TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 133, June 2021

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: June 2021

SCIENCE FICTION

The Nation of the Sick
Sam J. Miller

Different People
Timothy Mudie

Inselberg
Nalo Hopkinson

Do Nothing
Endria Isa Richardson

FANTASY

A Tableau of Things That Are
Adam-Troy Castro

Wolf Tones
Sofia Samatar

When You Die on the Radio
Adam R. Shannon

How to Become a Witch-Queen
Theodora Goss

EXCERPTS

The Witness for the Dead
Katherine Addison

NONFICTION

Book Review: Bacchanal, by Veronica G. Henry
LaShawn M. Wanak

Book Review: Day Zero, by C. Robert Cargill
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices, edited by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Adam-Troy Castro

Timothy Mudie

Adam R. Shannon

Endria Isa Richardson

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

© 2021 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Diverspixel / Adobe Stock

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: June 2021

John Joseph Adams | 250 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 133rd issue, and welcome to our eleventh year of publishing great speculative fiction. We couldn’t do it without all of our fantastic readers—so thanks a ton!

We’re kicking off the month with an original short fantasy story by Adam-Troy Castro with “A Tableau of Things That Are.” It’s a commentary on love and marriage and the prison system (a topic he’s addressed before in his story for our sister publication, Nightmare Magazine). Adam R. Shannon (another Nightmare Magazine alum) brings us a story about heroism in firefighting in his deeply affecting “When You Die on the Radio.” We also have fantasy reprints from Sofia Samatar (“Wolf Tones”) and Theodora Goss (“How to Become a Witch-Queen”).

Our science fiction originals grapple with classic SFnal fare: alternate realities and aliens. Timothy Mudie brings us a love story complicated by reality hopping (“Different People”) and in “Do Nothing,” a story set on Alcatraz Island, Endria Isa Richardson weaves an extraterrestrial invasion with a criticism of the penal system (it’s a great match for Castro’s fantasy story). Our SF reprints are from Sam J. Miller (“The Nation of the Sick”) and Nalo Hopkinson (“Inselberg”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from Katherine Addison’s new novel, The Witness for the Dead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include A People’s Future of the United States, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and the three volumes of The Dystopia 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 Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

The Nation of the Sick

Sam J. Miller | 5870 words

Try to picture the scene, Cybil, the same way I did when I got the call.

Christmas Eve; two cops standing in a stinking motel room. Blood on bare white sheets, and a broken syringe, and a man. My brother. Whatever sounds he made, that got the neighbors to call the cops, they’re done now. The overdose is over. He hasn’t died. He won’t, tonight. He’s sick, crying, begging—probably wishing he had died, now that two cops are standing over him and a significant unused amount of heroin. Possession—a third offense—he could be looking at thirty years—nonviolent drug offenses somehow as offensive as murder in the state of Florida.

Rain slants in the open door. Blue and red patrol car lights strobe the walls insistently, almost jovially—the holiday asserting itself, trying to Morse-code mercy into the cops’ cold hard hearts.

I always knew I’d be the one to eulogize you, Cybil. Revolutionaries rarely live long lives while henchmen fare far better. Hence Lenin died at fifty-three while Stalin made it to his seventies. Kissinger’s still kicking at one hundred ten. Et cetera.

But still, in the fictional funerals I imagined for you—crowded rooms rank with the scent of your beloved hyacinths, presidents and prime ministers and slum children united in tears—we were old. I figured you’d run your body down to the ground by sixty, subsisting as you always did on shit food and minimal sleep, and forgetting the most basic aspects of human health care. Exercise, annual physicals, blood pressure medication . . . you were too busy building the technological infrastructure for eradicating exploitation and bureaucracy—to say nothing of dozens of diseases—for any of that. Saving everyone else’s life, even at the cost of your own. I knew you’d burn bright and leave a beautiful corpse, to say nothing of an immeasurably better world.

At the very least I thought you’d do us the favor of giving us a body. Something to bury, and be done with you. Not this elegant disappearance, which has left us with so much heavy, idiotic hope. All these impossible scenarios. Cybil’s ensconced herself in Dubai or Iceland, paying someone to bring groceries and books and keep her hidden. Cybil fell off a yacht, got amnesia, is currently married to a handsome humble carpenter and serving as the stay-at-home stepmom for his four rambunctious boys. In all of these absurd stories, one day you may get your memory back, or decide your experiment in humble isolation is at an end, and emerge. So, we wait.

And so, instead of funeral oratory, an open letter. The full story, about the day we met. About the call I got from my sobbing mess of a big brother, an hour before our appointment.

I hung up on him. He was hysterical, couldn’t hear what I was saying, and I was maybe a little hysterical myself. Anyway I was crying, and angry at him for making me cry. Ten years since he ran away from home to pursue dual careers in mixed martial arts and drug abuse, and I was dismayed to see that my debilitating love for him was undiminished. I hung up on my brother in his moment of greatest need, and then I cursed, took three breaths, and called up my calendar and went online and looked for same-day tickets to Tallahassee.

You were the only entry in my day. Lunch with Cybil, 1PM, Punjab Deli (look her up first). You were nobody to me, just one of a dozen strangers who had reached out to me since that WIRED feature profiled me and nine other SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS MODELING THE FUTURE. You have no idea how close I came to canceling on you, Cybil.

I didn’t get it, back then. I know this sounds strange, coming from the man who just last week was on a magazine cover, standing in a floating fungitecture slum above the immodest headline The Father of the Iterative Modeling Boom (and I swear, Cybil, I tried to tell them what a crock of shit that is—you were mother and father both, I am at best the Gay Uncle of the Iterative Modeling Boom). But it’s the truth: I didn’t get it. Modeling software was where the money was, so that’s where I worked, and I’d had some significant success—hence the article, hence you found me in the first place—but I didn’t believe in it.

People won’t get that, now. Hard to even imagine a time before iterative software farms. Now the Nunnery we built together is only the most successful of hundreds of examples, academic, military, and corporate. They’ve rewritten the rules of architecture, pharmaceutical development, urban planning, and practically every other sphere of human industry, prompting many to declare the end of the era of human software development. Back then, though, they still seemed like playthings for the Pentagon and political campaigns.

I mean, to be fair—to me—back then that’s all they were. But plenty of people saw bigger futures for them. And you—you saw utopia. You saw it, and you built it.

I typed an email to you. So sorry, family emergency, heading for airport. No, let’s reschedule. I didn’t even know why I’d said yes to you. I might have even felt a flicker of gratitude to my dumb fuck-up brother, for giving me the Grand Doozy of all good excuses, to get out of a meeting I had no interest in.

If I didn’t have such an attention deficit, I’d have clicked send. But I do, so I didn’t. Instead I looked at my flight search results first, and saw there was no plane until 8:00 p.m. As simple as that: one mouse click instead of the other, and Cybil and Austin never meet. A massive transformation of the entire world fails to happen. Or, more likely: it happens, just without me as a henchman. History has a way of unfolding in spite of us. Especially when it has a juggernaut like Cybil Natarajan behind it.

I had my smart speaker read me the headlines; the news was always bleak enough to suit my blasted blackened heart. A new round of jailed journalists, vanished lawyers. Three more opposition party legislators had just gone into hiding. Our national plummet off the precipice continued apace.

But then I walked out the door.

I wonder if you remember it, Cybil. That day was so beautiful. Fifty degrees and sunny—eerily warm for the day after Christmas, melting snow and slack winds tempting people outside without jackets.

I took it personally. How dare the weather be so wonderful? How dare they smile so, these people, when I was already grieving for a brother who hadn’t died yet? Unacceptable, all that happiness at being alive.

The day of my mother’s diagnosis had felt like that. My mother and father and me—because by then Colby was down south, calling occasionally, convinced he was just at the edge of breaking through, making it big—the three of us walked out of the oncologist’s office, and into a city full of happy people. How could they hold hands and eat ice cream when my whole world had cracked wide open? Didn’t they see the pain I was in? Or the fear in my mother’s eyes?

That had been my first sojourn in the Nation of the Sick. A state within a state; a country made from pain and fear and untellable secrets. Now I had returned, and I hated Colby for bringing me back.

“Cybil,” I said, when I saw you, because by then I had looked you up.

In person, I thought: fashionista terrorist. Army pants; stylish bright blue blazer; black woolen cowl around your neck. So high it could almost have been a hijab. Vivid eye makeup, but no other cosmetics that I could clock.

I hadn’t bought a ticket. I still didn’t know whether I’d go to Florida or not. Whether it was time to cut the cord on my dumb doomed brother and stop letting him break my heart.

“Austin,” you said. I was five minutes early, and you were already eating. The Punjab Deli only had one stool, presently occupied by a Sikh cab driver. It also had a high counter that extended down a narrow walkway, presently occupied by you and a crowd of standing cab drivers. “Get yourself something to eat.”

So much for my hope that you were working for some big spy agency or arms manufacturer, hoping to woo me with food as a prologue to an overwhelming offer.

I got a samosa, broken up in a styrofoam bowl of curried chickpeas. I scoffed at the sight of it, only to have it become one of my favorite New York City meals. When I turned to join you, your spot at the counter had been taken by a taxi driver, and you were already standing outside.

New York City winter. Dirty snow and panhandlers and the smell of cinnamon beverages. A shithole, but ours. Flooded subway tunnels and thirty square blocks being underwater had helped slow the Lower East Side real estate boom, but the place was still packed with the hip and the handsome.

I never did have any secrets from you, Cybil. Certainly not when it came to my tragic, prolific excuse for a sex life. Every sexy boy who walked by us was more interesting than you were.

“You’re the fifth one I’ve met with,” you said.

A bearded elf-man caught me staring, and grinned. “Fifth . . . one?”

“I’m meeting with all of the developers from that WIRED profile.”

“Why?”

“Looking for a partner.”

I was my brother’s first sparring partner, although not an entirely consensual one. But when he found others, I was sad about it. I missed the attention, even though it had come with bruises and aches. I missed him.

Colby baffled us. My mother and father and I are all cut from the same timid cloth. Docile, obedient, skittish. Mom submitted meekly to three years of cancer-related indignities before they stopped toying with her; my father adapted humbly to widowerhood. My brother was some other sort of beast. The kind of boy who at ten years old was climbing up onto roofs and walking into the homes of strangers for his daily shot of transgressional adrenaline.

But here’s the thing, the special species of asshole he was: he hated hurting people. What a dilemma, for a little lawbreaker! Bullies had it easy; they could punch someone in the throat or throw a rock through a window whenever they needed to feel themselves superior to the laws of God and man. The good-hearted monster must be so much more creative.

Hence, combat sports. The pain, the fear of fighting—he craved it, but only on consensual terms.

And, hence, drugs.

“Twelve iterative modeling programs, running at the same time,” you said. “One takes the problem—you’ve been working in defense, so, let’s say, If I reduce the number of aircraft mechanics working at XYZ Base, what scenarios are likely to result?—but instead of just running the scenarios and being done with it, the program passes the results on to the next one in sequence. And then the next. Each program created by a different developer, with its own quirks and intricacies. Twelve completely different processes for solving a problem. Generating thousands of potential solutions a second, sending the best ones to the human admins for final selection.”

“Sounds amazing,” I said. Not Why twelve? Part of your genius was to fill in the blanks so well that everyone assumed there was a good explanation.

I kept thinking: I always knew this day would come. The moment when I say goodbye to my brother forever. Not because he’s dead, but because I’d finally learn how to stop loving him. To let him go. I’d tried before, but never succeeded. Because some people we can’t save. Some people, for as long as we spend trying, we’ll never be able to become who we need to be.

“Why are you talking to me about it?” I asked. “I know you know how to put together a business plan, get a meeting with some venture capital bros.”

“I’m not involving venture capital at all. I want complete autonomy and control over what we build. Because it will change the world, and I won’t let big money do so for the worse.”

This much, I knew. You’d been vocal about it even back then. You’d established yourself by building a company around an app that optimized bicycle routes around prevailing winds, which was acquired by Seamless, who gave you two million dollars and a cushy job—which you quit in protest when you found it was being used to punish deliverymen who veered off its suggested routes.

No venture capital. Complete autonomy. That kind of crazy talk was in the air in those days.

Back then, anyway, it was crazy talk.

Every morning, I gather up a list of all the new creations for you. Even though you’re not here anymore to review them. Small stuff, mostly. Slight tweaks on biofuel manufacture; new recipes for protein slurry; monomolecular filament refinement. Some of the fledgling floating city-states in the new Arctic frontier are already experimenting with AI governance, along the lines the Nunnery first started sketching out ten years ago.

Big deals happen about once a week. This morning I watched scientists take a jagged little crystal—engineered from a Nunnery recipe—and drop it into a bottle of seawater and shake it up for sixty seconds. It crystallized all the salt out of the solution, leaving behind clean drinking water with a little quartz at the bottom. Desalination, with minimal energy consumption. A far cry from the petroleum-intensive approaches that have been the best we could do for decades. Brilliant.

