laboriously constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs a system of pulleys to drag our party up the cliff-sides. One would think the Navigator could at least strap himself into a harness! But no, he lolls like a baby being dressed. Today was particularly bad, as the Diviner had been practicing blood divination, and was nearly as weak as the Navigator.

Her lips were gray as the stony cliffs. “Shouldn’t we get out of here?” I whispered as I buckled her harness for what seemed the twentieth time. Dreams swooped about us in the dusk, all of them more attractive than our current location. One bore a beautiful stretch of beach, like the rind on an orange. With an effort the Diviner shook her head and pointed upward. We toiled on until we passed the snowline. Now, from the cave where we shelter, I can see a vista of harsh dry stars and hear the desperate howling of the wolves.

Firelight flickers. The Navigator sleeps, the Archivist smokes, and I wonder how long we have been on this journey, and whether we will succeed in piecing together a map of the Land of Witches, and whether we will ever go there. I remember again the night we set out, and how the Mountaineer trembled, overcome, he said in a strangled voice, by the thought of redemption. I watch him as he scrubs his naked torso with a hot sponge, his back whitened by the stripes he received in Laceration Field. The Archivist catches my gaze. “Don’t lose heart,” she says. “Remember the gardens!” And even the Diviner smiles from the depths of her weariness, recalling the abandoned gardens where the Archivist and I, filled with reverence, left notes for other amateur witches on the trees.

Gently, our Harpist begins to sing. A moment of hushed awareness, like the instant when one realizes one is dreaming. The Diviner raises herself on an elbow and sniffs the air. It is just midnight. The wind dropping. The sky clear.

©2017 by Sofia Samatar. Originally published in Tender: Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has received several honors including the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches Arabic literature, African literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.

Ann-of-Rags

P H Lee | 3264 words

I have heard it on the rumors that when the tale-spinner’s guild gathers in their secret places, a full half of them are sworn to never tell the truth, and the other half to never tell a lie, even if it mean their life. Being one of that trade myself, I can tell you that that’s more or less the shape of it, and I tell you so you’ll know that this tale I tell you is true, just as I heard it and just as it happened, for I am one of the ones sworn to the truth.

The name I’m called is Dusty Boots, I come from the valley of Erwhile, and I am in love with a girl that I can never have. The story I tell you know comes from the endless forests, out north past the mountains, past the Loedlands, where no man has been king for a thousand years and the winter sleeps only small and restful beneath an inch of ground.

One day a little girl, no one remembers her name, was out with her old doll in the endless forest, playing hide and seek and princesses-pretend, all surrounded by those bleached white trees that reach thin up to heaven. As the day wore on, the girl and her doll wandered deeper and deeper into the forest, and by the time night fell the girl was completely lost.

At the night, the forest took on a different character than it had while the sun still lit it. The trees were more jagged and more pale, reflecting thin moonlight between them in some silent song. New animals emerged, strange ones that only knew the night, and they made creeping sounds from the undergrowth. The frost awoke from beneath the earth to walk its chill once more upon the land. The little girl grew frightened, and curled up with her doll in her arms and began to cry. Her tears were so sad that they would have broken the hardest heart to her plight, and shortly after she began, her doll spoke to her in comfort.

“Don’t cry, my darling girl,” said the doll, “for I will get you home. Listen to my words, and you will not suffer frost nor night nor monsters from the dark. As long as you have me in your arms, and heed my words, no harm will come to you, and come morning you will be safe and sound at your hearth once more.”

“But, Ann,” said the child, for the doll’s name was Ann-of-Rags, and had been so through the whole of the family’s history, “it is dark and cold and I am all alone. How will we ever find our way out of the forest?”

“Fear not, my clever girl,” said Ann-of-Rags, “for I am not stranger to the nighttime animals, and one will be along shortly to assist us.”

Even as the doll spoke her reassurances, a great owl, with wings a span across, came to rest on the tree before the little girl. Terrified by its enormous yellow eyes and fierce sharp beak, the child hugged her doll even tighter to her chest, and began to wail and cry once more.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Ann-of-Rags. “My dearest girl, there is no reason to fear this old Owl, for he is a friend of mine, and wise in the ways of the wood, and if you follow him surely he will lead you home.”

“True!” said the owl, and nodded sagely. And, with that, he began to fly slowly out of the wood, expecting that the girl would follow him.

But the little girl was so afraid of those big yellow eyes that she stayed exactly where she was, too terrified to follow the owl, even when Ann begged her to follow his lead and thus find her safety. And so the girl remained in the woods in the night, with the frost wandering further and higher, shivering as she wept into Ann’s straw hair.

“Don’t cry, my lovely girl,” said Ann, “for I have other friends amongst the nighttime animals, and surely one of them will hear your crying and come to our rescue. But this time, you must do exactly as I say, or else surely we are lost.”

And, true to her doll’s word, in due time a great gray wolf came padding up to where the little girl lay crying and nuzzled her with his big wet nose. Terrified by its yellow eyes and sharp teeth, the child hugged her doll even tighter to her chest, and began to wail and cry once more, this time even louder and more pathetic than the last.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Ann-of-Rags. “My precious girl, there is no reason to fear this strong Wolf, although his appearance is fearsome, for he is a friend of mine, and wise in the ways of the wood, and if you follow his trail surely he will lead you home.”

“Yes,” said the Wolf, “for my friend Ann I would do anything. To lead a lovely girl like you from these dark woods is as if it were nothing at all. I am happy with only the chance to help you.” And, with that, he set out from the woods, expecting the girl to follow him.

But the little girl was so afraid of those big sharp teeth that she stayed exactly where she was, too terrified to follow the wolf, even when Ann begged her to follow his lead and thus find her safety. And so the girl remained in the woods in the night, with the frost growing up around her hair, shivering and chattering as she wept into Ann’s cloth bosom.

“Don’t cry, my pretty girl” said Ann-of-Rags, her voice now faltering a little, “for though you have feared my two good friends, there are other animals in this forest, and they are not strangers to me, and surely one of them will hear your crying and come to our rescue. But, this time, you must do exactly as I say, no matter how ferocious the creature, or else surely we are lost.”

And, in due course, just as night snow began to fall around the girl, along came an old woman, with a back hunched like the mountains and fingers long like your arm, blind in the right eye and deaf in the left ear, clad in sugar and wine. In truth—and you would already know it if you had any sense—it was Bone Grandmother, the long-fingered woman, wandering this way and that in her nightly witcheries, conspiring with her son the frost, harvesting the work of her thousand poisoned daughters, and other things so awful that mortal and decent folk, such as yourselves, do not even know the words to speak of them.

But as soon as Bone Grandmother saw the beautiful little girl curled crying in the snow, she put to rest all the other nefarious plans she had for that evening, for she knew just from the pretty sound of the girl’s crying that this girl would have the tenderest finger-bones she’d ever eaten, and eyes so innocent that they had not even seen one suffering, and a heart unbroken by even a single betrayal. Oh, yes, she was already smacking her lips in anticipation when she came up to the girl and, taking on a friendly visage, said:

“Oh dear! What a splendid little girl! How is it that your mother let you wander so far away from home? Well, there’s nothing for it! You’ll have to come back and spend the rest of the night at my little cottage. I’m afraid it isn’t much to look at, but at least it will keep you warm for the night.” And she came up and wrapped the little girl in her cloak and dabbed away her tears and for all the world acted just like a kindly grandmother.

The little girl stopped crying, and even started to uncurl a little, when Ann-of-Rags gave a sharp cry. “No!” she said, “Don’t go with this old woman, for I know her like I know all things of the night. She is Bone Grandmother, and she will lock you in a cage and eat your hands and your eyes and your heart and then surely you will die! Stay here, it is better to leave ourselves in the grip of the dark and the cold than to be in her cottage, which holds nothing for children but pain and death.” It was well known that Bone Grandmother preferred to eat only from the smallest children, for as they grew older, their fingers grew gnarled through labor, their eyes jaundiced by suffering, and their hearts broken by betrayals.

But, despite Ann’s warning, the old woman’s appearance was so comforting and her actions so kind that the little girl let herself be swept up in her arms and carried away. The woman’s hut was a lonesome, tiny place right in the heart of the forest, thatched with skin and walls of bone. But, in the dark, it seemed just another small hut like all the rest in the girl’s village, and it did not matter anyway, for the girl had fallen asleep, still clutching her doll, in the old woman’s arms.

“Don’t open your eyes, my love,” said Ann as the girl awoke from her enchanted sleep, “for if you see what you will see, surely you will scream and cry, and then we will truly be lost. But, if you are quiet and you do exactly as I say, you might yet survive this night.” The little girl, still tired from the sleep, did as she was told.

“Child, you are in a bad place,” said Ann-of-Rags. “You have been seduced and captured by Bone Grandmother, most evil of all twelve witches, and she plans to eat you up this night. She is down in the kitchen, making ready her tools, and you are trapped in a cage made of the bones of less fortunate children, who did not have dolls like I to protect them, or did not heed their words. Now, my most favored child, you can open your eyes, but you must not make any sound.”

The girl opened her eyes, and saw that everything was as her doll had said.

“Now, blessed child, soon the wicked woman will be done with her preparations. When those are dispensed with, she will come over, reach up to your cage with her long fingers, and ask to feel your hands. When she does so, you must place my hands out of the cage, and not your own, for she is blind in her right eye and half-blind in her left, and will not see the difference.”

Just then, Bone Grandmother looked up from her vials, ovens, and pans. “What’s that noise?” she demanded of herself, and then remembered. “Ah, my dearest little child has awakened. Since your mother clearly could not care for you, I’ve decided that you’ll stay with me a while longer.” She smiled at this, showing rows of sharp, yellow, crooked teeth. “Now, let me see how horridly she’s fed you. Hold out your hands through the bars, so I can feel your fingers.” And she reached out with her knotted fingers, just as long as my arm is here, with wicked claws at the end of each.

The little girl was terrified, but she remembered what Ann-of-Rags had told her, and held the doll’s hands through the bars in place of her own. Since the old woman was blind in her right eye and half-blind in her left, she could not tell the difference between the doll’s hands and the girl’s. Rather, she wondered at the softness of those cloth-stuffed hands. “Oh, what soft and lovely hands,” she said to herself, “your parents probably spoilt you, didn’t they? Never worked a day in your life!” And, with that, she dug her claws into the doll’s hands and tore them off at the wrists. “And now you never will!”

Even though the girl was not harmed, she screamed and cried out with shock at the old woman’s violence and evil laughter. “Yes, that’s right,” said Bone Grandmother, “Grandmother will be taking good care of you, so you won’t be needing these hands anymore.” Then she laughed again, and went off to cook her prizes.

“My heart-held girl,” said Ann-of-Rags when the witch had gone, “do not cry for me, for my blood is cotton and straw and there’s no harm to me that a needle can’t fix. We should both be glad it isn’t your hands that she’s cooking right now.” The little girl listened well, and stopped crying. “Now, when she discovers that my hands are not the feast she hoped, she’ll be angry, and she’ll reach up to your cage with her long fingers and demand to feel your face. When she does this, you must put my face through the bars, and not yours, or else it will surely end badly for you.”

Just then, Bone Grandmother had finished preparing those hands of cloth and cotton and straw. When she bit into them and tasted only dusty rags and not the soft bone and succulent flesh that she had expected, she spat the fingers across the room.

“However your parents have spoiled you, girl, they certainly haven’t fed you very well,” she exclaimed aloud, “for your flesh tastes of damp straw and dusty cloth!” Standing up, she paced around the hut, clearly agitated and angry, until finally she stopped beneath the cage, reached up towards the girl with her long, long fingers, and said “Well, so much for your hands. Let me feel your face, my dearest little child, so I shall know the sins that you have seen.”

True to her word, the little girl did not hold her own face out between the bars, but held up Ann-of-Rags for the old witch’s inspection. The long fingers slowly caressed the doll’s eyes, which were really nothing more than glass beads, and Bone Grandmother exclaimed at their fine qualities. “Why, I have never felt eyes so smooth, or so round. They are perfect in every quality! It is like these eyes have never seen suffering!” She paused a moment, admiring the eyes, and then she said “We’ll see to it that you never see any suffering at all,” and tore the doll’s eyes from her head just like that.

Even though the girl was not harmed, she screamed and cried out with shock at the old woman’s violence and evil laughter. “Yes, that’s right,” said Bone Grandmother, “Grandmother will be taking good care of you, so you won’t be needing these eyes anymore.” Then she laughed again, and went off to cook her prizes.

“My brilliant child,” said Ann-of-Rags when the witch had gone, “do not cry for me, for my eyes are glass and my mind is string and there’s no harm to me that a needle can’t fix. We should both be glad that it isn’t your eyes that she’s cooking right now.” The little girl listened well, and stopped crying. “Now, when she discovers that my eyes are harder than she’d like, she’ll be angry, and she’ll reach up to your cage with her long fingers and open up the cage and try to grab you out of it. When she does this, you must make sure that it’s me that she grabs hold of, and not you, or else surely this whole tale will end quite badly.”

Just then, Bone Grandmother had finished preparing the glass bead eyes that she had taken from Ann-of-Rags, thinking that they were from our little girl. But, when she bit into them, not only did she not feel the fine juicy pop that she was expecting—the eyes shattered in her mouth, cutting her tongue and cheeks in a thousand places. She screeched in pain, and spat blood and shards of glass across the room.

“However your parents have sheltered you from the world, they clearly haven’t kept your mind very well,” she exclaimed, “for your eyes are harder than ice in winter and more fragile than an oriental teacup!” Standing up, she paced around the hut, agitated and angry and spitting bits of glass from her bloody mouth, until finally she stopped beneath the cage, reached up towards the girl with her long, long fingers, and said, “Well, so much for your eyes. Let me take your body, child, so I can keep you safe from all the harm in the world.” With that she flicked her long fingers in the locks of the cage and, as the bone-barred door slid open with a terrifying old creak, the girl huddled in the back, terrified.

“Child!” said Ann-of-Rags suddenly and desperately, “Fast, clever, brave, and faithful child! You must throw me now in your place, and after I am gone you must run from this house, not looking back, until you have left the forest forever. Do not fear for me, for I am only a doll, and who will mourn my passing?” And, though it grieved the girl to lose her favorite doll, she threw the doll into the long fingers that crept along the cage.

The witch snatched Ann-of-Rags out of the air, and cackled as she said: “You thought you could escape me with your little leap for freedom, but know that this world has never seen a child fast enough, clever enough, or brave enough to get the better of this old grandmother, with my fingers long as your father’s arms, and my son Frost guarding the door. Hah! Enough of this foolishness—let’s put you in the oven and be done with you!” And, with that, Bone Grandmother took Ann-of-Rags off to the kitchen to be roasted.

The little girl in the cage did not hesitate for an instant, but dashed out of that house, not looking back, while the witch put Ann-of-Rags to roast. But, even as the girl was running out from the clearing, the doll caught fire in the oven, for she was made of straw and cotton and not of flesh, and she burned up not only herself, but the kitchen, the old woman, and the whole house.

True to her word, the girl did not turn around, even to watch the flames of the house or to listen to the dying cries of the witch, but kept straight on running until the sun rose, and she found her way back to her village again and into the arms of her mother and father.

I can’t truly say what happened to that girl after her terrible night in the forest, but I’ve heard that she married a boy from the city, and together they lived a long time, and had many children, sons and daughters both. The doll, of course, was burned up and never seen again, but soon the girl had outgrown such childishness and did not give her family’s doll a second thought or tear. Her husband was not a poor man, after all, and her daughters had dolls of their own, made from porcelain and silk. What good would they have gotten from an old straw patchwork like Ann-of-Rags?

That is the story, the whole and the heart of it, just as it happened and just as it was told to me. If any man call me a liar, he has only himself to blame.

©2020 by P H Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P H Lee lives on top of an old walnut tree, past a thicket roses, down a dead end street at the edge of town. Their work has appeared in many venues including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine. From time to time, they microwave and eat a frozen burrito at two in the morning, for no reason other than that they want to.

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

The Blade Between

Sam J. Miller | 2183 words

From Nebula Award winner Sam J. Miller comes a frightening and uncanny ghost story about a rapidly changing city in upstate New York and the mysterious forces that threaten it.

Ronan Szepessy promised himself he’d never return to Hudson. The sleepy upstate town was no place for a restless gay photographer. But his father is ill and New York City’s distractions have become too much for him. He hopes that a quick visit will help him recharge.

Ronan reconnects with two friends from high school: Dom, his first love, and Dom’s wife, Attalah. The three former misfits mourn what their town has become—overrun by gentrifiers and corporate interests. With friends and neighbors getting evicted en masse and a mayoral election coming up, Ronan and Attalah craft a plan to rattle the newcomers and expose their true motives. But in doing so, they unleash something far more mysterious and uncontainable.

Hudson has a rich, proud history and, it turns out, the real-state developers aren’t the only forces threatening its well-being: the spirits undergirding this once-thriving industrial town are enraged. Ronan’s hijinks have overlapped with a bubbling up of hate and violence among friends and neighbors, and everything is spiraling out of control. Ronan must summon the very best of himself to shed his own demons and save the city he once loathed.

Available December 1, 2020 from Ecco Press.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Someone is whispering, in the hallway behind Attalah’s office.

CPS is an old building, built as a school before the fifties. Weird tiles—smooth and brown, not stone, not marble—conduct sound strangely. Strange echoes are not unusual. Words get crumpled, twisted—impossible to make out what’s being said—but tone of voice always comes through loud and clear, and whoever is speaking, hers is hushed and urgent and a little bit angry. CPS has seen more than its share of angry parents exploding after a meeting did not go so well, so Attalah gets up and goes in that direction almost without thinking about it. In her hand, she carries the small air horn they all have in their desks.

“No, you listen,” the woman is saying. “I already told you what to use, and I told you how to make it. I’d fucking make it myself if I didn’t have a fucking job over here.”

Silence. Whoever she is, she’s on a cell phone.