But best of all, thanks to a whole lot of intricate patent law precedent-setting you orchestrated, with the help of that master corporate strategist I found for you: because it was created by the Nunnery, it’s still considered our intellectual property. No one can patent it. No one can exploit it. Copyright on anything created by a product resides with the person who created the product in the first place. Anyone can use the creations of our creation, even build a business around it, but only if they agree to a very strict set of profit sharing and worker empowerment rules. Licensing terms you set fifteen years ago—which everyone said were insane and antithetical to capitalism at the time—have now become business norms.

• • • •

To book, or not to book. I had enough money for the flight to Tallahassee. I was between projects. I could afford to step away from the city for a couple of weeks.

But my dad had told me to stop sending Colby money, to stop giving him additional chances. Every other week, Dad found a new article about how family members of addicts could stop enabling and being exploited by their sick relatives.

“That social media hack was a great trick,” you said. “I need someone who knows how to ask the unasked questions.”

“I don’t know how many unasked questions I have left,” I said, eyes on the ass of some fetching young thing on a bike.

My big idea had been to populate the military’s urban operation simulation software exercises with actual people scraped from social media in the areas of proposed operation. Those were real faces on the civilians passing through the streets of the VR run-throughs that soldiers had to log fifty hours in before being deployed to Caracas or Tehran or Kandahar. Blow up a block of buildings and you’d see a scroll of actual baby pictures. Not just for the grunts in the first-person shooter portion, either. The generals got names and faces in their reports, too.

Not such a big idea, not really, but it happened during a huge Department of Defense marketing push to turn iterative modeling software designers into celebrities. And it was controversial enough that I got a lot of calls from journalists. What do you say to people who say you’re helping the military develop new tools for surveillance and privacy invasion, which could potentially be used against civilians? I personally didn’t have anything to say to people like that—because I didn’t care, not then, not before you—but the DoD did, and they’d supplied me with this: All personal information has been stripped, and names are randomized. This is about putting a real face on abstract war games. This is about making the military more human, not less.

The fetching young thing biked away, abandoning me.

“I’m not sure I’m in the market for a partner right now, honestly.”

“Venture capital’s day is done,” you said, unruffled by my opposition, if you noticed it at all. “Silicon Valley’s scorch-and-burn suck-them-dry tactics will soon come to seem as backward as child labor.”

And while you spoke? I believed. Ignorant as I was, and as hard as I was trying to think about sex as a distraction from worrying about my brother, I couldn’t help but see that you were special.

Your army of iterative software agents, they would conquer the world. What couldn’t they accomplish, free from corporate manipulation? What couldn’t they create, unfettered by the limits of the human?

He just happened to walk by. A total stranger, one of millions of anonymous miserable New Yorkers we walked by every day and turned our eyes away from. The sick, the old, the broken. The mad. Living in this city meant hardening your heart to them, I’d always believed, but that day my heart wasn’t hard enough. That day, because of my brother, I saw him. Really saw him.

And he saw me. Still human, under the years and the city’s slime. He saw me, and he smiled.

Sixth grade—springtime—staring out the window of my math class, aching to be out there—when Colby appeared in the classroom doorway like an answered prayer. Four years older than me, he was in high school already, so only something significantly wrong could explain his presence there.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, ma’am,” he said to the teacher. “But I gotta take my brother with me to the hospital. It’s our mom.”

I was crying by the time we walked out the middle school’s front door. Blaming myself, for wanting a way to get out of class—and here came God like the asshole that he was, giving me an afternoon off at the cost of my mother’s life.

“Stop crying, stupid,” he said, all sadness gone from his face. “Mom’s fine.”

His shitty old car was double-parked, hazards on. We got inside. He asked me, “Where do you want to go?”

My breath hitched, at the enormity of what was being offered. “Anywhere?”

“Anywhere.”

“Albany,” I said. “The mall.”

We went. We got ice cream. He bought me video games. We rolled our windows down all the way and the wind screamed through his car and we played our music too loud and the world was ours and nothing could stop us.

I’d remember that day often. He’s still in there somewhere, I’d tell myself. The boy who loved me, who wanted me to have fun, and fuck the rules if they tried to stop us. But I’d remember it too on the day my mom got her diagnosis, when Colby was nowhere in sight, and on the day of her funeral, when he was likewise absent. I told myself it was his fault, his doing, belated karma for that afternoon of fraudulent freedom.

Inexpensive, medically identical synthetic blood has extended the average American lifespan by four years. We did that.

Bizarre solar energy capture modules, which resemble bushes heavy with tiny metal leaves, have slashed carbon emissions in the developed world by 40 percent, and every year it drops another 6 or 7 percent. We did that.

Floating city construction.

New opioids that aren’t addictive.

Recreational pharmaceuticals to painlessly reach a thousand different states of mind.

Government offices that make decisions impassionedly, with no window for human corruption to intervene.

You were right, that I was good at asking questions. Like, how can we make cheap durable stackable homes?

Fungitecture was our first big success. A software-engineered mushroom species that grows fast and fills a mold to produce a material as strong as cement, as light as Styrofoam, and cheaper than cotton. Like shipping containers, but at a tenth of the cost—and they float. That’s the most important part these days. Two percent of the planet’s population live in fungitecture homes today, including all thirteen thousand citizens of Tuvalu, floating over the ruins of their sunken homeland, and the eighty thousand climate refugees they’ve admitted.

I had so many questions, once I let myself start asking them.

“Austin?” you said, seeing my face go slack. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. I wasn’t. That random damaged man had moved on, but I had not.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

You nodded. Your eyes locked onto mine and didn’t let me look away.

Once you’d gone, I opened up a sex app. Growled or woofed at a couple dozen gentlemen in the space of two minutes. Started typing more detailed messages to the ones who’d growled back.

It was no good. My heart wasn’t in it. To my great shame, something other than sex was weighing too heavily on my mind.

I dialed the number Colby had called me from. He answered immediately, his voice a whisper:

“Austin?”

“Hey, brother,” I said, hating how my heart hurt at the weakness in his voice, making my own more cheerful in allergic response. “This your new cell number?”

“It’s a strip mall pay phone,” he mumbled. “Across the highway from the motel they kicked me out of.”

“Jesus Christ, Colby,” I said, looking at my phone for the time at which he’d called me. “You mean to tell me you’ve been standing by the pay phone for the past three hours?”

“Sitting, actually. The sun is nice.”

“Florida’s got that going for it, at least.”

“Florida’s not so bad,” he said. “I don’t know why you guys are so down on it.”

Doors slammed, somewhere. On his end, or mine? Tears somehow blurred my ears as well as my eyes. Made me unsure where and when and what I was. “You okay, Colby?”

“Yeah,” he said, which is what he always said, no matter how badly he was bleeding. “Sorry about before. I just kind of lost it.”

“Of course you did, buddy. You almost fucking died.”

“Dying didn’t scare me,” he said.

“What did?” I said, and now it was me who was whispering. “What happened, Colby?”

I’d gone to visit him only once.

The fights, I didn’t mind. They weren’t my thing, but there was something pure about them, something compelling in the contest of brains and brawn. What gay boy is completely immune to the spectacle of two sweaty mostly naked men grappling on the ground together?

What made me sick were the managers and promoters who made or broke a fighter. The moneymen behind the scenes who kept good fighters grinding away in obscurity while less skilled ones got the big matches that made the big money. Shit was unfair, what the fuck else was new?

So I stayed away. From all of that, and from the rest of his messy life. The drugs, the girls, the alcohol. When he called me, high, I’d talk to him. Listen, mostly. Big theories about the deeper meaning of a Pixies song or a Biggie lyric. Elaborate plans for how to work the system, game the gamers, get the stardom he deserved. I know how they work, how they think, he’d say, how to play them, how to burn it all down. He refused to see how screwed he was, how helpless.

That optimism, that faith—it had always been as alien to me as his addictions. And just as pitiable.

Then, though—on the phone—I envied his belief so acutely that it actually made me cry.

I said goodbye. I hung up the phone. I booked the ticket to Tallahassee.

You scared me, Cybil. Of course you know that. That was always your thing, a look and attitude you cultivated. Spiky hair, jagged metal jewelry. The whole way to the airport, I kept thinking about you. A good sign, I thought. It showed I was less scared for my brother’s life.

I had to take three buses to get to the airport. Construction of the Trillion-Dollar Fool-Proof Flood Locks had shut down most of the FDR, and the Real Estate Riots were in their sixth month. Not being underground, I could research you at greater length.

Intensity: that’s what I saw when I looked in your eyes. That’s what most people saw, to judge by all your press coverage. Now, though—I don’t think that’s what it was.

I read eleven of your interviews, in the interminable trip between La Guardia terminals. You called out the tech sector’s casual solipsism, skin-deep liberalism, how we talked a good talk but never walked the walk, how we were “woke” on Twitter and thought that was enough. How the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and would continue to do so until the Silicon Valley rank-and-file—and workers everywhere—got off their fucking asses.

And somewhere in all of that, something else started to shift.

You quoted some old novel or short story: It’s not enough to hold justice in our hearts like a secret. Justice must be spoken. Must be embodied.

Something else you upended. The casual cynicism of our politics; the toxic partisanship; the hypocrisy and the apathy. Now we look back at those dark years and shiver, seeing clearly how close we came to becoming another one of history’s cautionary tales of a nation committing suicide via nationalism.

• • • •

“What happened?” I asked Colby for a third time, when I called from the airport.

“I’ll tell you later,” he said. “I just . . . I needed to hear your voice. It’s stupid. I’m sorry. I know you’re real busy these days—”

“I’m on my way,” I said. “I’m at La Guardia. My flight leaves at five fifteen.”

“Really?” he said, and I heard the tears start on his end, which kicked them off on mine as well.

“Of course,” I said. “Of course I’m coming, Colby.”

Here is what happened. Colby didn’t tell me until we were together, late that night, eating bad delivery food on the bed of a better hotel than the one he’d almost died in.

Try to picture the scene again, Cybil. The half-dead junky on the bed; the rain in the open door. The two cops. Flashing squad car lights. Christmas music from the next room over. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer too loud on the television; citizens of the Island of Misfit Toys singing songs of their lost homelands.

Lying on his side, mid fetal position, Colby locked eyes with the cops and begged. Waited for them to reach for the cuffs.

“The Black cop, I think maybe he recognized me,” Colby said. “Maybe he saw me fight, somewhere. Maybe that’s why he did what he did.”

I guess that’s possible. It’s also possible that my brother wanted desperately to construct a narrative where something other than blind dumb luck kept him from spending the rest of his life in prison.

Whether he was a fight fan or he just didn’t want to do the paperwork or he really and truly had the Christmas spirit—or all of the above—or for some other unknowable reason altogether, the Black cop put his hand on his partner’s shoulder and tilted his head at the door, and the other guy looked startled, nodded, and then followed him out.

The strobing lights darkened. The car started. The cops drove away. Christmas carols continued, coming from across the wall. Colby cried and did not move, not for a long long time. Convinced they might come back. That they were fucking with him. That Florida could not contain such good fortune, not for him, anyway.

“It’s Austin,” I said, when you answered the phone. It was 2:00 a.m. in Tallahassee—What time is it in New York? I thought to wonder, but of course it was 2:00 a.m. for you too. My brother slept in the bed beside me. My hand was on his arm, like I could hold him tight and keep him safe, like I could save him from a savage world. “I’m in, Cybil. If you’ll have me, I want to be your partner.”

One week later, I went home alone. Hopeful, but not confident. Colby in rehab. His stuff in storage. His word he’d call every day. His unuttered plea to come live with me when he got out.

You called me for lunch, this time at Little Poland. A booth in the back. Plates and plates of pierogies. Our second meeting, and I didn’t know ‘til it was over that I had been on the clock since I’d sat down, that I already worked for you.

“What’s wrong?” you’d asked. “When we met before—and even today—you’re troubled by something.”

So I told you. Just the basics: big brother’s an addict; almost died; didn’t.

“Bring him in,” you said. “He needs a job, or something. Right? If he’s gonna stay sober. We can find something for him.”

Of course there’s more to Colby’s recovery than me getting on a plane. Most of it, you already know—most of it was your doing—how you figured out, over Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles, where his skills sets were: how effortlessly he could play people, the same way he’d played my middle school math teacher; how he, like you, wanted to burn it all down. How you bought him a suit and set him up with three investor meetings. It’s a long complicated messy story, but it isn’t this one. This is just the story of how I said yes to him, and yes to you. I’m telling it to you, Cybil, but I’m also telling it to myself. I’m finally understanding: we can change our minds, and we can change the world, but we can’t change who we are.

For years I wondered: why me? How did you walk away from that bench—and from me, with all my arrogant disinterest—and think, that’s the one? Even when I called to tell you I was in, I felt sure I’d flunked the interview. I knew why I wanted to be on your team, but I couldn’t imagine why you wanted me there.