“We already had this conversation, Paula. I told you, I chose this for a reason. It won’t kill anyone. It’ll give them the shits, and that’s all. And if you can’t do it I’ll find someone else who can, and the deal is off, and your sister will have custody of your kids until they’re not fucking kids anymore.”

Attalah doesn’t need to stick her head around the corner now to know that it’s Zelda. And that she’s talking to Paula Dinehart, a woman on her caseload who should under no circumstances be allowed to reunite with her children until she’s completed six months of addiction treatment, including a minimum of two weeks inpatient, all of which she has steadfastly refused to do.

“I don’t want any goddamn excuses. Just get it done.”

There’s a curse, and then a long measured exhale. Attalah debates scurrying off. Not because she’s scared, but because she’s baffled. The pieces of what she’s just heard: they refuse to come together in her mind. Mercifully, the full magnitude of what is happening escapes her for a few more sweet moments. And then, in her instant of indecision, Zelda comes around the corner.

Neither one of them says anything, not for a while.

“Hey, Attalah,” Zelda finally says, rubbing at the bottom of her nose. “What’s up?”

And Attalah gets it. Not only what she’s just overheard, but the bigger picture. Something is very wrong with Zelda Outterson. Her eyes twitch. Her lips are ragged.

“What was that all about?” Attalah asks.

“That?” Zelda looked behind her, like that was something physical, like the empty hallway was proof of her innocence. “Nothing.”

“To me, it sounded like you were having a conversation with one of our clients, on your personal cell phone, in the hallway, so no one could hear you.”

“No,” Zelda said.

“That wasn’t Paula Dinehart?”

“It was, but—it wasn’t about anything CPS related.”

Attalah looks her up and down. Zelda is on drugs. That much is clear from the look of her. And it’s not the harmless bloodshot eye of someone who smokes a joint to help them get through the day. Zelda is strung out in a serious way. And that makes her a liability. Only Attalah’s own myopic focus on the schemes at hand—and her anxiety over the revelation about Dom and Ronan—and her anger at herself, for not seeing it herself, for giving that asshole Treenie Lazzarra the satisfaction of telling her—could possibly explain how she missed it until this moment. “A personal call.”

“Yeah,” Zelda says, nodding too fast; she’s an utter amateur at all of this.

A terrifying dilemma, how to proceed from here. What she should do is check it now, nip it in the bud, curse Zelda out and make it excruciatingly clear that she needs to get her shit together or get the fuck fired.

But Zelda has something on her. It isn’t much—that she asked Zelda to participate in some very low-level illegal activity—but if Zelda got mad at her, and if Zelda felt like she had nothing to lose, she could make some noise about it and get Attalah investigated by internal affairs. It might be enough to get her fired. And even if it wasn’t, it’d establish a paper trail pointing back to her. Documentation that she helped orchestrate at least part of what was unfolding in Hudson. And depending on how the next few weeks went down, that might be enough to get her locked up.

So, instead, Attalah takes a gentle approach. Even though it makes her deeply uncomfortable. “Are you okay, Zelda? You look tired.”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“Are you up to something? With the you are hated stuff?”

Here, Zelda smiles. “Some exciting things are happening, that’s all. People are talking. Stuff is in the works.”

“And you’ve been . . .” blackmailing our vulnerable, damaged clients into doing terrible things in exchange for access to children they shouldn’t be anywhere near?

“Talking to people,” Zelda says. “That’s all. Lots of people are talking to each other, finally. For years we’ve all pretended nothing’s happening, or there’s nothing we can do about it, and those days are over.”

She stares at Attalah, a hard square look like Thanks to you.

“I’m happy about that,” Attalah says. “You know I want them out as bad as anyone. But there are limits, Zelda. Putting up billboards and wearing buttons is one thing, but we can’t break the law in serious—”

“Fuck the law,” Zelda snaps. Finger joints pop as her hands make fists. “Who is the law there to protect? Why does the law say that I’m not allowed to write GO HOME YOU ARE NOT WANTED HERE on the side of my new landlord’s car, but he’s allowed to evict my downstairs neighbors? Which one is worse, Attalah? Which act is more violent? Any set of laws that says it’s okay to throw a family with kids out into the street in the middle of winter is not worth my respect. Or my obedience.”

“I agree,” Attalah says, because of course she does.

“I should probably get back to work,” Zelda says, her voice dismissive, as if already the power dynamic has shifted, as if Attalah is no longer the supervisor here. “Heather is my next client, and if she shows up on time for once, and I’m not there, she’ll storm out of here and it’ll be a miracle if we see her again before Thanksgiving.”

“Of course,” Attalah says. “But you’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If anything big was going to pop off? After all . . .”

. . . I started it

. . . It was all my idea

. . . Whatever happens, it’s all on me

But Attalah can’t find a safe way to end the sentence.

“Of course,” Zelda says, and hurries out of the hallway.

• • • •

The Friday 9:05 p.m. train from New York Penn Station had been sold out, and it’s a weirdly warm night, and no taxis are in sight, so the scene at the station is a big, happy, milling crowd. They are weekenders, after all, with a whole weekend ahead of them! What brunches they will have; what antiquing they will engage in! The world is their oyster.

Several people see the naked man and don’t bat an eyelash. Same way they do when they see someone eating out of the trash, or beating their kid, or puking. They are New Yorkers, after all. Public nudity is unusual but not inconceivable. And anyway, some of them have been warned. This place has so much character; These people are real characters; You definitely see some characters up in Hudson! Et cetera. Here is real life, which is what they’d come for.

Only when he screams “Look at me” do they dare to do so.

What they see: a man with no clothes on, forty going on seventy, possibly handsome once, his whole body sagging and full of folds now. Soaking wet, they think, except for a couple of people standing very close, who smell the sharp reek of gasoline and step back.

“Look at me,” he says again. “We burn for you.”

The ticket taker recognizes him. “Stubby?” he calls in the instant before the mayor’s son lights a match and sets himself on fire.

• • • •

Sometimes simplicity is best. Classics are classic for a reason, after all. No sense reinventing the wheel when you want to scare someone.

And anyway everyone forgets, in this age of email and cell phone calls you can silence with a finger, the profound psychological power of a ringing telephone. How something so banal can suddenly become so terrifying, after the sun sets. So invasive.

Zelda sends lists, to people who responded positively to her initial you are hated entreaties. Names and phone numbers. Some guy on Tinder sent it to her, a little hottie with jug-handled ears who started a convo by saying he liked her profile pic—a close-up of a you are hated button. Said he’d been collecting info on the new arrivals for a long time. Waiting for someone who would know what to do with it.

She gives her pupils no specific instructions, other than scare the shit out of them. Creativity is important, is something she wants to cultivate in her apprentice (offspring) terrorists. She knows they are full of great ideas. She believes in them.

Connor keeps it simple. Sometimes he just screams when someone answers. A blood-curdling shriek of anger or pain or fear. Other times he’ll start right in with threats and profanity, bellowed in a low monster voice.

Sally is more of an artist with it. She starts out all business, sounding like it’s a real call. A kind voice from the doctor’s office; a Quinnipiac poll. Something believable, something that won’t make the person hang up right away. And then a couple of sentences in she’ll start to turn it around, following Do you ever wonder what it would feel like if someone slid a knife into the meat of your thigh and dragged it all the way down to your feet? or That dog I hear barking in the background, do you ever worry you’ll come home to find it gutted with its entrails ripped out and the body cavity stuffed with screws and nails and broken glass? In a voice as sweet and slick as honey.

All night long Zelda’s chest has been throbbing, a jagged something pressing up against her heart. She likes the throb of it. It tastes sweet, like hatred. It means her pupils are hard at work. Phones are ringing all over town. Distant sirens sound. People are lying in bed, shivering from fear. Telling themselves everything will be all right. Knowing it won’t.

Copyright © 2020 by Sam J. Miller. Excerpted from The Blade Between by Sam J. Miller. Published by permission of the author and Ecco Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam J. Miller is the Nebula-Award-winning author of The Art of Starving (an NPR best of the year) and Blackfish City (a best book of the year for Vulture, The Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and more – and a “Must Read” in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine). A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and the hopefully-soon-to-be-renamed John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam’s short stories have been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. He lives in New York City, and at samjmiller.com.

Book Reviews: December 2021

Arley Sorg | 2701 words

A Universe of Wishes
Dhonielle Clayton, ed.
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN: 9781984896209
Crown Books for Young Readers, December 2020, 416 pgs

In the March 2020 issue of Lightspeed, I reviewed Patrice Caldwell’s A Phoenix First Must Burn—very favorably. The moment I saw that book, I craved it, having pored through so many anthologies that lacked any meaningful amount of diversity. In fact, the more I studied anthologies, the more I realized that many editors repeatedly publish the same core set of authors across books and sometimes even across decades. In Phoenix, Caldwell declared an objective: to provide space for people who don’t see themselves represented enough in fiction. Whether or not you feel underrepresented, Phoenix put forward a batch of wonderful stories for any reader.