I get it, now. I know why you chose me. Telling this story, writing this progress-report-turned-obituary, I see what it was. And I can turn this obituary into a goodbye letter.

Those other hotshot Titans of Iterative Modeling Software, boys and girls juiced up on the WIRED star treatment and exploding social media mentions—any one of them would have been smarter, more ambitious, more energetic than me. You always saw people as they were, no matter how they tried to hide the truth of who they were from others and from themselves. You’d have seen the hunger in their eyes. The hustle.

What you saw in my eyes was pain. Panic. The certainty that I’d lost my brother forever—the knowledge that maybe it hadn’t happened that day, maybe he’d survived that overdose, but he wouldn’t survive the next one, and if something didn’t happen to disrupt the status quo of his long, lonely self-destruction, he wouldn’t stop taking the risks that would eventually put him on the wrong end of a back-alley switchblade or a tainted shot or a fatal shared syringe.

You saw it in my eyes, and you recognized it.

You, too, are a citizen of the Nation of the Sick.

I see that now. I never did before. I bought your PR, even though I wrote most of it and so I should have known it was bullshit. That haunted look that sometimes flickered in your eyes—I imagined it was intensity, drive, the inexhaustible determination to bring a better world into being against all the formidable forces that opposed us.

And, yes, you contained all those things.

But you were something else as well. You were sick. Sick enough to one day take yourself out of the world completely. None of us noticed. Your fans, your followers, your henchpeople . . . we never saw your sickness. That’s our failing, our guilt to carry—that we saw you every day, and never saw you. Never offered you the help you needed.

I’m sure you’re gone for good. I know better than anyone how you think. You chose a death that would leave no body. There are millions of them out there. You chose something mysterious and open-ended enough that the vultures who’ve tried for years to take us down would never have a corpse to point to, to know when it’s time to pounce. But the bottom line, I believe, is: you chose death.

Colby is convinced he’ll find you. As our charming, gregarious corporate strategist travels the globe, helping build worker-owned coop incubators and collectives of gutter-punk coders who analyze and refine and write manuals for the bizarre new fruits our tree bears, he scours every crowded street he comes down. Every market square. He even had the Nunnery craft an algorithm to scan for your face in the feeds of every public traffic cam on the planet. He loves you, the poor dumb puppy. Same as me. You made him what he is—although he thinks it was you and me, but I know how that’s bullshit, how you were making me at the same time as you made him. You turned me into someone who believes in something, and you turned him into someone whose unconventional skill set could be put to positive use—and he can’t accept that he’ll never get to thank you for it.

Against protocol and all probability, a cop takes pity on a sad-sack, broken-down, dope-sick ex-fighter. A direct flight to Tallahassee is a few extra hours away, so an asshole boy takes a meeting he’d otherwise skip. A homeless man happens to walk by; happens to slow down to make eye contact; happens to smile. If any one of those things hadn’t happened, my life suddenly looks a whole lot grimmer. So does the whole fucking world, for all I know.

Citizenship in the Nation of the Sick means knowing how fragile our happiness is, how accidental our comfort, how little it takes to turn the warmest sunny day into dark cold night. We citizens of the Nation of the Sick, we know that all we have is the people we love. The ones we can save, and the ones we can’t.

©2020 by Sam J. Miller. Originally published in Entanglements, edited by Sheila Williams. Reprinted by permission of 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 Astounding 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.

Different People

Timothy Mudie | 5026 words

You never expect to meet one of the refugees. You aren’t a scientist or a politician, you’re a middle school history teacher. The story of the refugees from a destroyed parallel Earth—security camera footage of dozens of bedraggled people appearing through a shimmering section of air not far from Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado—should fade into the background of your life like every other major news story and tragedy, present but mostly forgotten. So much bigger than you that it doesn’t feel entirely real. Instead, your doorbell rings six months later and when you open the front door a dark-haired woman stands there who you don’t recognize, but who looks at you with an expression of such naked joy that you brighten instantly and feel an urge to hug her right there on the spot.

“Have you met me?” she asks without preamble. “You’re my husband.” Which is one hell of an introduction. On another Earth, you were this woman’s husband, left behind when the world ended. Wiped out of existence with the rest of her old universe.

You get the sense that Rachel would gladly bring you to town hall and get married right then and there, and the idea holds a certain appeal—you’ve never felt confident connecting to anyone, let alone a woman, and you’ve been alone for so long, you’ve begun to doubt you even know how to talk to people anymore. Your anxiety always overcomes you, making you worry about sounding stupid or giving accidental offense, spurring endless second-guessing and apologies until conversation and connection withers away. Your therapist, when you still went to see him, told you this is in your head, that if you live in the moment more you’ll experience things differently, better. So, you invite Rachel in for coffee. Which, at her suggestion, turns into a few fingers of rye whiskey because this is a pretty mind-blowing development and you both figure the liquor will steady you. It doesn’t occur to you to wonder how she’d know you drink rye, but when you think about it later you aren’t surprised.

There’s no kiss that night. It isn’t love at first sight. That heady combination of curiosity and feeling desired creates a different emotion, one you’re never able to name, even years later.

• • • •

You’re late for your fifth date, a car accident delaying you by almost half an hour. Flustered, you burst into the Italian bistro Rachel suggested, find her seated in a corner booth, bottle of wine and two glasses already on the table. She pours as you sit, smiling away your apology.

The two of your clink glasses, and as you sip the wine, you notice Rachel watching with anticipation. “It’s delicious,” you tell her. “What kind is it?”

“Montepulciano.” Rachel observes the wine swirling in her glass. “Luckily, this vintage was a good one here too.”

You smile shyly. “I don’t really know much about wine.”

To her credit, Rachel hides her surprise well, though you still catch it.

“Did your husband know a lot about wine?”

“We shouldn’t . . . We don’t have to talk about him,” Rachel says, but you tell her it’s okay. That you don’t mind, even though your heart puckers. He was Rachel’s true love, and you worry you can’t live up to him. It’s not as if she’s talking about some high school boyfriend.

“He did,” she says. “He introduced me to wine, and I got so interested in it that pretty soon I knew even more about it than he did. From a scientific perspective at least. He was always better at the intangibles. Bouquet, picking up flavors.”

“He sounds . . .” You don’t actually have any response. For a long, awkward moment, neither of you speak, and you fear you’ve blown it. Now you’ll be alone again.

Rachel reaches across the table and wraps her fingers around your wrist. “I’m really enjoying getting to know you.” A subtle but unmistakable emphasis on that last word.

“I’m glad you found me,” you say. And then, because you’ve wondered, and this feels like it might be the only time to ask. “Have you looked for yourself? Here, I mean, the other version of you.”

She shakes her head. “We’re not supposed to do that.”

“You weren’t supposed to contact me, either.”

“True. And my case worker was not pleased.” She rolls her eyes. “This world’s version of me? I don’t care. I know we didn’t follow the same career path, or I would’ve met her already. She’d probably disappoint me, to be honest.”

Three months later, Rachel and you do find yourselves at the town hall signing a marriage certificate. Five years pass and sometimes you believe that you’ve both slipped into that other Earth, that you really have been her husband all along.

• • • •

Rachel works as a quantum physicist, contracted with the government. When colleagues or people at dinner parties ask you what that entails, you laugh self-deprecatingly and say, “Oh god, I could repeat the words she’s said, but I have no idea what they mean.” Something related to parallel universes. Contacting them or peering into them or harnessing the excess energy they leak into our own. Some combination of all that. Your liberal arts brain can’t hold onto all the jargon, all that science stuff.

You ask Rachel one night, sitting on the couch together in your living room. Neither of you has bothered to hang anything on the walls. “What do you actually do? What’s the goal? What does the government want from you?”

She mulls it over for long enough that you wonder if she might not answer, but finally, carefully, as if unsure what she’s allowed to admit, she says, “We’re trying to replicate the experiments I did back in my universe. To see what other universes are out there. And . . . and to see if mine still exists.”

“It . . . there might . . .?” A lump rises in your throat, and you try to swallow it, but can’t. Panic. Heartache. “Do you . . . if it is still there, would you go back?”

“No! God, no.”

“You wouldn’t be tempted to look for him?” You try to avoid talking about her original husband, the other you.

She shakes her head. You feel relieved, a minute loosening of the pressure on your heart. “If there’s anything left, it’s all chaos and destruction anyway. The universe might technically still exist, but I doubt anything’s alive in it.”

This answer doesn’t comfort you.

• • • •

Before Rachel plummets into her work completely, the two of you take a vacation to Puerto Rico. She knows she will be away from home for long hours, working intensely. You can spend some time together, just the two of you.

Sipping tropical drinks on the beach, eating mofongo in Old San Juan, taking a nature tour through the El Yunque rainforest. You feel so comfortable with your wife, your fingers intertwined like on those earliest dates, when hesitancy blossomed into confidence. You think the two of you kiss more over those ten days than every other day of your marriage combined.

You return home refreshed and infatuated. It isn’t until a week later, Rachel late getting home from her laboratory, that you realize how strange it is that Rachel knew her way around the island so well. You had thought of the trip as a honeymoon before her research project ramped up. But maybe once, for Rachel, Puerto Rico had been a honeymoon of a different sort. You wonder which trip was better, how often she compared this trip to her first time sitting on those beaches, hiking that rainforest.

You don’t ask her. You think you’d rather not know.

• • • •

The work is so important, Rachel says. It could change the world. It would be almost impossible for a discovery of this magnitude not to change it irrevocably. Surely, you’ll understand. You won’t complain when she’s away for days on end, coming home for just long enough to grab a few changes of clothes. Not even to shower because she’ll do that at the lab. She can’t or won’t explain what she’s working on, why it’s so important, how it will change the world. Whether that change will be for the better or worse.

You wonder if the other you ever complained.

You do what you promised yourself you’d never do. You go online, search her name. Scroll the results, scour social media profiles, examine pictures. You find her. Your wife. This Earth’s version.

She doesn’t live far away, and if she’s anything like your Rachel, she won’t mind you showing up on her doorstep unannounced.

• • • •

It’s a four hour drive each way. You’ll probably have to spend the night in a motel, but you suspect Rachel won’t notice. Before she left this morning, she told you the team is close to a breakthrough, that they’re perfecting the technology from her Earth, fixing what went wrong. You understand this to mean that she’ll be in the lab for at least the next forty-eight hours.

Despite your straightforward plan, you can’t bring yourself to knock on Rachel Two’s door. It feels too presumptuous, an invasion. What if a husband answers? A child? What if she answers, but thinks you’re a crazy person? Your Earth’s versions of the refugees were never informed about their doppelgangers—an attempt to ensure privacy for both parties. Maybe she’ll assume you’re a stalker. Sitting in your car, parked three houses down from Rachel Two’s address, you check your hair in the rearview mirror, adjust your collar, attempt to look as sane and nonthreatening as possible.

Unable to bring yourself to knock on Rachel Two’s door, and realizing there’s a limit to how long you can reasonably sit in your car without drawing suspicious neighbors, you drive to a motel. Check into a room. Rack your brain for other ways to introduce yourself. Nothing comes to mind that isn’t creepy. You lie down and stare at the ceiling. Morning comes. You must have dozed off. Defeated, you head to get a coffee before driving home. You fumble your overstuffed wallet trying to extract your credit card. As you bend to pick it up, you hear a gasp, and turn to see Rachel. The one from your Earth. Rachel Two. Staring at the picture of you and your wife that holds pride of place in your wallet’s center panel.

• • • •

“It’s a lot to wrap my head around,” Rachel Two says. She hasn’t taken a single sip of the latte you bought her. Skim milk, no sugar, same as your Rachel. “The me from the other Earth—the destroyed Earth—she found you, but didn’t want to find me. Like she was—what? Blocking me from meeting you? What would’ve happened if you met me first?”

You’ve wondered this more and more since Puerto Rico. You shrug and finger the disposable lighter in your pocket. Smoking appalls you, but you carry the lighter for Rachel’s cigarettes. She always says she’s going to quit, but when she’s stressed, one miraculously appears between her bitten-nailed fingers. Though Rachel Two must be at least as frazzled as you are, she doesn’t smoke during your hour-long conversation. Not the faintest whiff of stale mucky smoke wafts across the table from her clothes or hair. Here’s a difference, you think. Already, this woman is not the same as your wife.

You inhale deeply. Smell only coffee and autumn air.

“It’s so lucky we ran into each other like this,” Rachel Two says, reaching out to barely tap your knuckles with her fingertips. No ring on her finger. She chuckles. “Like—I don’t know—fate.” You didn’t tell her why you were in town, and she hasn’t asked. Given everything else, that must seem like such a mundane question.

“Could I . . . talk to you again?” you ask. You hadn’t intended this, you don’t think. But really, you don’t know what your intentions were, coming out here, not telling your wife where you were going. You told yourself you needed to see, to meet this other woman who was maybe supposed to be your wife if Rachel hadn’t found you. If her world hadn’t destroyed itself, sending survivors tumbling into your own.

“I don’t know,” Rachel Two says. “It’s weird.”

You try not to appear crestfallen, but apparently fail. You’ve never been good at hiding your emotions. A lot of people seem put off by that, but not your wife. Or she doesn’t notice. Or ignores them. You’ve never broached the subject, afraid of the answer.

“Why don’t you leave me your number,” this Rachel says. “Maybe I’ll call.”

• • • •

Back home, Rachel doesn’t mention missing you. Probably because she never noticed you were gone while she was working nonstop in the lab, sleeping on a couch in her office for an hour here or there. Whatever she and her government employers are studying obsesses her, obsesses her entire team. Once, shortly after you met, when Rachel claimed she that the experience of losing everything had changed her and inspired her to give up her research, she admitted that she’d let her work consume her in her original universe.

“It spun out of control,” she said. “Everything spiraled. If only I could have controlled it, held on tighter . . .”

She wouldn’t say anything else when you asked her to elaborate, and never brought it up again. You don’t bring it up either. She may not be especially aware of other people, but she understands herself, her limits. When she gets in too deep, she’ll know. You tried to stop her when she began drifting back toward the laboratory, toward her old research. She explained it would be different, shrugged you off. Trying to drag Rachel away from a decision she’s made is a fool’s errand.

• • • •

Your wife is in the shower when the other Rachel calls you. You don’t recognize the number, of course, but your phone says the call originates in Rachel Two’s town, and you immediately know it’s her. Your throat fills with your heart, and your toes unconsciously wiggle. If it turns out to be a telemarketer, the disappointment will crush you.

But it’s not. It’s her.

“Hello,” you say. The instant you hear the other Rachel’s voice, you step from the bedroom, away from the en suite bathroom. Somewhere more private. You tell yourself you’re hiding this conversation from your wife because she wouldn’t understand. Wouldn’t get that you’re talking to your Earth’s Rachel so that you can know yourself better. Know your wife better too. She’s a physicist, and Rachel Two runs an environmental nonprofit. Both smart, both driven, but different. If you figure out why . . . But you still barely raise your voice above a whisper, tuck yourself into the remotest corner of the house.

“I’m glad you called,” you say. “It was . . . nice drinking coffee with you.”

You know this is the way affairs start.

• • • •

The rest of the world learns what your wife and her team are really studying at the same time you do. Maybe a few minutes before. You’re pretty sure you miss the first news report.

When Rachel comes home from work—early, presumably to avoid reporters and associated fallout—she drops her oversize purse on the table by the front door, fishes out a pack of cigarettes and lighter, and makes for the back porch.

“Rachel,” you say, hesitant, unable to believe she truly intends to walk right past you without a word of explanation, without even a hello.

“Please not now,” she says. “I know you hate the smoking, and I’m quitting, I swear. But the day I’ve had, you can’t imagine—”

You burst out laughing. “Of course I can imagine. I’ve been watching news coverage for six hours straight. Trying to call you too. Text.”

“I turned my phone off,” she says. “Fucking reporters won’t stop calling. I don’t know how they got my number. Probably from the same sneaky fuck who leaked the project in the first place.”

“It’s true? Rachel, it’s not true.”

Her sigh answers better than her words. “More or less.”

“More or—?” your indignation sputters. “Which parts are more and less?”

You can tell she doesn’t want to answer. She never wants to answer. The you on her Earth must have been just as scared of confrontation, equally as willing to go along with whatever anyone wants in order to avoid the wash of panic and shame that comes with being wrong. Being told you’re wrong.

“It’s not a weapon,” Rachel finally says. “Not here and not back in my universe. It never was. The connection between universes, that infinite liminal space surrounding everything, it could be such a source of power. You can’t even conceive it.”

Hurt must cross your face, because she clarifies. “No one can truly conceive it. It’s too large. That’s what I’m trying to do, what I was trying to do before—save the world, get rid of fossil fuels. Free power for everyone.”

“The government’s going to provide the world with free power,” you say, voice dripping with skepticism.

“Fine,” she admits. “But it’s a start. And the research itself—the rush . . .” She looks down like she’s embarrassed. The unlit cigarette jerks up and down between her fingers. She glances at the door. You nod and follow her to the porch, where she immediately lights up. You consider saying something, decide not to.

Rachel smokes, and you sense that she is waiting for you to ask the question on the tip of your tongue. Except you’re afraid of the answer. Afraid it will be true.

“Did your experiment destroy your world?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Did your work kill your husband?”

“You’re my husband.”

“I’m your backup,” you snap. Later, you’ll replay this conversation in your head over and over. Mull all the different things you could have said. You’ll regret this response, and then you won’t, and then you’ll regret that you don’t regret it before finally deciding it was the right thing to say. Sometimes you need to give voice to your greatest fear.

Three times Rachel scoffs, an engine unable to catch. She shakes her head and lights another cigarette with the ember of the first, drops the butt into an empty planter. “Science is messy,” she says. “Progress hurts sometimes. My other husband understood that. He never begrudged me my research.”

“And look where he is now,” you say, so bold your stomach churns.

“Christ,” Rachel says, and throws her cigarette into the dark. While she retreats inside, you chase after the tiny orange glow, extinguishing it in the grass. By the time you get into the house, she’s gone. No note, no text for an hour. It doesn’t matter. You know she’s returned to the lab.

You stare at the blank television for a long time. Then you stare at your blank phone screen. Then you call the other Rachel.

• • • •

“No,” you say, “Rachel is the first relationship I had that lasted longer than a month.” Instantly, you wish you had lied. But you want to be honest with Rachel Two. You want her to understand you like Rachel understood the you from the other universe. Rachel Two still doesn’t know you were in town specifically to find her. You know you should confess, decide that this is the moment, even part your lips and start to speak, but she talks first.

“I’m the opposite,” she says. “A serial monogamist. One boyfriend to the next, and the minimum length was—god—ten months? And that was in college.”

“After that long, you can just let it go?” you ask.

“It’s not like it doesn’t hurt,” Rachel Two says. “Of course it does. But I feel like, if you’re miserable, why stick with something? There’s other fish in the sea, you know?”

You’re in your car, parked in the lot of a Dunkin Donuts a town away, chatting on speaker phone and sipping a cold brew coffee for the first time. You’ve never had one before, don’t see a whole lot of difference between it and normal coffee to be honest.

“I’d be too worried about making the other person mad,” you say. “I wouldn’t want them to hate me.”

“What if they already did?”

You don’t have an answer for that. You take another sip of coffee. Maybe it does taste different. Subtly, but unmistakable.

• • • •

For two weeks Rachel barely speaks to you. You still share a bed, but don’t touch in it. So, you’re surprised when she speaks to your back in the dark one night.

“My husband—my first husband—he never worried about me. He figured I knew what I was doing, that we all knew what we were doing, and he didn’t ask questions about it.”

You roll halfway over, but when Rachel clams up, you stop, allowing her to go on without fear of seeing judgment or forgiveness in your eyes.

“It took us decades to discover a way to travel between universes—I started studying as a doctoral candidate—and even then it was heavily theoretical. Crossing over to here, actually opening a portal, that was pure desperation. The world, my home, it was . . . Things were bad there. We didn’t have a choice, we didn’t have time to wait for everyone we wanted to travel here with us. My husband over there . . .” She shudders slightly, a goose walking over her grave. “I intended to do better here. With the project. With you.”

It takes a long few seconds for you to respond. What you come up with is neither soothing nor clever. “Good intentions.”

“I know,” Rachel says softly, and you immediately feel guilty. You didn’t expect her to agree with you—you never do. You think she might not say anything more, but she does. “You do know that I love you. I loved him, but I love you as well.”

There’s a difference between love and comfort, and you wonder whether Rachel knows that. You’ve wondered it a million times, lying next to her sleeping body at three in the morning, sitting across from her at dinner when she insists that you’d like lobster if only you’d try it again. Does she truly love you, or are you a familiar form she can slot into the space in her life labelled husband? This is the closest you’ll ever come to finding out, but the answer scares you so much you don’t ask the question.

“I know,” you say. “I love you too.”

You stare at the ceiling when you say it. The two of you lie silently then for a long while until you hear Rachel’s breathing steady and slow, and you know she’s fallen asleep.

You roll to the side, pick up your phone, and look up Rachel Two on Facebook. Just to see what she’s been up to since you talked last.

• • • •

One of the refugees, a man who owns a used bookstore in Prague, an attempt at moving on from his previous and parallel life, is found dead in the poetry section. Fingers sprout from his skin, his body overgrown with twisted pink phalanges. The books in the shop, once a mix of English and Czech editions, are now unreadable, the marks of ink jumbled into something vaguely resembling cuneiform. You stare at the images on a disreputable news website for an hour.

“What happened?” you ask. Is this another universe bleeding through? Is whatever happened on the other Earth happening here? You ask both Rachels, knowing that one can’t answer and one won’t.

• • • •

It gets harder and harder for the government to shut down questions about strange happenings around the world. About their potential culpability. You catch yourself sneering at a Department of Defense spokesperson, doubting that he has a clue what’s happening inside Rachel’s laboratory. Whatever is going on in there, the effects are spilling out. Let the government and Rachel and everyone else deny as much as they want—anyone with eyes can see it. When you ask Rachel if this is like what happened to her world right before everything spiraled out of control, she brushes you off. She spends almost every waking hour in the lab these days, possessed with a franticness that reads less as the thrill of approaching a breakthrough than the panic of attempting to stave off a catastrophe.

This world is ending, and Rachel will probably not be with you when it does. Her work takes precedence, the same as it did in her original universe. Why didn’t you try to learn more about her original husband? Was the jealousy and hurt really so painful you couldn’t even talk about him? You look like her husband, but you aren’t him. She looks like your wife, but maybe she isn’t supposed to be. Maybe you were meant to meet someone else. Maybe you have, it just took longer than it would have without the interference of an interloper from a parallel dimension who showed up on your doorstep and snatched away your fate.

These thoughts swirl about your head as you buy a bouquet of roses, as you pull up to Rachel Two’s house, as you ring the doorbell and wipe sweaty palms on your pantlegs.

She greets you with a look of mingled confusion and pity. You consider inventing a fake reason for the roses. You know in your heart you shouldn’t proceed with your plan. But the world is ending, and your wife is to blame, and this woman standing in front of you could have been your soulmate if it wasn’t for the mad scientist who shares your bed. Nothing ventured, you think as you profess your love. You’re not sure yourself whether you’re approaching a breakthrough or holding back catastrophe.

“That’s—we barely know each other,” Rachel Two says. “Not to mention you’re married.”

“Only because she got to me first. If the refugees hadn’t come—”

“But they did. That’s the way it is. That’s how things happened. Trying to imagine what would have happened if your life unfolded differently . . . that’s normal, but to let that dictate . . .?” Rachel Two shakes her head. “You can’t just shift the whole world to fit your desires.”

“You’re right,” you say. “I shouldn’t have shown up like this. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” Rachel Two says, a rueful polite smile on her face as she slowly shuts the door and says goodbye. She doesn’t need to tell you not to call.

As you drive home with the radio off, you consider the multiverse, the infinite Rachels and infinite yous, the unending possibilities for love and connection. For freedom and happiness. Rachel Two represented those things for you, but maybe you projected too much onto her, thought she would be an escape hatch from the chaotic breakdown of your marriage. Rather than try to fix anything, rather than take that risk, you tried to throw away your life and start fresh. For no reason other than things got difficult and it looked like there was another option. Maybe you’re no different from Rachel, your wife, who journeyed between universes and used that opportunity to find and marry you. You saw Rachel Two as a different path than the one you’d taken, your wife saw you as the same path she’d taken. How much do you really know about Rachel Two? How much does Rachel really know about you? What the hell were you thinking?

You have hours to ponder all of this as you drive home. Halfway, you stop for gas, and when you go inside to pay and grab a soda, the teenaged cashier barely glances at you as she takes your cash and slips it into the register, her eyes glued to a small TV behind the counter.

“Something happen?” you ask, trying to catch her attention so she’ll make you change.

“Yeah,” she says, shaking her head, still not looking at you. “I don’t know.”

You clear your throat, and when she gives you the briefest flicker of acknowledgment, you say, “Change?” She hands back the twenties you just gave her, eyes glued to the TV.

A guy around your age is parked behind your car at the pump, leaning out the window of his car and honking nonstop. You wave apologetically and drive away while fiddling with the radio. Before the announcer speaks, you know what she’ll say. That they’re broadcasting the same news on every station. Unexplained phenomena occurring across the globe. Buildings winking out of existence, forests materializing where suburbs used to be. Family pets abruptly transforming into ambulatory skeletons, snapping at dust motes that conglomerate into balls vibrating with practically nuclear heat. Bleed-through from an infinite number of universes, ones where almost everything is the same and ones where almost everything is surreally different.