When I saw the cover for A Universe of Wishes, it had that same immediate impact, eliciting a similar craving. In fact, Universe editor Dhonielle Clayton contributed a story to Phoenix. Both Phoenix and Universe are published by Penguin Random House children’s imprints, and the latter has “We Need Diverse Books” across the top of the cover. Needless to say, the expectation elicited was to find something fairly similar to Phoenix. Even Clayton’s opening note declares, “The only thing that made me happy was reading . . . But after a while, I started to notice that kids who looked like me didn’t get to save the world, didn’t get grand adventures through fantastical landscapes, didn’t get to go to magic camp . . . For far too long some of us have been missing from magical worlds.” And I was not let down.

As with Phoenix, whether or not you feel underrepresented by the publishing industry, whether or not you crave stories that may more closely represent you, Clayton has put together a set of excellent tales for you.

Let’s talk favorites!

Tochi Onyebuchi’s “Habibi” is a tale of two people worlds apart in different sorts of dire circumstances who find a mysterious way to communicate. As they share their stories with each other, they grow as people and learn about themselves. This story gave me chills, and I can’t pay any piece of fiction a higher compliment than that. The power of this story is in the development of the narrative, so I won’t ruin it by saying more.

“The Takeback Tango” proves that Rebecca Roanhorse is just as great with space opera as she is with various types of fantasy settings. A young scoundrel sets out to steal back a few cultural artifacts from the Museum of the Conquered, items that were stolen when the Imperium took over yet another planet in their endless quest to expand and rule. This piece immediately grabs the reader through voice and character, rendering a sixteen-year-old protagonist who is full of charm. It has the sort of on-point socio-commentary on class and culture that regular readers of Roanhorse will expect, made more personal through an individual’s journey to hang onto the slenderest shred of sovereignty possible, and a sharp sense of aloneness from loss, not only the loss of one’s people, but of their family.

Natalie C. Parker’s “The Silk Blade” is a wonderful fantasy story that feels nearly epic, succeeding in creating an interesting narrative through a gladiatorial trope. The tale combines strength and softness and the delicate in unexpected ways, and plays with gender roles as well as familiar plotlines. Worldbuilding details and the courtship process itself make this one cool, with the added bonus of a thoughtful ending.

Title story “A Universe of Wishes” by Tara Sim has a great opening and an intriguing world. Thorn is trying to gather the magical power of wishes in a very specific way, and in the process gets caught by Sage. Thus begins a relationship that is well-written and constantly engaging. Some of the conflict points are predictable, but the treatment of their interactions is deft, and there are so many lovely plot moments and subtle reversals that this story can’t be considered anything less than a true accomplishment. This piece is also lightly philosophical, elevating the narrative: “Wonder, Thorn realized, was beautiful; it banished what was impossible and made room for belief.” Finally, the ending surprises, and yet still brings all the bits of the story together in a satisfying way.

The standout for me, the story that made me want to go to Twitter and shout to everyone how great this book is, was a story I didn’t even think I’d like: “Cristal y Ceniza” by Anna-Marie McLemore. I have seen so many retellings. And while retellings have their advocates, not to mention die-hard fans, I rarely feel that they do enough. This Cinderella retelling features a loving central family and the government as the bearer of malice: “La corrección,” an initiative in this fantasy kingdom setting that separates any spouses who are not male and female pairs, reassigning them to other spouses. In other words, ripping families apart so that anyone the government considers “male” will be with someone the government considers “female.” This story offers a level of insightful and nuanced class commentary that armchair intellectuals pretend to but miss: “This was the way of the world, how things came to be. Not by kneeling before sovereigns, but by small bargains made, with those who wanted what little I had to give.” It’s heartbreaking and wonderful at once. The narrative is made even better by McLemore’s thoughtful decisions around plot; a few inspired shifts in familiar narratives result in a really beautiful and award-worthy story.

The table of contents of Universe is stacked with tested and proven storytellers, such as V.E. Schwab, Tessa Gratton, and Zoraida Córdova. Readers can open this book anywhere and find a solid tale. The anthology Vampires Never Get Old featured some of the same authors, and a quick browse around will reveal a few more anthologies that offer better representation than many of the books soaking up the bulk of genre’s attention.

My single concern in seeing major anthologies like this gaining prominence is the sense of repeating the pattern of a lot of those other, established, well-known anthologists: utilizing a core set of people, and missing the opportunity to bring the sort of freshness to the game that comes from finding and publishing new voices—right next to the powerhouses of story whose names will sell the books. All the same, with these particular writers executing stories on this level, I, for one, will continue to crave and devour them.

Glitter + Ashes
dave ring, ed.
Paperback/Ebook
ISBN: 9781952086106
Neon Hemlock Press, September 2020, 256 pgs

It’s not necessarily unusual for a press to appear out of nowhere. Small and indie presses come and go, to a point where it becomes hard to keep track of them all. A press you’ve never heard of will announce their fifteenth anniversary, and another seemingly familiar press will announce the publication of their first title. Some are little more than vanity presses. Then again, several indie presses have reputations for higher caliber work, such as Small Beer and Tachyon, both known for discerning taste; Fairwood, which boasts a stable of reliable storytellers; and relative newcomer (since 2014) Meerkat, whose books are already accruing accolades and landing on awards lists. What is surprising is that an indie press would appear seemingly out of nowhere, produce a really nice-looking book early on, and present stories that are actually quite good. Thus, I introduce you to Neon Hemlock press, and their anthology Glitter + Ashes.

Sub-titled “Queer tales of a world that wouldn’t die” Glitter + Ashes features twenty-six pieces—some very short—“centering queer joy and community in the face of disaster . . .” As a collection, these aren’t superficial, sappy, or silly tales. They are thoughtful, uplifting, and empowering. Moreover, the work here features an array of intersectional diversity: It’s the sort of inclusive storytelling that isn’t adding in shoehorned identities for the sake of checking boxes; rather, these are tales that reflect a range of real perspectives and people through the lens of the fantastic.

The table of contents offers a strong set of stories. Short fiction readers will recognize the likes of up-and-coming authors Elly Bangs, Darcie Little Badger, and C.L. Clark, authors with notable short stories out and with new books on offer: Unity (Tachyon), Elatsoe (Levine Querido), and The Unbroken (Orbit, due in 2021) respectively. Add to this the likes of L.D. Lewis and Mari Ness, both well-known figures in the industry, and it’s clear that the baseline of quality in this anthology is higher than many—especially for a new indie press.

All the same, I have my favorites.

“Wrath of a Queer God” by Anthony Mull begins the anthology. It’s less than a page long—brief, clever, but utilizing lines that open up the imagination to broader images and scenes. The effect is an impact much larger than its word count, and a great demonstration of the dynamic nature of story.

“The Descent of Their Last End” by Izzy Wasserstein is gently beautiful and brief. As ash falls from the sky, two people share their last moments together, in a way that is poignant but grounded. At a page and a half or so, it’s surprisingly creative, interesting, and touching.

Michael Milne offers an intriguing world and set up in “The Bone Gifts.” Awl is a caretaker for the dying, and lives in a tower where people come to die. When Halligan dies, Awl is caught between the claims of her father and her wife, both of whom want Halligan’s skull. This story goes beyond cool ideas by virtue of its meditation on the way we cling to what little is left to us in our people.

Nods go to “A Future in Color” by R.J. Theodore, which has an interesting idea and is, perhaps, an allegory for the interdependent nature of artistic endeavors, not to mention life in general; and “Be Strong, Kick Many Asses” by Aun-Juli Riddle, an intimate look at the ways renewal and change are not always bad, even if they are scary.

A major standout is Jordan Kurella’s “The Black Hearts of La Playa.” This one is cut with strong lines and good turns of phrase. It’s a story that feels like it’s written from a joy of writing, evidenced by word choice, structure, the play of sentences, and phrases calling back to each other. Clever without arrogance, and approachable still. The language sets the groundwork for cool situations and even cooler ideas. Letty lives in a camp in the desert, an outpost of survivors standing against the menace of vampires. On the one hand, she has to reconcile her memories of her mother with her own observations of what they are doing out there; on the other, she has to navigate the often tricky interpersonal dramas which come from living in close proximity, and from building different sorts of relationships. The narrative takes things a step deeper, exploring the phases of Letty’s sense of belonging via her journey of self-discovery. It’s an excellent example of storytelling and craft.

While Kurella’s piece is outstanding, my favorite was Christopher Caldwell’s “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel.” This piece was immediately engaging, bright with imagery, and had me absolutely laughing out loud from wonderful dialogue and the author’s wit. It is, essentially, the tale of a magical drag queen’s exodus, as she takes her “children” from one place to somewhere much safer. It’s warm and lovingly told and, at the same time, a rather wholesome adventure story.

It doesn’t matter if these favorites end up being yours, or if you find others that speak to you more. The bottom line is this: Rarely does a small press put together something so good so early on. If Neon Hemlock continues this kind of work, they are destined to become of the best indie presses around.

Black Sun
Rebecca Roanhorse
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN: 9781534437678
Simon & Schuster/Gallery/Saga Press, October 2020, 464 pgs

Occasionally I want to write a single-line review: “Read this book.” Even more so for Black Sun, which is full of surprise and wonder, and which should be discovered in the course of leaving assumptions and expectations left behind.

The opening scene is vivid, arresting, and should be enough to convince anyone to read this book. It begins, “Today he would become a god. His mother had told him so.” What follows lands a solid visceral impact, verging on horror in all the best ways. Going beyond the spectacle, the narrative delivers an artfully nuanced relationship between mother and son, a detailed fantasy culture, and a clever plot set-up. You could teach writing classes based on chapter one alone.

The plot brings together disparate and fascinating main characters. Xiala is a sailor with fantastic abilities to affect the waters, and uncanny navigation abilities. She is rowdy and wild, and fairly cavalier about burning bridges. She hails from a group of people who are literally cut up and sold for parts. Serapio is an introspective youth, a vessel for a god with a violent bent, who is sent on a quest for vengeance. Naranpa is the pinnacle of authority in a system that seems to be losing its authority. She has to negotiate the politics of a crumbling power structure, as well as the intricacies of having been elevated to a position many feel she shouldn’t have, all while a scheme may be brewing to kill her, a justice-seeking revenge plot for the horrors her predecessors committed.

Each character is thoughtfully drawn, thrown into compelling circumstances in a detailed and innovative fantasy setting; and yet each individual is still relatable, their complicated lives striking chords to resonate on a deeply emotional and personal level. The strongest themes the book explores through the focus of their stories are those of belonging, complicated identities, and love. At heart, this is a story of misfits and people struggling to survive. Each character is caught in delicate circumstances, caught between cultures of different kinds, and has to navigate what that means within their specific situations. Serapio, for example, struggles with his destiny, and is willing to pack away his own desires to follow what must be done, even if he isn’t sure he agrees with it. His parents were in violent disagreement over how to raise him, coming from different backgrounds and beliefs. He acts in the name of a people who may not care for him, yet there’s an undercurrent of desire for connection that sings throughout his narrative.

Roanhorse creates a luxurious, imaginative fantasy setting, grounded in research and divorced from the European-style fantasy worlds that have become fairly standard fare. She breathes a glowing life into her characters, and crafts an intricate, engaging plot. This book demonstrates both a mastery of form and a willingness to explore, to actually challenge traditions and readers, and to not only add to genre, but to expand upon genre, with the best of possible results.

Read. This. Book.

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 Reviews: December 2020

Carrie Vaughn | 1527 words

As of this writing it’s been almost nine months since I’ve been in a movie theater. I make no speculations for the future of public movie-going. It’s been a rough summer and I’m in “wait and see” mode on just about everything.

In the meantime, streaming services are sure making an effort to keep us from being bored, aren’t they? There’s a whole lot to see on TV, and I’m fascinated by the viral mode of viewing where suddenly everybody on social media talks furiously about the same movie or show for a couple of days, and so we all watch it, and it’s somehow even bigger and more communal than going to movies ever was. And then just as suddenly—silence, until the next thing comes along.

Enola Holmes
Directed by Harry Bradbeer
Produced by Netflix, Legendary Entertainment, PCMA Productions
September 23, 2020

The thing that went viral as I was putting this together was Enola Holmes, a film released on Netflix, based on books by Nancy Springer, about Sherlock Holmes’s younger sister. Sherlock Holmes is generally widely embraced by science fiction and fantasy readers, despite not technically, originally, being science fiction or fantasy (high-tech steampunk versions and fantasy retellings aside). I think this is because of these stories’ focus on competence, cleverness, and the admiration of intelligence. This feeling that Holmes would be one of us if he’d been born a hundred years later. (Never mind that he’s fictional.)

I’ve only just now realized that in the last dozen years or so we’ve have a bunch of Sherlock Holmeses: the Robert Downy Jr. films, BBC’s Sherlock, Elementary on CBS, the Will Ferrell and John C. Riley film Holmes and Watson, Ian McKellen in the film Mr. Holmes. That’s a lot of Holmes. We haven’t even had that many wide-release Robin Hood versions in that time.

Some of these try to put a spin on it—Sherlock in the modern era, Sherlock as an old man. Enola Holmes tells the story from the point of view of a precocious teenage girl, played by Millie Bobby Brown of Stranger Things fame. Enola has been living in isolation with her genius suffragette mother since her father died and her two older brothers left home, never to return. Then, one day, her mother mysteriously vanishes. Enola needs to find her. Her brothers aren’t much help—Mycroft rather viciously vows to ship her off to a ladies’ finishing school. So Enola dresses as a boy and runs away to London to search for her mother herself, and has adventures along the way.

Enola is a great character, and the setting and energy of the film are vibrant. The plot . . . well. It doesn’t quite come together. The film is trope-driven rather than plot-driven, by which I mean the story beats are there, but there’s not much connecting them. There isn’t a single central mystery to solve. To say the plot is scattered is something the film itself knows—Enola literally stops in the middle to announce to the audience that she’s changing her goal from finding her mother to saving missing young aristocrat Lord Tewkesbury. It might have made for a stronger movie if these two mysteries had somehow converged in an even bigger crisis, but they don’t. A bit of writing advice: If your characters, while racing toward the climactic confrontation, declare, “This is a really bad idea full of danger and we shouldn’t be doing it,” and then spend the next minute or so justifying their actions to each other—the audience, actually—your plot is perhaps not hanging together well.

As I mentioned, the attraction of Sherlock Holmes is usually competence porn: watching clever people be excessively clever. Here, no one really gets to be clever and there’s not much to solve. There’s a few anagrams to figure out and some language of flowers clues scattered about, but for the most part the characters slide toward inevitable conclusions with little effort. Enola’s overriding quest is to find her mother. She does not find her mother—her mother simply appears, revealing herself at the end. It’s a nice emotional moment, but from a story perspective, rather empty.

I have a lunatic suggestion and you’ll have to trust me on this. So, this is not Millie Bobby Brown’s first feature film. This is not even Brown’s first feature film in which she plays a teen girl having to confront that fact that her mother might actually be a supervillain. That movie would be Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Which I loved, and which I think is a better “teen girl has to figure out what to do about her mother possibly being a supervillain” movie than Enola Holmes.

NASA as Entertainment

For All Mankind
Created by Ronald D. Moore, Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert
Produced by Sony Pictures Television, Tall Ship Productions
November 1, 2019

Initially, I had intended on reviewing Away, a new Netflix series about the first crewed mission to Mars starring Hillary Swank. But I only made it ten minutes into the second episode. I found it emotionally manipulative and it hit one of my biggest pet peeves in very near-future spaceflight/NASA-centric stories, which is depicting astronauts who are deeply, fatally unprofessional. It makes for high drama, but the drama is clearly fake and these are clearly actors playing astronauts. It’s like the Discovery Channel mockumentaries where you know it’s fake because the so-called scientists they interview are just so gosh-darned pretty and don’t use their hands when they talk. I just couldn’t fight my way through the melodrama.

As a palate cleanser, I hopped over to For All Mankind, a 2019 show that aired on Apple TV. This one blew me away. It’s another NASA show, but this one gets to cheat by leaning on all the familiar tropes and imagery of the 1960s Apollo program, which we’ve seen dozens of times. It’s comforting, right? Except I didn’t precisely know what this was about when I started. The first episode begins with very familiar scenes of people glued to their televisions, watching a figure descend the ladder of the lunar module, about to be the first person to step on the moon. But something’s wrong—the date, for one. It’s June 1969, not July. And everyone looks grim. Unhappy. No eager shining eyes here. Rather, there is despair. What’s going on? Well, the figure steps down and speaks the first words—they’re in Russian. The Soviet Union got to the moon first, and the American audience is devastated.

The alternate history spins out from there, and it’s impressive: The space race doesn’t end. In the emergency of dealing with how the Soviets got the jump on NASA, Ted Kennedy cancels his trip to Chappaquiddick, which means no scandal, which means he beats Nixon in the ’72 election, which means Nixon never has to resign because of Watergate . . . and so on. The show extrapolates profound ripples we might not have expected. So what happens next? I’m particularly impressed by how the show deploys that familiar imagery, the depiction of vintage ’60s NASA that we know so well from films like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13—and uses it to upend our expectations. Because this is that setting, but we don’t know what’s going to happen next. Apollo 11 launches a month later . . . and it might fail. It’s extraordinary.

You’d think “the Soviets get to the moon first” ushers in a grim alternate future . . . but it doesn’t. The second Soviet landing includes a woman cosmonaut—another first for the scoreboard, mirroring the space flight of Valentina Tereshkova. So NASA decides to re-activate the Mercury 13, bringing women into the astronaut corps ten years earlier than in the actual timeline, and this class of astronauts includes an African American woman—“to get a jump on this one,” one of the administrators observes wryly. Suddenly, we’re getting a different history of the space program, the way it maybe should have gone. I found it profound, and emotionally wrenching.

I’m not sure if this is getting a second season, but a teaser hints that if it does, it’ll be jumping forward in time, to the ’80s. I would love to see this.