This is how it ends, you think, slamming your foot on the gas, trying to put as much road behind you before everyone else gets the same idea. But where would they flee to? Nowhere on this planet, nowhere in this crumbling corner of the multiverse. There’s only one person you know who might possess the knowledge and ability to escape this apocalypse. She’s done it once already.

Voices on the radio speak in tones of awe, tones of panic, tones of resignation. Eventually, they blur into background murmur, white noise accompanying your frantic drive to Rachel’s lab. You wonder about the last hours of Rachel’s universe, the last hours of her first husband. You wonder how many times different people can make the same mistake. The sun sets behind you, and you drive on. There will be another portal, another universe, another group of refugees. Maybe this time you’ll make it to Rachel before she goes. Maybe this time you’ll both be able to start again.

©2021 by Timothy Mudie.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Timothy Mudie is a speculative fiction author and an editor of every genre from serial killer thriller to hiking guide. His fiction has been published in Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Escape Pod, and various other magazines, anthologies, and podcasts. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son. Find him online at timothymudie.com.

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

Inselberg

Nalo Hopkinson | 2645 words

Yam, feed me now.
Yam, when I am dead,
I shall feed you.

—A Nigerian grace

Everybody gather round the bus, now! Thank you please. Sir, beg you, don’t try to pick the trumpet flowers. You might cause damage. Yes, sir; me know say you paid for an all-inclusive tropical vacation here on the little nipple of mountain top that is all left of my country, but trust me. Some things you don’t want all-included. Not since the sea uprise and change everything. Things like trumpet flower bushes.

How many of you coming on the wondrous, watery tour? Gather in, everybody, so I could count heads. You in for a treat this morning, mek I tell you. Submerged cities, underwater skyscrapers, and an audience with the Wise Old Fish of the Mountaintop. If you ask him nice, maybe ’im will let us come back down from the peak. But be polite, you hear me? The tour last week had some from foreign ladies who feel say they were too tourist to mind them manners when tendering the requisite offering to the Wise Old Fish of the Mountain.

Sir, what you carrying on like that for? Didn’t I tell you not to pick the trumpet flowers? Stop with all the screaming, please. I warned you you might cause damage. Is all right, though. The trumpet flower plant is fair-minded. Even though you kill two of her future possible generations, she only take from you the same number of orchids you take from her. What, you didn’t realize that “orchid” is Latin for “testicles”? Chuh. Just give thanks is only two flowers you pick. I don’t know what woulda happen if you had pick three, or four.

Try and lie still, sir. Our friendly resort staff soon come and fix you up good-good. Just remember, gratuities not included in your bill. Our workers rely on your extra generosity as a reward for their good service, ascording to how seeing to your needs is the only industry ya-so nowadays. Here; you can use my scarf to stanch the bleeding. You don’t want the smell of blood to bring the mongooses out from their holes.

But stop; the rest of oonuh not on the bus yet? Get on, get on! Can’t keep the Perspicacious Mister Fish waiting! Yes, find yourselves a seat. We provide every luxury on dis-ya bus. We oxygenate and filter the air for your comfort, no extra charge. You can even take off your helmets; no air-borne irritants in here! In your seat pockets, you will find your inflatables. You each get seven hundred. Don’t fret; they indexed to the American dollar. In case of sudden tropical depression, you will find they remain relatively stable. Can’t promise the same about Mister Fish, though!

Now, before we can set out on today’s marvellous and malleable tour of our once prosperous nation, oonuh haffee tell me if the password change.

Well?

No, lady, is not game me playing. What? You think I already know the password, only I not saying? But seeyah! After is you people from foreign who come up with the new passwords! You know, a code phrase you always want us to say to you at irregular intervals? Time was, it was “Yahman.” No? Is the same one? Yahman, then; yahman.

All right, driver. We ready.

Guests of this beautiful resort, don’t mind the lurching of the bus. This is one of the ones that wake up one morning with legs instead of wheels. Even the bus-them and all had to come to them senses and swim for dear life when that last duppy tide come through! Never mind, though. Here in the islands—or the mountains—we could do worse than have sentient buses. Biggest problem is when them take it into them head to hold our pickney-them to ransom in order to get more fuel.

Pickney? That mean child.

No, Ma’am; is no problem that you bring your nine year-old on the trip with us. It will be educational for her, yahman.

By the way; if anybody see a pig deh-bout while we following the camino, him name Malky. If you see him, call him for me, do. Thank you please.

Over on your left, you can see the trembling waters of the island’s former nuclear plant. You know what they say: “If my swamp a-rock, you best don’t knock.”

Mister, I mean don’t get it into your head to go for no sea bath over there. You might come out again as pretty as me. You think I didn’t notice you staring at me? If you tell me your room number, you and me could spend a little sweetness later. Ten percent surcharge, of course, and you haffe provide certification you had three clean blood tests in the past six months.

The extra eyes give me 360 degree vision, and at least me never have to worry with combing my hair any more. To tell the truth, I think I was happy to lose it all and get more vision instead. Papa Fish tell me I must count my blessings.

If you cast your gaze just beyond the shivering bay . . . see that scrim on the other side of it? Forming what look like an edging between the mountain and the sea? Yes, Sir; like a frill. Well, that frill stretch all the way around the foot of the whole mountain, except for the places where the cruise ships dock at the resorts. You can guess what that frill is? Any of you ever read a book name The Goats Look Up? No, my mistake; Stand on Zanzibar. Ask not for whom the bell tolleth. That’s all me a-say.

The bridge we crossing on right now is taking us over some famous ruins of former industry. This new body of water, we call it Sugar Lake. No, you can’t get out the bus to take pictures. I know it smell nice, like boiled sugar sweeties. Funny thing about that duppy tide; time was, the biggest you would get is a king tide, and that was plenty big. All that melted ice from way up and down yonder. Hey you, little nine year-old pickney; you could tell me some of the effects of rising seas, of swollen oceans pushing an island like this one down under the sea? You look like a smart girl who pay mind to her lessons.

Yes, floods. What else? Rivers running backwards, sewage rising up into the water table, crops deading because the soil get salinated. Very good! You forget one, though. For a long time, we didn’t have beaches no more. People like you and your mummy stopped visiting us. Things did bad them there days. Not enough jobs, food crops doing poorly. But is all right; oonuh coming back again, both the tourists and the things that drowned. Why? Nuh this-yah duppy tide, this new thing? Nowadays, is like nothing that get drowned is really gone.

Duppy? How you mean, what it mean? Now that I think about it, oonuh been worrying out my soul case from the beginning, asking me what words mean. Aha. I see most of you never drink your phrasebooks this morning. You have to take a dose every day, for your protection. The water here not safe for oonuh to drink. You don’t have resistance built up.

But I was saying: when the long time ago sugar plantations get submerge, is like that event leave a residue. A big sugar plantation duppy. It just sit down there below and a-brood. It make of every plantation the island ever had. All of them. All those boiling houses where people who look like me—but with fewer eyes—get forced to feed long poles of sugar cane they cut from the fields into the grinders, to squeeze out the sweet juice. Then they had to pour the juice into some rahtid big cauldrons to render it down to molasses, and then to sugar. Every so often, one of the people who looked like me (except; eyes) would nod off from fatigue and get a hand caught in a grinder. Fine. So all those duppy hands, they sitting down below, too.

Beg pardon, Ma’am. I don’t mean to upset your little girl, and she so clever. But I have this tour guide script to follow, you see? Koo here, see how the script get tattooed on the inside of my bottom lip, in peeny little letters? The whole script fix deh-yah in my mouth, so you understand I don’t have no choice but to speak it. Is Master Fish make it to be so, yahman.

I could continue? Thank you please.

Oonuh sure you don’t spy a pig out there in the murk? I hope he not lost. He’s such a little guy, only standing as high as my shoulder. I prefer to have him with us on these rides. He help to keep the mongooses away.

Long and short of it is, that swamp below make of molten sugar. True we call it Sugar Lake, but is more like Syrup Swamp. Now we have to move along. If the bus stop here too long, the heat of the bridge will burn her poor feet. The pain give her the belly runnings, and we inside that self-same belly at the moment.

The facilities? Absolutely, sir. The water reclamation unit is at the back of the bus. Any other bodily fluids you care to donate while you in there are gratefully appreciated. Or any bodily solids. You don’t even have to remove any bones first. And sir? Don’t fret if what you see coming out of you don’t look exactly like what you expect. If, for example, your pee turn into hundreds of little frogs and hop away to hide in the dark corners. Is how you folks say it? “Change is good.” Right? Yahman.

Next stop is the Twinkling City. See all the rainbow colours as the light catch the oil slick? Pretty, nah true? Pickney-child, you too smart for me. You right. No light not in the sky to make refractions in the oil slick.

The actual city, of course, is down below the surface. Oonuh want to see? All right, I will open up one window. You gwine haffe peer out one at a time. Don’t worry; I will stand by and make sure the murk don’t reach long fingers in and pull you out for the mongooses. Oh! Out he gone! Why he open the window before I was ready? Never mind. I ready now. Who else want to look? Yes, lady. Lean out. I will grab your waist. If you screw up your y’eye-them and gaze hard, you might see thousands and thousands of lights flickering down below. We nah know where the electricity coming from to power the city, but there underneath the oil, it still going. Traffic lights still clicking from red to green and back again. Factories still a-run. I bet you anything the university still full up of scholars, experimenting on the wonders they find in the uprisen sea, and studying the results, and making discoveries, and arguing, and publishing.

Now, as I was saying to the rest of oonuh; the oil slick have a circumference of approximately 325 square miles, and is about 29 feet deep. I say, “oil slick” because is that it was at the beginning of the duppy tide, but like everything here, it change up. It have a way nowadays to rise up all of a sudden and grab sea gulls from out the air. At night, it will sometimes whisper to us in our dreams. Those who can’t hear it have a way to die screaming before they wake up. Perhaps you already beginning to hear it when you sleeping? Show of hands? All of oonuh hearing it except that man in the noisy shirt? Maybe the shirt drowning out the sound of things you need to hear. Sir, when we get back to the resort, they will have a ticket waiting for you, for a flight home. You will have to leave right away, before night come. Your choice, though. Only try don’t doze off between now and when we get back.

Come back in now, lady. My arms don’t get tired, exactly, but put a tender life in my hands like this, and after a while, I start to get certain impulses. To let go, or to hold too tight. Quick, close the window!

Yes, of course I was here when the duppy tide make landfall. Is the reason I still here. On our TV stations, we had meteorologists telling us for days to get out, get out. Local weather website had a live feed. I would watch it on my phone during breaks at work, and on my computer when I was home in the evenings.

What? You think say “tropics” mean “backward?” Chuh.

The feed didn’t look so bad, though. Long shots of dark sea and a dark sky. Screech of the wind whistling past the fixed camera. Camera view little bit unsteady from the wind making it vibrate. Nothing we never see before. Until I look at it good and realize the camera image not split into the usual two equal horizontal bars of slate sky on top of midnight sea. Up at the top of the image, a shallow bar of lighter grey. That was all the camera could see of the sky. The lower bar, the one taking up more than seven-eighths of the computer screen? That was the duppy tide rising up. I wait too long to leave. Most people did evacuate long since, but I couldn’t find Malky. You sure you don’t see him out there in the dark? Sometimes I think I spot him, but I can’t really tell in the murk.

I couldn’t leave him all alone.

We have to speed up. Time getting short. Over here in this boiling bay, all the fights we ever fight, for freedom, for independence, revolts against hunger, protests for wages.

That laughing waterfall? This land had stewards before us. Rush, driver, rush past all of them. All the zombis. How many of oonuh know is this part of the world zombis come from? No hands. Well, you know now.

Finally. Last stop. I will let you out the bus just now, but don’t get too close to the whirlpool. You haffe koo ’pon it from a distance. This island have a bedrock of ancient limestone, so we get sinkholes. Some terrible things get push down into sinkholes over the centuries; lost, and then forgotten. But that thing outside? That is all the sinkholes, with all their cargo. That is sinkhole papa. And yet, all the ocean it swallow, the levels only rising, not going down. Massa Fish the—well. I was going to say, “The Unflappable,” but a fish had best be able to flap, you don’t find? So. Massa Fish the Intensely Flappable. You feel him now? That vibration rumbling up through you, that sound too low to hear, but so deep it make your insides shiver? My generous guests, what you looking at is the open maw of Massa Fish. He shouting. He been shouting since the duppy tide beach him up here on the mountain. And me think say him finally getting an answer. Check the skyline. Dark. Seven-eighths black, with a little grey line of sky on top. Duppy tide a-come down again, even vaster! Massa Fish a-call out for him mama! I so excited to see what changes she will bring this time, I could turn myself inside out! Any last questions, fish food?

How to escape the tide? Me sorry, friends; me don’t have the answer.

I never did escape. Yahman.

©2016 by Nalo Hopkinson. Originally published in Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica, and grew up in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada. Her debut novel, Brown Girl in the Ring was the winning entry in the Warner Aspect First Novel contest, and led to her winning the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She has since published many acclaimed novels and short stories as well as numerous essays. She currently teaches writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her latest novel is Sister Mine.

Do Nothing

Endria Isa Richardson | 3949 words

From where she lay on her back, on the grass of the Presidio in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge with all its painted trusses strung from tower to tower seemed most like a red haired boy running along a jetty. She tried, objectively, to see it as they might. A span or a wing. It connected two land masses; of course it would be seen as connective. But there was no ‘of course.’ However they perceived the thing—anchored and cabled and suspended; material hung from more material—would not be objective. Their perceptions would depend on any number of subjectivities that arose from their strange and immaterial existences. Her imagination could not stretch far enough to allow her mind to reach their reality.

They didn’t have bodies.

She pushed herself up on one arm. Damp stuck to the shirt at the elbows, at the shoulder blades, in patches of dark green, black. The seat of her jeans was wet, cold. It was nearly empty, the green blanket of earth spread before the blue-gray water of the bay, with Alcatraz right over the shoulder of the land. It was empty because it was, after all, still a weekday, and people still worked. A pair of adults passed with a brown tufted dog that galloped over the grass. The dog ran open jawed and delighted; it bounded to rub against her leg and to be rubbed by her hand. A few lean bodied people clutching nylon harnesses and slim rubber shoes, gray, and blue, and yellow, entered the climbing gym across the grass from where she sat. It looked coldly appraising with its bank of shining windows. She imagined the climbers inside clutching textured plastic holds—gray, and blue, and yellow, layered with enough chalk and grease and dirt so that they looked gray, or black, or brown—with their tight, desperate bodies. She wondered whether they also looked out at the green grass, and the green-gray salt water, the red-bronze boy jumping across the bay, and were transfixed by the miserable hulk of Alcatraz. Squatting, hulking, gray yellow. Or whether they were simply enjoying having bodies for as long as they would continue to have them.

“Are you really just sitting there?” a voice asked from over her shoulder. Without a face to accompany the voice, she had to work harder to understand its tone. Curious, or hostile? She shut her eyes. If she refused to turn, or if she kept her eyes closed, she would leave the voice suspended in the air behind her. Would there be voices, she wondered, without the accompanying tongue, throat, lungs? The voice repeated itself. “You’re really just sitting here?”

“Yes,” she answered. “In protest.” She imagined what she would feel if she were a voice hovering over the grass, if her palms did not press against the ground.

“Half a year left. And you want to waste it sitting around doing nothing, just like a lump.”

“Why not?” She poked one finger, index, in the dirt. The bottoms of her jeans were wet through with dew and stuck to her ankles.

“I hope you go to hell.” The words were flung at her. The voice was passionate, it remained with her, pushing into her ears, skull, brain, even as its body was taken away. She opened her eyes. For a moment, all she saw was brightness; no objects could be differentiated against such light. And then she turned, and watched the man walk away. He was lean, and tall, and white. He looked strong. She wondered whether he wanted to wring as much power from those facts as possible, before they were gone.

“You won’t be like this soon,” she yelled after him. “You’ll be the same as anything else.” If he heard, he didn’t turn.

They would arrive later that year. They would set foot—no, that phrase was wrong—they would be on Earth a few years before climate disaster. The disaster that would, supposedly, create a dust cloud dense and persistent enough to kill everything on Earth within days, if not hours. There was no reason not to believe it. They had provided enough data to substantiate their claims. Of course, many people refused to believe. But disbelief would not be a problem for long. Once they arrived, she thought, people would believe. And belief would manifest in many different ways—violence, and grief, and numbness, and preparation. They would have a month to do whatever they could with their feelings, and then decide. They could join them as bodiless consciousness drifting amongst the stars. Or they could remain on earth, and wait to die.

Many people had already decided, one way or another. Or believed they had decided. She was sure that, when the time came, when they were really in front of the choice, some people would, with input from their bodies, change their minds.

Now, she stood up from the grass and stretched. A red backpack sat, sodden, by her left foot. She picked it up by one strap, shouldered it—overfull, clunky—and began to walk. A woman was walking an intersecting course, holding a girl’s hand. A mother and child.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” the woman said. They both stopped.

“May I walk with you?”

“Do you mind?” the mother asked the child, who shook her head.

“What’s your name?”

“I’m Jackie,” said the mother. “This is Frank.”

“What’s your name?” Frank asked after Jackie prodded her.

“Avery.” They began to walk. Avery was taller than Jackie and Frank; she was aware of her strides, shortened them.

“Where are you going?” Frank asked.

“To Alcatraz. But first I’d like to talk with you.”

“What’s Alcatraz?”

Avery pointed. “There. May I take your photo, Frank?”

Frank looked at Jackie again, who nodded again. The child’s face was small, sun-browned, and friendly. “I guess, yeah,” Frank said.

Avery stopped, and the others stopped. She positioned the phone, the girl, and the sun such that what she photographed was a small, dark monolith outlined by a white corona of light. In the back right-hand side of the photo, the shadowed edge of a large metallic box.

Avery asked, “Where are you each going?”

Jackie said, “I am going to drop Frank at her father’s house. They will spend the day together, while I get some work done.”

“Work,” Avery was abruptly bitter. “And what does work mean to you?”

“Well,” Jackie said. She had reacted to Avery’s tone; she slowed, Frank slowed. “It means normalcy. It means I can pay for my child’s food and our rent. What else should it mean? What does it mean to you?”

“And what about trying to understand all this? After all that we’ve done—will you really—you’ll walk right in when it’s time?” Avery gestured—sunlight striped white light down the left side of her arm; the rest was shadowed by the box. She shifted her focus from the woman, umber haired and ochre skinned, plain and reasonable, to the child. “Frank, don’t you understand how terrible this all is? Maybe you don’t because you’re a child. But look.”

Only now did she show the photo to Frank, who said, “I don’t know what that means.”

“We’re solid through,” said Avery.

Jackie stopped, and pulled Frank toward her, away from Avery. “I’m sorry, I don’t think we can walk with you anymore.”

“Don’t say things like that,” Frank added. “I don’t want to talk to you.” The woman and her child turned and walked in the direction they had come from. They did not look back.

Avery put her phone away. The bursts of anger and emotion were startling. “Already,” she said out loud. “It’s like I’m a different person already, and nothing has even happened.” She looked at her bare arm, at her hand that she could still close or open. “Everything on the outside is the same as it was two months ago, but it is all different.”

The ferry to Alcatraz was scheduled to leave at 11 o’clock, and Avery wanted to be on it, so she began to walk again. She would walk to the pier with her face tilted upwards, with her sleeves bunched at her elbows, and her forearms and wrists and hands bare, would let the late spring sunlight excite her cheeks, her arms, the backs of her hands. Her skin, muscles would be alive with heat—but not thoroughly; the sun’s heat would stop somewhere (tendon? bone?), and she wondered where, and wondered how she was different from a brick that would, in the sun, be hot throughout. She stretched her legs, long, full of blood, and tensed the muscles of her back and core to lean slightly forward against the counterweight of the pack. Her legs carried her and the sun was on her face.

At the pier, she asked to speak to security.

“I’m a filmmaker,” she said. She handed the man a small yellow card with her name and website printed in blue letters. “I spoke with someone already. I need to collect footage for a documentary. Relics of the human age.”

Backpacks were not generally allowed on the island, or even on the ferry. But things were different now. People were hopeless and wanted a reason to feel hopeful again. The man asked her to open the pack, and he sifted through its contents. Three cameras and a tripod. A bottle of water fell onto the table and he handed it back to her.

“This all?” he asked without looking up.

“Yes.”

“Fine.” He said no more than three words to her, and she pressed her lips together to keep from chastising him as she took her pack and left. Don’t you understand? she wondered. But he didn’t seem to understand.

“Could there be love?” she asked out loud. If anybody standing in line heard her, they did not answer. “Without a heart, how could there be love?” A man and a woman glanced back at her, and moved away.

She boarded the ferry. Her backpack shifted against her as the ferry swayed over swells and she watched the small white waves fold into the gray-green-black water. From this perspective, on the ferry, the bridge towers stood above and to her left, large and silent. Her arms rested on the gunwale. Two more arms appeared. Had she never noticed this before? The way that her body made people approach her; allowed her to approach others?

“I wonder what you are thinking,” the voice above the arms asked.

“I’m thinking about what the aliens will be like,” she answered, deciding not to let the voice remain a voice only. She turned to look at the man who was leaning against the railing. His sandy hair blew into his face, and he raised a hand to push it out of his eyes. Blue.

“Why think about it? You’ll find out soon enough.”

“How cowardly,” she said, and moved to step away from the railing. She stopped herself. “I’m sorry. I’ve felt very angry.”

“I don’t understand. What is there to be angry about? You should be grateful.”

“So you agree with what’s happening?”

“Of course.” He held up his arm. “It’s all just material. Don’t tell me you’re a resistor. Is this so important?” He tapped her arm softly.

She’d noticed this tendency, in herself as much as in others. People had become drawn to touch, less precious about personal space. It was as though physical boundaries had become more permeable, bodies both more and less important. “I don’t know,” she said. She grabbed his hand, and squeezed. “Am I? The word sounds so backwards. I suppose that is what I am doing. Looking backwards.”

“I don’t want to look backwards,” he said. He squeezed her hand. “I can’t wait for freedom. We’ll be able to be for once, totally free. Equal.”

“Maybe.” The ferry was docking. She removed her hand and asked if she could give him a hug. “What’s your name?”

“Terry,” he said, and smiled. They hugged.

“I’ll see you on land.”

Her shoe slipped, caught on the corrugated silver ramp as she left the ferry. Once on the island, silty and salty and wet, she let the small group wander ahead of her. Terry and another man—one he had just met?—walked together, arms slung over each other’s shoulders. She stooped and opened her pack and took out one of the three square, sizable cameras—there was never a good way to fit them into one regular backpack, they always knocked—and took three photos of the men. The images appeared centered, boxed in by the rectangle of her viewfinder. They were light redirected from the lens by a prism; they were not solid through; they were light scattered onto liquid crystal.

The question at the convening, months ago, organized by the National Parks Service in conjunction with the Preservation Council, was what to do with Alcatraz. They couldn’t take their bodies, but they could take some earthly relics, or more accurately, could take the essence of those relics. What they had held, what they had represented. They could also take animals and plants. Not mandated pairs, as there was no longer a question of material reproduction. The determinations of what relics and animals and plants to take, and in what number, were made locally. The local committees had faced surprising dilemmas. Was it enough to represent rabbits, or did each individual rabbit merit consideration?

Along with state legislators, corporate executives, producers and a filmmaker from National Geographic, a handful of people who had been incarcerated (not at Alcatraz of course, but at Tehachapi or Pelican Bay or San Quentin or Solano) had also been invited to decide the question of Alcatraz.

“How can the bodiless understand what it means to cage the body?” one man asked.

“The mind and the body were caged. The aliens have minds,” a woman said. She sat at the opposite end of the table.

“It’s just rocks,” another man said loudly. Some in the room looked at him with disgust; others nodded.

“Once it’s been through the—process—it wouldn’t be ‘just rocks’ anymore.” They all, if they said it, placed a delicate emphasis on the term “process” because no one knew exactly what, besides boxes, the process entailed.

“You are exactly right. It would be nothing.”

“We don’t know that. You’re guessing. It’s all guesses. They’ve told us nothing. Our scientists have been able to discern nothing. Nothing with certainty.”

“What else would it be?”

“We don’t know. That’s the point. How can we preserve the essence of a thing, the function of which was to be rock—solid, heavy, immovable—when, once it’s done—processing—it will be immaterial, weightless, nothing but air and light and movement!”

“Exactly. The site is just another relic of what once was, but will never be again. We are already taking the Holocaust Museum and the Lynching Memorial. Let those be enough.”

“Who’s to say it will never happen again?” Avery asked. She was the filmmaker, and regarded with skepticism. “Because we give up bodies, we give up torture?”

“What does it matter? Taking or not taking, there is nothing we can do to change what’s happened.”

“They have been freed from the body. We can be, too.”

“If we don’t make right what we’ve done, we will never be freed from ourselves, no matter what happens to our bodies.”

“What is it that we’ve done? We’ve done nothing.”

The preservation of relics was not costly, but there was a feeling of scarcity. The feeling of scarcity was either irrational or ideological. They wouldn’t have bodies; nothing would take up space. There would only be space. Listening to the room with her eyes shut, Avery heard voices overlapping, no one voice clearly connected to any one body. She felt lost, afloat, sure that if she opened her mouth, she would hear her voice speaking to her from the opposite corner of the room.