I know it’s yet another streaming service to subscribe to, but here’s an idea: Apple TV is going to be showing Foundation, a series based on the Isaac Asimov books, sometime next year. Wait for that to drop, sign up for a free trial some week when you have time to spare, watch Foundation, and binge the heck out of For All Mankind on the side.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn’s work includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Bannerless, the New York Times Bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, and over twenty novels and upwards of 100 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. Her most recent work includes a Kitty spin-off collection, The Immortal Conquistador, and a pair of novellas about Robin Hood’s children, The Ghosts of Sherwood and The Heirs of Locksley. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.

Interview: E. Lily Yu

Christian A. Coleman | 1052 words

E. Lily Yu received the Artist Trust / LaSalle Storyteller Award in 2017 and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2012. She is a writer and narrative designer whose stories appear in venues from McSweeney’s to Tor.com and in eleven best-of-the-year anthologies, and have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards.

Congratulations on your debut novel! It looks like you first mentioned working on it back in 2012. How does it feel to have On Fragile Waves on the brink of publication?

Thank you. I feel both exhaustion and relief, like a long-distance runner coming within sight of the finish line.

On Fragile Waves follows the Daizangi family from war-torn Kabul, Afghanistan to Melbourne, Australia as they eke out a living as refugees. You anchor us in the experiences of the daughter, Firuzeh. The ghost of her friend, Nasima, keeps her company throughout her journeys as she negotiates her new sense of home. How did the premise come together for you?

I started writing the novel nine years ago and have learned and forgotten a great deal in the meantime. I couldn’t tell you now. What I can tell you is that the novel began with my spending an Australian winter with Professor Paul Tregoning’s research group at the Research School of Earth Sciences, ANU, back when I still thought I might become a physicist. I was supposed to map an anomalous disappearance of groundwater in a remote region of Australia based on remote sensing data, and I did an absolutely rubbish job of it. If anyone from that group is reading this, I’m very sorry about that.

Partway through the assignment, Julia Gillard unseated Kevin Rudd as prime minister, which triggered a federal election. Being in Canberra, and at a university, I was suddenly surrounded by intense political debate. The one major issue I couldn’t understand, even after a reasonable degree of listening and learning, was Australia’s stance on asylum seekers. So I kept digging.

What kind of research went into bringing the Daizangis’ travels and stark struggles of displacement to life?

Many libraries and interlibrary loans, a tremendous amount of reading, three semesters of Persian in graduate school, several remote interviews with researchers and advocates, a week visiting detention centers and refugee advocacy groups in Melbourne, a brief trip to Jakarta, and ten days in Kabul.

What was it like speaking with the refugees and asylum seekers in Melbourne and Kabul who shared their stories with you? What kind of impression did they leave with you?

Mostly one of my own inadequacy. When people take daring actions in extreme situations, they often develop courage and capacity of soul. I saw both of those qualities. Also hope, loneliness, despair. I don’t think it’s desirable for seventeen year olds, for example, to have to develop that kind of capacity, but there are precious few opportunities for it in the developed world. We’re often cowardly and comfort seeking in comparison.

In Kabul, I was frequently fearful. I wish I hadn’t been.

In terms of writing style, is the fable-like prose of the chapters written from Firuzeh’s point of view meant to evoke Hafiz and Rumi? You mentioned that you’d read the two poets, mostly in translation, for this novel.

No, but I had more references and citations to their poetry in earlier drafts.

It’s one of three distinct narrative modes you use. The second one is the expressionistic, concrete poetry style of the chapters where dreams happen, and the third is what would be considered the traditional novel prose for the chapters that introduce us to secondary characters. How did you decide to write in these modes?

The book decided on its own form, though it took its time in letting me know. I tried to impose a variety of structures on it and wound up rewriting the whole book four times. Imagine a block of marble determined to become a particular shape, breaking the chisel every time the sculptor aimed for something else.

You’ve written many of your short stories with the cadence of fairy tales. Some are even fairy tale retellings. I’m thinking of “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” “The Valley of the Wounded Deer,” “The No-One Girl and the Flower of the Farther Shore,” “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” and “The Time Invariance of Snow.” What brings you back to this storytelling mode?

The eloquence of bones. We are given, when very young, a very old set of narrative constructions. They’re designed to teach us all sorts of values—what to honor, what to fear, how to treat our elders—and they do so deeply and effectively. Never mind craft or clever literary devices. Fairy tales operate on a values-driven logic, though sometimes those values are situationally necessary rather than true, and in the long run, that logic produces a richer and higher life than the common, self-serving rationalizations of ordinary life. As I see it, that is the basic test of new fairy tales; it is easy to tell when that moral logic is missing or flawed. I would classify much of Ayn Rand’s work as failed fairy tales.

You’ve built an impressive career as a short story writer. What has the transition to writing novels been like? Or do you see it as a transition at all?

I’ve always been writing both. If my memory is correct, On Fragile Waves is the third novel I’ve finished, though it’s the only one I’ve wanted to publish.

Do you have other writing projects coming up that you can tell us about?

I’ll be writing the libretto for a twenty-minute opera for Seattle Opera’s Creation Lab, to be performed next year. Besides that, I have drafts of various things in flight and am writing an ongoing series of essays at The Paper Airplane (paperairplane.substack.com).

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: Andrew Dana Hudson and C.Y. Ballard

Laurel Amberdine | 1559 words

How did this story begin? Was there an initial image or prompt?

ADH: Years ago I spent an afternoon with a Bay Area collaborator of mine, Adam Flynn, coming up with a long list of story prompts, and Superfund remediation of old advertisements lingering in the collective psyche was one of them. The idea gnawed at me for a long time, and when CYB and I wanted to try to write something together, it spilled out.

CYB: As ADH and I started talking about where we might want the story to go, I was thinking about the spaces that characters and advertising mascots occupy in our dreams. They’re recurring figures alongside our friends and relatives. I don’t believe that we’ve lost something or whatever because Luke Skywalker shows up instead of a Jungian hermit. That’s what happens when we tell stories in visual media (and when certain companies figure out the best way to your wallet is through your imagination). But I think it’s easy for our brains to grab these characters and mascots and throw them in the mix as a mentor or an enemy, because they’re designed to be seen often and recognized. What happens when something so polished ends up in our dreams? When dreams get weird, how are we affected by all that extra marketing stuff that comes along with the design and the narrative? And I think that’s when I shifted to the question of how it would all get cleaned up.

ADH: We were somewhat reacting against the movie Inception (2010), which has such a self-serious take on the dreamscape. (The title of this story parodies a tagline from the poster for that movie, “your mind is the scene of the crime.”) In Inception, dreams are so bland, filled with nothing freakier than ex-lovers and faceless gunmen and Escher architecture. Where were all the TV and video game characters we stuff into our brains every day? Where was the synesthetic nonsense? Obviously, there’s a lot about the irrational emotional register of dreams that is hard to capture in a movie, but fiction can take a different approach. I think one of the first things we wrote was the bit about turning the tables on the back-in-high school stress dream, something that I started experiencing in my own dreams once I was a few years out of school.

CYB: I fluctuate within several stages of lucid and nonlucid dreaming, so many of my high school stress dreams are me thinking, Are we really still doing this? and explaining to my band director that I appreciate him but I’m thirty and I no longer care that I haven’t prepared for region auditions. Once ADH and I talked through the differences between those stages, we had our own version of Inception’s “levels of dreaming.” This was how Tracey and Alleyah’s clean-up operation took shape.

How did you manage the collaboration?

ADH & CYB: Badly.

As a Catholic (and we invented Christmas!) I have to say the commercialization of the holiday and the shift to it being a nuclear-family centered event is very irritating. So I appreciated this story a lot, though probably not from the angle you were expecting! But people do need celebrations, and as you indicate, it seems like the only way to escape commercializing them is to escape the control of capitalism entirely, which, with how distant that possibility seems, is a depressing thought. What are your favorite holidays or annual rituals? What do you do to keep them special?

ADH: I’ve ended up quite bad at keeping holidays in my adulthood. It’s nice to get days off or share a meal with family, but the cultural content has either lost its appeal for me or feels tainted by problematic history or capitalism. I keep a copy of the French Revolutionary Calendar, which includes a week of end-of-year fall feast days celebrating various concepts important to civilization: virtue, talent, labor, convictions, revolution. I like that idea much more than our existing holiday season, and I like the idea of celebrating solstices and equinoxes. But yes, I think there’s no getting our seasonal festivals out from under the many layers of consumerism and bourgeois culture without getting the boot of capitalism off our neck first—which is why this story had to be set after a revolution.

CYB: By the time this is published, we’ll be in the final stretch of the holiday season gauntlet. And while I think of myself as being bad at celebrating holidays, I actually mean that in recent years I’ve run out of endurance for holiday seasons. Which is probably why New Year’s Eve somehow ended up being a favorite holiday of mine. It doesn’t get the chance to drag itself out, it’s easier to make of it what you will, and there’s only so many ways you can sell champagne.

When I relocated to Arizona a few years ago, I discovered that I find a lot of quieter pleasure in taking the time to celebrate what deserves celebrating, and the opportunities that each season brings. Though in Arizona, fall means you get to go outside again, so this might have happened under slight duress. In fact, we wrote this story in the heat of July while dog sitting, unable to get out of Phoenix at its worst.