Ultimately, seven voted one way, and six voted the other. The fourteenth person abstained, not before monologuing at length about agnosticism. It was decided that within two generations of disembodied life, the “essence” of Alcatraz would not carry any meaning. The context necessary to contemplate Alcatraz—the thoroughly somatic context, it was argued— would be lost. It simply would not translate. The full reality would not compute, or it would compute in a perverted way. It would convey no useful information about humanity, being, materiality, or anything else.

The dissent had included all those who had been previously incarcerated.

Now, Avery watched the tour group round the corner. She rounded it herself.

The smell was terrible.

Rows of outdoor pens, reinforced black chain and metal, stretched nearly the length of the rock, and were stacked ten high. A box of pens, cages, cells. The cells were small, no more than a few inches of free space on each side of what they contained. The impression, Avery saw, was rather like a monument: geometric, symmetrical, awe inspiring, and awful.

The aliens, the ones that had arrived first years ago, were in the cages.

They were solid through. Bricks. Rocks. Lumps.

“Look at them,” Terry said. Avery’s hands had appeared beside his. They both gripped black linked chains strung from heavy metal stanchions spaced four feet apart. As though under a directive, Terry and Avery and the other man stood without speaking for thirty seconds in front of one of the cages. An alien was in it. It appeared gray and rectangular, about two feet by four feet by six feet, cement-like. The smell was unmistakably animal, alive, rancid. Terry lifted the chains an inch or so, let them clang gently down. “No mind at all in there. Just body.”

The aliens had no eyes and no mouths or nostrils. No faces to speak of. They were sickening to see.

They watched the lump. It vibrated sullenly. The effect of the grid made it hard to look at any one lump for a long period of time. Avery looked away. And still she felt that it was aware of her.

They were not bricks, rocks, or lumps.

“This is what all the protest is about? Taking lumps into space?” Terry was leaning toward the cage, pressing his arms straight against the chains.

“We are taking animals.”

“That’s not an animal. What does it do? It does nothing.”

The aliens did do something. They had arrived on Earth, after all. In San Francisco, and in other cities across the world. The aliens had never established a language to communicate with humans. They vibrated, always, slowly, terribly. They could move quickly. They had caused a number of deaths by throwing themselves, without warning, heavily against humans. Whether they acted in self-defense or fear was unknown. Many had been destroyed in retaliation.

World leaders responded in different ways. In the United States, the lumps that were not destroyed were incarcerated. They could not be understood, but they could be contained. The prison, Alcatraz, defunct since 1963, was reopened to cage them. They did not need the modern conveniences of other, functioning prisons.

There were protests across cities. Now, a line of protestors stood behind more chains strung up between more stanchions. These were reinforced by armed guards who looked like blue blocks wearing caps pulled low over their eyes. The protestors yelled and blew air horns. “No justice, no peace!” they chanted, and “no box, no locks, everybody walks!” Avery wondered if the aliens could hear the protests, and if so, whether they understood the sentiment.

“It’s not like we can do anything about this,” the man with Terry said.

The press of tourists from behind moved them forward. The press of protestors to their left pushed them closer to the cages. At the end of the row, they rounded another corner.

Now, cold gray water to their left. Avery watched the water, which was the same cold, gray color as the rock, but which shifted and rippled gently, and reflected the cold sunlight in triangles that flashed in her eyes. To Avery, the shared color gave the impression that the water was a continuation of the rock on which they stood. As though the solid rock was, in essence a cold, still, fragment, and the water was a cold, moving, fragment; as though all it would take was a key to unlock the force holding each atom of the rock serenely in place, to arrange them differently, more freely, until all the same pieces remained as water. Insight tried to unlock a movement of understanding in her mind, tumbled the lock carefully—but Terry gripped her arm, pulled at her, and she lost her catch.

At the tour’s natural terminus, the box came into view across the bay. The tourists gathered in a clump, each transfixed by the sight. Giant and metallic, with a sea-green tinge that was luminescent in both sun and moonlight, the boxes had appeared lined across fields, stadiums, even floating on oceans, lakes, and seas. Days after the local committees made their decisions about relics, more boxes enclosed the physical sites that had been chosen. When the time came, it was understood, humans would also go into the boxes.

The box filled Avery with natural horror. Her mind tried to stretch to imagine a consciousness that would not use physical confinement as a torture. She could not do it.

The protestors shouted, their voices sounded from the salt, from the air, and rose until they might have been a whale of sound, breaching over the prison. A wall of bodies surged over the chains and through the guards. She saw the wall break into pieces and scatter. Three pieces, dressed in blue sweats, wool hats pulled over their faces, holes cut for the eyes, ran straight toward the prison. Avery was directly before them. They ran at her. Terry cried; she pulled her arm away.

“The fuel is in the bag,” she said. “In the plastic bottle.” She swung the backpack—the cameras, the two still in the bag, clunked heavily. A hand grabbed it, slung the strap over a shoulder, and was past her. Now, to the chains; now, hurtled over the chains and to the wall; now, fingers and bare toes searching, graceful, caressing the slick wall, not clutching but gliding, letting go of each stone to touch the next.

At the top of the wall, each stood, panting, painted dark against the bright sky. There was one moment, two. And then, almost as one, each dropped from the wall to the roofs of the cages, using tools to flick open the pens. Guards shouted, raised rifles, could not shoot in the chaos. A lump, unpent, struck a guard. On the ground, tourists ran, slipped, hurtled against each other and toward the docked ferry. Avery ran to the water and jumped, arms pressed around her head.

They had asked themselves, at the last meeting, whether there was a message the aliens might understand.

Across the bay, from the Presidio, the explosions were red, orange, bronze, and black. Two strange, disembodied essences, hanging in space high above the green grass and the cold gray water, they would look most like bright, random strokes against a marbled white space. The aliens would read into those marks various meanings, some of which the protestors had intended, some of which would depend entirely on the aliens’ strange, disembodied realities.

“At least they should know,” Avery had said, after everything was decided, “that whatever else we were, some of us wanted to be free.”

©2021 by Endria Isa Richardson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Endria Isa Richardson is a queer Black and Malay person taking her time and writing stories about ghosts, race, rocks, and the prison industrial system. She holds a JD from Stanford, but is doing her best to retire from lawyering. You can find her wandering among the redwoods on Ohlone land in Oakland, California, and you can find more of her work currently or forthcoming at FIYAH, Anathema, Clarkesworld, and Fireside magazines.

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

A Tableau of Things That Are

Adam-Troy Castro | 9054 words

When they ordered me down off my pedestal, I had nowhere else to go.

Life as a statue is easy. They make you ascend the pedestal, turn you to stone, remove your ability to move, and leave you to watch the turn of the seasons in a world you cannot touch or care about, anymore. You can only stand in the public garden where all the convicted are placed, and you watch with dull and distant interest at the visitors who stroll past, living the lives of the quick, sometimes interested in all the immobile condemned, and sometimes not.

It is not fun, but it is not torture either, the way it would be if you were left the capacity to care. Fun is just a word that no longer applies, and the years are just time, crawling by like a snail on a pane of glass. It is easy because it requires no effort and takes nothing from you but your humanity.

Returning to the world, once you have served your sentence, is more difficult.

The custodians of the gardens don’t give you any money and they don’t offer you a job; they just say, “leave,” and if you’re smart, you start walking. You must, because otherwise they’ll petrify you again and put you on another pedestal, frozen in whatever position they have chosen for you. This time you will remain there forever, and many have, because their dulled wits did not provide the impetus for the first step toward whatever destination a released stone man can choose.

I would not have been upset by permanent immobility. I was made of stone and did not care about anything. But after some delay to urge my thoughts back into constructive motion, I remembered that I’d once had a home; the place where I’d been when they’d come for me, where I’d lived as a short-tempered idiot and a married man, where I’d broken a man’s back in a barroom fight, and earned my ten years on display as a statue.

I put one foot in front of the other, and then did it again, and after that did it again, a process that once begun, took care of itself. I did not even have to think of it. My legs, given the order to walk, obeyed, and left me alone with my thoughts, which were not many. What thoughts I had only accumulated like drifting sediment, and most of them were of a woman’s name.

Ariella.

I made my way out of the park and from there out of the city and from there into the countryside, trudging past villages that did not make much fuss about me as long as I did not tarry or interfere with the lives of those still made of flesh. I sometimes saw people at their fences, watching me as I passed, their hands folded against their chests in silent judgment. I left them behind only to face a new set of pitiless eyes, bearing the same warning, at the next curve of the road, or the one after that.

Soon those populated places thinned out. I entered the places where I was most of the time the only being visible. The land became less dominated by farms and more dominated by woods and empty fields. I marched through torrential rain and the road became a soft strip of mud, where my stone shoes sank to ankle-depth, turning every step into an exercise in first freeing a foot from imprisonment. It got cold. Now the people I encountered wore heavy coats, and exhaled little clouds of vapor. Some coughed from chests clogged from winter illnesses, and they looked miserable, a state of being I vaguely envied, even though I was stone all the way through and had no lungs to clog. What cold I felt, the part that would always be part of me now that I was no longer flesh, was the chill that goes with being stone. But I remembered being a man and registered the winter through the way it looked, if not the way it felt against a body that was no longer flesh; the grayness of it, the sense winter tends to have that the world will never be warm again. It looked like I was peering inward at the thing I had become.

The entire journey had only two significant social interactions, before I reached the distant parish where I lived.

One was with a band of hooting boys, throwing rocks and snowballs, calling me a big dumb stupid rock and demanding to know what crime I had committed, that kind of thing. I said nothing, in part because it would have done no good and in part because I was still so unused to speech that my attempts sounded like an anvil being dragged across a slate. My most heartfelt reaction, the urge to seize one of the little bastards by the head and then make a fist, mashing every cruel impulse into a red paste, flashed in me, but took so much time to form that it outlasted my will. I just walked until they tired of me.

The other interaction I had was more significant. The cold snap had gone away, and I found another stone man lying on his back in an unkempt patch of yellow grass. He must have been there for some time, because he was half-buried by a recent snowfall which had turned to slush and filthy water in the hollows that form on the body of a supine man. I altered my course long enough to approach him, and stared down at the eyes that gazed unblinking at the gray sky. Like all stone men, he had the features of the being he’d been until convicted of whatever crime had sentenced him to petrification, and in all respects but the motionless cast to his face and the ageless pinpoints in his eyes he seemed to be the commemoration of a fresh-faced young man, untouched by the evils of the world.

I asked him if he was all right.

“I am stone,” he said.

It had been a stupid question.

I asked him if he needed any help getting up.

“I will not be getting up,” he replied.

I asked him if there was anyone who he wanted informed of his whereabouts.

“I think not,” he said. “It has been many years. Everybody I loved must be dead. Why did they make you a statue?”

“I killed a man.”

“Just one?”

He was downright chatty for a stone man.

“Yes.”

“I killed two women. I was the kind of man who enjoyed doing things like that. When they petrified me, I stood in the garden for forty years, and my enjoyment of anything is gone.”

I told him I was on my way to see the wife I had left behind.

He said, “Why?”

During none of this did he move as much as a twitch, and I thought about how little his existence had changed, since his days on public display. Maybe my existence would change more, when I found Ariella.

I abandoned him, and though it has been many years, I have no doubt that he is there still.

I continued my journey. I did not need to stop. I did not need to rest. I did not need food or water and I did not feel the strain of the long journey in my legs. I did not get tired. There were times when if I paid no attention to the testimony of my eyes, I could almost forget that I was not still on that pedestal, watching the years go by from inside a cage of immobility. There were other times when I considered not going home at all, but almost without realizing it I left the road and took a narrower path into the hills, into the forest of bare trees where I at long last found the old, rickety two-story home with the wraparound porch. It still stood, though it showed the passage of years, and it badly-needed a coat of paint. But there were clothes flapping on the line, and the sound of a singing woman drifted from the open window.

I almost climbed the porch stairs to knock on the front door, but before I could the front door opened and Ariella came out, dressed for housework and drying her hands with a rag. For a moment, her brow knitted in confusion, and for that moment I took a mental inventory on what the years had done to the woman I’d married. She had lighter brown hair streaked with gray and she’d given up on straightening it, allowing it to instead become its mop of curls, blowing in the wind. She had the beginnings of crow’s feet and laugh-lines at the corners of her mouth. But her skin was still golden in the sun, and her eyes were still big and bright, and when she saw through the stone to the man I had been, her hand shot to her mouth, and she whispered my name, “Holt.”

She did not look happy to see me. Why should she? The husband taken was not the husband returned. But after a moment’s hesitation she came down the steps and approached, in something like apprehension, before rushing the rest of the distance to hurl her arms around me. “Holt,” she said again, and “Holt,” and when I failed to raise my arms to return the embrace, “Oh, Holt, my love. Look what they’ve done to you.”