There are so many cool elements in this story, both around Boston and in the cultural/commercial imagery. Is there anything you’re particularly happy with that you wanted to make sure readers noticed?

CYB: Alleyah mentions seeing a parade of mascots a few weeks before the events of the story. We were vague about it, but our thinking was that would be Black Friday. We realized that for years we both thought “Black Friday” was a nickname given because it was so hellish to be out shopping, but then learned that in fact the name is totally earnest. It’s the day in the fiscal year when many businesses get enough sales to tip over from running in the red to running in the black, making a profit. It’s very mask-off consumerism in a way that even Christmas isn’t, and so it seemed important for us to make that the inciting event.

ADH: The other thing I’d love people to pay attention to is the post-capitalist political economy in the background. The parks and public transit, the way the characters are liberated to make choices based on how they want to live and what they want to contribute, not forced to sell their labor to get the bare necessities of survival. We often come at this world-building obliquely: people complaining about the housing council or about being up early in the free cafeteria, because of course a world freed from capitalism would still have plenty of daily annoyances to gripe about. But hopefully these details help stir the political imagination. I’m big on moody utopias. Once I saw a review of one of my stories that said, “I found it rather boring but it allowed me to dream new dreams.”

What are you working on lately? Is there anything new or forthcoming you can share with our readers?

CYB: I’m finishing up a science fiction novel about a war criminal’s attempts to make amends while she struggles against the mythologization of her legacy, set in the Colorado River watershed mid-geoengineering. So if you liked this story and want something else with weird Superfund sites and how the familiar distorts as it moves through our shared minds (but you’re somehow inexplicably tapped out on beating up mascots), please tell your favorite agents and publishers to call me!

ADH: I’m mostly throwing myself into writing my first proper novel—a gritty, alternate history, socialist utopia detective novel with talking elephants. But I have another story coming out in Lightspeed sometime next year that I hope readers will keep an eye out for. I also have a couple of recent stories in other publications. One is in a free ebook of solar futures called Cities of Light, a collaboration between Arizona State University and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that I worked on quite a bit. (The book also includes great stories from Paolo Bacigalupi, S.B. Divya, and Deji Bryce Olukotun.) The other story is another collaboration, this one with my friend Jay Springett, and is a too-close-to-home tale of ecofascism in Idaho, published in an climate fiction ebook out of Australia called And Lately, The Sun. Lastly, this isn’t new stuff, but if readers liked this story I recommend they go back and check out my last story in Lightspeed, “Voice of Their Generation” (Lightspeed, April 2020) which is about spending all night in Starbucks trying to perfect a screenplay for Detective Pikachu Vs. Predator. In my humble opinion it contends with this story as about the funniest thing I’ve ever written.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Kali Wallace

Jude Griffin | 1344 words

How did this story come about?

This is one of those very rare cases where I can pinpoint exactly where I got a story idea. In November of 2019, I was invited to be a guest at the National Book Festival in Malta. I had never been to Malta before—had never even considered going there—and so I took the opportunity to spend a week exploring and enjoying. (Remember when we could travel? Before the plague? I remember those days.)

In one of the museums, I read about an invasion and siege in 1551, when ships from the Ottoman Empire attacked the island of Gozo and carried away some five or six thousand people, leaving only a tiny number of the island inhabitants behind. I immediately started wondering about those few people left behind, about what you can do when invaders steal away everybody you know, about what’s left when you’re the one who gets away.

This story is not a fictionalized version of that event or a metaphor for that event in any way—being inspired by an event in space and time is not the same thing as writing about that event—but I was definitely compelled by the history to think about different threads of what-if and what-could-be and what-the-hell, and to weave all of those possibilities into something weird and fantastical. Some of the best story ideas come from looking at what happened in history and thinking, “Okay, but what if it was stranger? What does that mean for people? For one person?”

“Salt Warrior” is rich with both familiar and tantalizing cultural clues: barbarians and tricksters, raiders and scavengers, priests and saints, monks and bishops, blessings and prayers, Parable of the Queen of Mists, Latinate names, Caius and the Green King, patriarchy, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. Can you talk about the choices you made in worldbuilding?

A lot of that goes back to the initial inspiration, although obviously it does not stay rooted in the real world. Part of my interest in the vaguely medieval Mediterranean setting was in the presence of a dominating and patriarchal religious system—it’s not quite Fantasy Catholic Church, but it’s also not exactly not that, to be honest, so that’s where the ritualism and structure and Latinate names come from. (The same is not at all true of the mysterious invaders—they are not based in any real world invaders at all and as such bear no similar characteristics. I wanted them to feel wholly Not Of This World, at least as far as what the islanders know about them.) I was aiming for a flavor that evoked the place that had inspired me, even if I wasn’t actually writing about the place that inspired me, if that makes sense.

When we’re writing, the methods we have for establishing how the story feels—the tone and atmosphere of an imaginary world—all come from the words we use and the feelings they evoke. All SF/F is a translation, an exercise in making readers feel the presence of an imaginary world, and that often means drawing in real-world words, descriptions, and reminders that build the setting we want to build.

I also wanted to establish that the world is bigger than it looks from within that system—and connected enough that even people who never leave their homes know about the larger world. There is a tendency in SF/F, I think, to assume that pre-industrial societies means people who are necessarily ignorant and isolated. But that’s never been true in the real world—people have always traveled and traded and warred widely—so there’s no reason for it to be true in imaginary worlds.

Why does the saint arrive in a coffin-shaped box filled with straw and sawdust?

Well, I wrote it that way because it was kinda creepy and also sensible to keep him confined and keep his nice shiny armor from getting scratched. But my writing group immediately decided it meant he was some kind of vampire . . .

So, hey, whatever works! I’m afraid the true, heartfelt reasoning behind that particular choice is “because I thought it was cool.” I’ve learned over the years to let myself go with “because I thought it was cool” more often than not. What’s the point of writing SF/F, after all, if not to give ourselves a chance to play around with all the weird, strange, creepy, inexplicable stuff that catches our fancies? Where’s the fun in not writing about metal-clad blood-drinking boy-saints shipped across oceans in coffins filled with straw?

How has the pandemic impacted your writing and writing life? Any surprises?

I know I’m not alone when I say that writing this year has been a massive, endless, stressful, soul-crushing pain in the ass. I’m not sure any of that counts as a surprise, especially not once it became clear that the US was going to do literally everything wrong that it could do wrong in terms of pandemic response, but it does kinda keep hitting me, over and over again, just how hard it is to focus these days. And I’ve got it easy compared to many people! Writing is my job, I’m fairly healthy and secure, I have no kids to deal with—my situation is so much more stable and manageable than many people’s, and it’s still ridiculously impossible to focus on any kind of creative work.

I’ve adjusted by setting my goals way, way low. Where I used to write 2,000 words a day regularly, I started out earlier this year aiming for 200. Then I aimed for 500. Now I’m aiming for 1,000 and mostly hitting it, but I’ve also had to change how I draft things. I used to be a “write from beginning to end without leaving gaps” kind of writer, because regardless of what happens in the structure and timeline of the story itself, that’s what makes most sense to my brain. But now I find myself leaving huge gaps, not because I don’t know what happens in them, but because I just don’t have the energy to fill them right now.

I am also taking full two-day weekends for the first time in my life. I stop working on Friday afternoon and start on Monday morning, even if I have deadlines. The world is just too exhausting to keep up my previous “work every day for as long as you are enthusiastic” method of writing.

The weekends are good for me, but as for the rest, I hate that the world is the way it is, that none of this had to happen, and I hate that it’s causing so much stress and anxiety for so many creative people. We all still crave the joy that creativity and fiction and imagination bring us, so it seems a little extra mean, to steal that joy away along with so much else. It’s a constant adjustment. I’ve gotten used to that by now, and I’ve figured out how to keep working, but I’m definitely not happy about it.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

My next novel will be coming out on March 2, 2021 from Berkley. It’s an SF mystery/thriller called Dead Space about a unwilling scientist-turned-detective investigating who killed a friend of hers on a remote asteroid mine. It’s got claustrophobic space stations, a grumpy cyborg who is so over this shit, tragic space disasters, artificial intelligences, reluctant allies, evil corporations, and all of it takes place inside an extremely large chunk of rock.

I think it’s a good time, full of fast-paced twists and turns, and I hope readers agree! It’s available for preorder now wherever books are sold—which means from your local indie bookstore, which definitely needs the business right now.

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: Ben H. Winters

Laurel Amberdine | 571 words

Poor Janet just wants to be a good person and do the right thing, but in her impossibly corrupted society, there are no right things, and she doesn’t even have the option of escape. Feels awfully familiar right now. So what came to you first—Janet, or the situation, or something else entirely?

What came first here was not the situation, but the world, the idea for the world. There are obviously quite a lot of dystopian stories out there, in literature and film and TV, much of it dealing with the horror of living in surveillance states, with Big Brother type scenarios, and the terror and the paranoia endemic to those environments. A lot of this stuff is great, some of it classic and enduring, but a lot of it is also unbearably sad and bleak. So at this moment, with totalitarianism in the zeitgeist for obvious reasons, it occured to me it might be fun to turn the idea on its head—give us a more lighthearted, even ridiculous way of thinking about One Party rule. So here she is, this kind of zany all-American character, the working girl balancing life and career, but she’s doing it all under the watchful eye of the Party. The idea just delighted me, which is usually a good sign to start writing.

Did the story give you any surprises as you were writing it?

I think I was surprised by how quickly I came to love this lady I had invented. When we think about these kinds of societies, be it Stalinist Russia or North Korea, they are abstractions, with comic book villains at the helm and huddled faceless masses suffering in obscurity. But of course the people that live in these states are real people, living real lives, trying to find joy, like everyone. So although this idea really was kind of a joke, a bit, for it to work Janet had to be real, to be human and honest in her enthusiasms and her fears. So I fell in love with her, as we do with all of our protagonists.

How are you holding up with . . . everything? Are you still managing to write much?

Oh, thank you. I am so lucky. It is awful and upsetting and anxiety-provoking, obviously, but I am healthy and my family is healthy and I don’t work in an industry that has shut down or suffered waves of layoffs. I miss my parents. I miss my brother and his family. I miss eating at restaurants. But on balance, I am lucky. So, yeah. I am writing a ton. I channel all of my anxiety into work. It’s just what I do. I finished a novel and started a new one; I finished a TV pilot and I’m trying to sell another; in the first month of quarantine I wrote a trio of short stories for Audible, called Inside Jobs, that were about quarantine.

What can readers look forward to from you?

Thanks for asking! Whether they are looking forward to it or not, readers are going to have my next novel, The Quiet Boy, in late May, from my friends at Mulholland Books. And I have another piece for Audible coming out in January, a thriller called Q&A.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: P H Lee

Setsu Uzumé | 1485 words

I really enjoyed the style of this piece, as wry a fable as “How the Emperor . . .” in Escape Pod earlier this year. How did this story come to be?

I wrote my first draft of this story around fifteen years ago so it’s a bit hard to remember its specific origin. (I have a vague memory that I wrote it while in central Finland? But that is all.) It’s part of a series of stories which are all fairy tales told from a secondary fantasy world, which is to say that they are like our fairy tales but a little different. John Joseph Adams and I have named this series Tales From the Great Sweet Sea and I have two more coming sometime soon.

I started writing this series when it became clear to me that I read stories, fairy tales and fables particularly, very differently than other people do. It took until I was a young adult to realize that there are consensus interpretations to most of these stories. “Everybody knows,” for instance, that the moral of Hansel and Gretel is “don’t go into a stranger’s house.” But traditional fairy stories have much more depth than that, and contain all sorts of morals and lessons that depend on the listener and the teller and their respective life experiences. To me, to continue the example, the moral of Hansel and Gretel is “the appearance of kindliness is not the presence of safety.” So I started writing this series of stories to give my minority report on fairy tale morals.

I don’t think it’s an accident that traditional fairy tales support these divergent readings. They’re incredibly flexible stories and they would not have survived to the present had they not fulfilled multiple purposes. They also contain vital messages about how to survive systems which in whatever way exclude or immiserate you, but given their origins within those systems, the messages themselves must be cloaked in metaphor.

Ann-of-Rags reminded me of Vasilisa’s little wooden doll in the Russian folktale, but in this case, the girl doesn’t follow her companion’s advice, and the sacrifice at the end is offset by a kind of humorous indifference. What kinds of storytelling patterns catch your attention, and how do you make them your own?

Fairy tales are great in some ways because they have been aggressively deconstructed several times, resulting in great documents like the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index. Of course, a writer doesn’t actually stick to a specific index, but the way that it views stories as agglomerations of different working parts is extremely insightful.

I end up feeling like there are these motifs and plot elements and other riffs that get used in various stories and the job of telling a fairy tale is to select ones that fit together well and form a proper story shape (of course sometimes they aggressively don’t fit the modern idea of a proper story shape, as in the case of a story like The Turnip from Grimm.)

Anyway, to me, telling a fairy tale is a matter of assembling these riffs into a shape that fits together in a satisfying way and serves to accomplish the goals that you’re trying to accomplish (education or self-expression or entertainment or all of the above or something else entirely). When you do this, you’re behaving like the bricoleur from Claude Levi-Strauss’ anthropological writing: assembling the narrative elements you have available into a Rube-Goldberg machine of a narrative that suits your present situation and understanding. This differs from the way that we normally talk about creative fiction in our culture, wherein the writer creates original ideas whole-cloth and deploys them only in an “elegant” narrative with no extraneous parts. In a fairy tale, by contrast, the ideas are pre-existing and the creativity comes from their assembly and telling. And often in fairy tales there are weird bits and bobs hanging off the edges, which is anathema to modern story-telling aesthetics and which I love dearly.

An interesting thing about doing this is that sometimes you end up with a pre-existing story without entirely knowing it. I have no conscious memory of reading or hearing Vasilisa, although I must have encountered that story before at some point (the skull-full-of-coals is definitely lodged in my memory somewhere). “Ann-of-Rags” was written as a riff on Hansel and Gretel. But I’ve very clearly produced a lot of the same structures as Vasilisa, albeit re-aligned to serve my purposes. Baba Yaga in Vasilisa appears to be wicked, but is in fact helpful (as well as wicked), whereas Bone Grandmother in “Ann-of-Rags” appears to be kindly and helpful, but is in fact wicked. This makes sense, given the message I am trying to convey.

The ending is another point of divergence in service of my own goals. An ending that I am very fond of, which is common in fairy tales and has fallen out of fashion in creative fiction, is “its purpose served, the magic goes away.” This is because, in a very real sense, the goal of childhood is to leave childhood and become an adult. After her experience in the forest, the girl is now an adult, and Ann (her childhood toys and imagination) has helped her survive to that point. What use is it holding on to Ann, then? Practically, it is no use at all. Of course that is extremely sad. Living as an adult means that, for you to exist, the child-you-were has died. I think, in a way, many adults are still mourning themselves-as-children. But it is still better than the alternatives.

What are some concepts or theories you’re intrigued by that haven’t found their way into your work yet?

Just speaking in terms of the fairy tale project, I spent an extraordinarily long time working on various versions of Little Red Riding Hood and have not managed to successfully reconstruct it yet (I’ve only produced a couple of catastrophic failures.)

Lately, I’ve been dwelling a lot in the “visit to the underworld” stories—Orpheus and Eurydice, Persephone and Hades, Inanna and Erishkigal and Dumuzi, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. I think that there’s a common element there that I can’t quite get a grasp on, an important lesson about traumatic memory vs. non-traumatic memory and the process of grief.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the “not story-shaped” fairy tales like The Turnip or The Mouse, The Bird, and the Sausage and trying to figure out if there’s a way that I can understand them well enough to produce a version that a modern fiction-reading audience could engage with.

Whose work do you read that makes you think, “ooh, I’d like to try that!”?

I was really impressed with Allison Thai’s “Saga of the Knapaleith” in Zooscape which manages to be:

A biologically accurate story about arctic foxes

A story about anthropomorphic talking foxes

 A story about a fantasy race with their own culture and traditions

Set in Iceland and about real history

Set in a secondary fantasy world about a fantasy apocalypse

An epic adventure story with a grand quest and a misunderstood heroine

A magical talking animals helping a human story

all at the same time. Being any one or two of these things would be impressive already (and there are some, like the epic fantasy adventure, that I’m still struggling with myself). But the really striking thing is that Allison is doing all of these things—even the apparently contradictory ones—simultaneously. Every sentence, practically every word, advances all of these goals at once. That’s really impressive to me and I’m in awe that it’s even possible. I’d love to get to the point where my writing is precise and efficient enough to tell that many stories at the same time.

What can we look forward to next from you?

I have two more stories in this series coming out at Lightspeed, currently titled “Frost’s Boy” and “The Bear Prince” (like all unpublished stories, the titles are subject to change.) I have a few other short stories in the works as well, including “Your Own Undoing” for the relaunch of Apex Magazine. At some point I may succeed in finishing and selling a novel, but for now my publishing future is short stories and novelettes out to the edge of the horizon.

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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 222 words

Coming up in January, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by D. Thomas Minton (“The Memory Plague”) and Anjali Sachdeva (“The Incorruptible World”), along with SF reprints by An Owomoyela (“The Hard Spot in the Glacier”) and Greg van Eekhout (“On the Fringes of the Fractal”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by P H Lee (“Frost’s Boy”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“Answering the Questions You Might Have About the Kharbat”), and fantasy reprints by Maria Dahvana Headley (“The Orange Tree”) and Liz Ziemska (“The Mushroom Queen”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights. Our nonfiction department is reorganizing a bit, but you can look forward to three fantastic book reviews, and our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Ashok K. Banker, Andrew Dana Hudson, A.T. Greenblatt, Adam R. Shannon, and An Owomoyela.

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.

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

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

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 (recently revived, other) 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

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 Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, 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 our magazines, so they 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 Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed 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.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, 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 three 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 our 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 our Adamant Press magazines, you might also enjoy these works edited by our publisher 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)

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

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus 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.