I knew I looked different, even allowing for the difference between flesh and stone. I did not wear quite the same face. I was stone and that meant I’d been weathered by ten years of rain and snow. My features had been smoothed of some of their lines. My body below had been protected, insofar as it could be, by the very clothes I’d been wearing when the keepers of the stone gallery spoke the words of transformation; and so above my stone form I wore a stone jacket, and stone trousers, and stone shoes, and they were all parts of me now, just like my exposed hands and wrists and face. I’d been wearing a brimmed hat before my petrification and had declined to take it off, presuming that it might protect my features from rain. But wind had found a way to drive the storms into my stone face, from time to time, and so it too showed the march of time; or so it had looked to me on my journey, when I found my reflection in glass windows, or in the puddles on the ground. It had to be shocking for her, as the mark time had made on her own still-beautiful face would have been shocking for me, had I been a man capable of seeing it in the way a man would.

I said, “It’s good to see you,” and I think she might have known that I only said it because it was something an absent husband should say, when he makes it back home after an absence of many years. But already I knew it was not. I could feel dull relief that she was alive and that she was well, but not the surging joy that should have come with seeing her again. She had become something I perceived at a distance, through a gray curtain that I could not part.

Then the door slammed again, and I saw that a man had left the house.

I did not know him, not at first. He was no familiar neighbor, no distant relative, just a bearded man with round shoulders, with unkempt crabgrass hair and a pair of dark eyebrows so thick that the eyes beneath them appeared to view the world through a thicket of weeds. It was bad now because of his scowl, matched with a grimace that displayed a thin sliver of tiny, yellow teeth. He was clearly not happy to see my intrusion this close to the woman who was once mine, and the bed that was now his. I should have felt equal outrage at his very presence, but the gray filter of my nature prevented the sight of him from rousing more than dull interest.

It made sense, I thought. What was Ariella supposed to have done, with her husband petrified for a stupid barroom killing? Create an empty space where once there was a person and soon enough something else must come along to fill it. To the degree that I could have an opinion on anything, I approved.

But that was before he opened his mouth.

He said, “As if this day wasn’t already a big stinking pile of shit.”

• • • •

Ariella introduced him to me as Defiance Cole, and he operated a small toolmaking shop in town, about five miles up the main road. Ariella specified that he was the grandson of Liberty Cole, who I did remember: a poisonous old bastard, ancient even when I was a child, who had once run the establishment in question. Liberty had been as taciturn while flesh as I now was in stone. Once upon a time, my father had accused him of hoarding conversation like it was made it of gold and only spending what amounted to pennies. I had never known that he had a wife, let alone descendants, and what Defiance said to me now would be a preview of the relationship to come.

“Fine. You came. Now get your murdering carcass away from here. You ain’t welcome.”

Still, there are two kinds of women married to men, those who obey and those that take charge, and Ariella had always been the one in charge. “We ain’t married yet, De; this is still my land.”

Then she took my hand, and I saw what happened to her eyes when she felt its cold, lifeless texture. “Long as you don’t want no trouble, you can stay as long as you want.”

Defiance said, “I going to have to put my foot down,” and this was I suppose the key proof that I was no longer a man, because the stupid, troublemaking, brawling idiot I’d once been would have been wrestling him into the dirt by now.

She said, “Your foot don’t mean nothing up or down.”

“You cain’t let him in the house. He’ll crash right through the floorboards, and break everything he touches. I wouldn’t even let him in the porch.”

Ariella’s eyes went angry at this, but she had to agree it was a reasonable boundary. “Okay.”

I did not protest my need for shelter. I had spent ten years out in the open, immobile, the sport of both the frigid air of winter and the blazing heat of summer. I had been covered with snow and I had been the platform for fallen leaves. Pigeons had nested on my hat brim. I had felt none of it. But shelter was a feature of the life I’d known as man, and so I allowed Ariella to lead me behind the house, across the ragged grass of the field, and to the aging barn left over from that one golden summer in childhood, when my father had let me keep a horse.

That summer had been the last uncomplicated season of my life, the last time when anything had felt possible, when I had felt that I could have been anything. My later life with Ariella had been something else, adult happiness, which is always a defiant cry in the face of adult desperation.

I had told myself that the horse loved me, and it had seemed to, nuzzling my hand and lowering its great elongated head for attention. But then my father’s debts had come due, and he had needed to trade the horse in exchange for forgiveness. I had screamed in his face that I hated him and for years I had until that hate was replaced with a coldness that never went away. Even as the life spark inside him started to flicker, and he became that seated presence who needed to be cared for and cozied, I had still been a preview of this man of stone, distant and unreachable. I had been annoyed at his neediness, and let him know it whenever I could. I’d been a bastard, and it was only after he was gone that it had occurred to me to feel bad about it. But I was past shame now. I was a stone man, and so I regarded the ruin as what it was, a rickety structure that remained upright out of sheer inertia. There were holes in the roof and walls that looked like they craved collapse, but I did not need much. Once in its shadow, I felt the vague distant satisfaction that was a ghost of the way of a man would feel, when he had walked a great distance and finally found shelter from the rain.

Ariella asked me if it would do and I said, “Yes,” because there was no other thing I could say. Defiance warned again that I better stay out here and not try to enter the house, and I said, “Yes,” for the same reason. Then she hugged me again and said we would talk soon, and left, the augurs of a loud argument forming in the space between her and the man she’d chosen as my replacement.

I did not weep. I did not attempt to follow. I did not sink to the dirt and bury my face in my hands.

I was stone.

As the clouds in the sky became streaked with purple, I heard the distant shouted voices. They were like almost all human conversations to me: muffled and irrelevant, a reminder of a connection I would never have again. Their content evaded me. I thought of the chair I’d broken over Mose Ferguson’s back. The savage pleasure of that moment was also a feeling I could no longer summon. The voices carried on the wind and then eventually stopped, and I let concern go the same way as everything else.

• • • •

The night surrendered dominion over the world. The sun rose and climbed toward the sky, its passage visible via the shifting angle of the shafts of light admitted by the holes in the roof. I gave some thought to stepping outside where the sun’s blessing fell everywhere and not just in scattered splinters, but I who had spent years at a time limited to whatever sights passed before my stone vision and had fallen out of the habit of shifting, even in the slightest, to choose a different vantage point.

In early morning Defiance showed up at the entrance to the barn and stood there for all of thirty seconds before storming off, in a hail of curses. Ariella arrived after noon wearing a white sun dress, with her hair tied back and fresh color applied to her cheeks. “Don’t be lazy, Holt. Let’s go for a walk.”

I followed her, not saying much, as she told me what the years without me had been like, about the long lonely nights and the suitors who had not taken well to being told that she would wait for me. Ultimately, she apologized, “I waited as long as I could.” And then she told me about how the men had stopped calling on her: except, when she thought that part of her life was done, cold practical Defiance, who had presented his case not in romantic terms but instead as an exercise in pooling resources.

“He’s never said he loved me,” she said, a clear invitation for me to say that I still did. “But he’s never been cruel.”

A brook passed through the woods a short walk away, pooling around a boulder that sat in the center of the water, forever unmoved by the pooling at its base. It had been one of the sacred places of our time together, and it was by the dappled light of its rushing waters, that she laid out a comfortable old blanket, and began placing food taken from her pantry.

“A picnic,” she explained.

I did not point out that as a stone man I had no possible use for, and therefore no interest in, food. I understood that some rituals must be respected even when they no longer had any meaning. So, I sat cross-legged on my side of the blanket, hands planted on knees, while she bit into an apple and told me how good it tasted. I could recall any number of past afternoons when in idylls stolen from the hours when I had to haul goods and she had to labor as a seamstress to support ourselves, we curled up on this very spot and pretended for a few minutes that it was Eden and that we never had to return to the demands of the world again.

I think she wanted me to respond as a man. But she had to know that even if I could access a part of me once made of flesh, using it in any real way would have injured her. It was another gulf between what I’d once been able to have and what I would now never have again, and it almost kept me from noticing that as she spoke about the joys of the past, only some of what she said was true. All the bad parts, and with me there had been plenty of bad parts, she omitted; all the good parts she inflated with air and invested with a gravity that made the life of two people like a grand idyll the world would never know again.

One thing was certain. Whatever she remembered that had been so grand, her current life with the scowling, ungenerous Defiance suffered from the comparison. She kept apologizing for various things he had done, and saying, “But he’s a good man.”

It was possible to believe Defiance a good man. It was not possible, I thought, to believe me one. I had loved her as best I could, but a stone man is forced to face the whole truth and I could know, from the perspective of a creature incapable of self-loathing, that I had not loved her well.

After a spell she fell into a silence almost as deep as mine, one that held us both as the brook made its bubbling noises a few short steps from us. Then she said, “This don’t do nothing for you, does it?”

I thought about it and gave her an answer as close to the truth as I could get, which was that the man I’d been was cursed to sleeping in his blanket of stone, and could not wake. But as tears sprung to her eyes, I also said that if the past meant nothing I would not have come so far to return. I would not have joined her at this picnic with the food I could not eat and the cold brook water that would not provide comfort to my naked toes. I stopped talking before telling her that if being with her made me at all happier, it was something I experienced only as a certain lessening of the weight that pulled me down with every step.

Her eyes flared. “You’re the one who destroyed it all. You know that. You had to do what you did, because you had to break this like you done everything else.”

“It’s true,” I told her.

The man I’d been would have followed that up with a string of self-serving excuses, gradually returning the blame to her, but the man of stone could only acknowledge the absolute truth.

She returned me to my barn and thanked me for the pleasant afternoon before abandoning me to the deepening shadows. I knew she would come back tomorrow and perhaps the day after, but would soon come to reason that it hurt too much to see me again. Before long she would skip days at a time, and then perhaps not long after that it would be weeks. One day she would startle with the realization that she had spent a snowy month not venturing as far as my new home, and she would rush to find me, still standing in the same place where she’d last left me, and my calm equanimity would suddenly make her hate me, would leave her pounding on my chest with anger at her own stupidity at letting me reside here. That was the only way it could go, and I knew this with the cold certainty that could only come with being a man of stone.

The night came and I stood throughout it, not moving.

And in the morning it was not Ariella who came to me, but Defiance.

• • • •

He stared at me the way he had the prior morning, and after extended silence said, “So you’re really a pathetic son of a bitch, ain’t you? Stone or flesh, both.”

I did not respond.

“She never stops talking about you. Not after we got together and not now that you’re back. Still. Not only the good things. About how you drank and how you wandered off whenever life seemed too hard. How you had no patience for nothing but drinking and fighting. But also, how kind you was. She won’t stop talking about how kind you was, and how her heart broke when they took you away. Seems to me it’s the story of a piece of trash who wouldn’t stay home and take care of his woman, one who’s so selfish he came back as a stone man, to hurt her still.”

I did not respond.

He told me that he and Ariella had made love the previous night. He did not use the phrase, “made love.” He used the ugliest word anyone can, rendered uglier by the worst way anyone could say it, with a leer. He said it as if with that word he was not reliving the memory of entering her but making it an exercise in violating me through her, like a bullying dog will sometimes mount a weaker one just to make the point.

“She didn’t want to. She was in no fit mood, not after trying to get some decent conversation, or whatever, out of you. She’d been crying, and crying hard, and trying to pretend she wasn’t, and the last thing she wanted to do, once that stopped, was doing her duty by me. I didn’t force her. I want you to know that. I never had to physically force no woman. I ain’t the type. But she done it anyway, just to make peace with me, just to keep me happy ‘cause she now knows I’m all I got. She ain’t ever loved it with me, I can tell, but she always done that long as we been together, because that’s the price. And maybe it’s true that she makes it okay by thinking of you, but I want you to know that from now on it’ll help me to think of your worthless ass out here in the barn, thinking about what you threw away.” When I still said nothing he showed teeth the yellow of pus and he said, “I would prob’ly kill myself if I was you, if that was even possible.”

He said all this while keeping his distance, trusting in his legs to carry him faster than mine could carry me. But I did not lunge and after a few seconds he grinned with renewed nastiness.

What he did then was unlatch the hook that sealed the flap of his trousers, pull out his man-root, and baptize me with a glittering stream of his bottomless contempt.

I did nothing to stop him, and why should I? As a statue I’d known similar insults from more birds that could count. I’d been caked with the stinking white of their droppings, and had the fossilized turds colonize my shoulders and the brim of my stone hat, feeling nothing until the rain and wind washed the filth away, and left me clean enough for more birds to sully. It had been nothing personal to the birds. It was everything personal to Defiance. And while it occurred to me that maybe I should cup his face in one stone palm and pierce his eyes with pointing finger and pinky, it was a fleeting spark that failed to catch fire. I let him enjoy his piss.

When he was done, I told him, “I’m not a statue.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Why don’t you do something to stop me?”

I did not respond.

He waited, but if Ariella could not get more than a few words at a time from me, then neither could he, and after a minute or so he decided that this was satisfactory, and left.

Until the next morning, when he came back, and pissed on me again.

• • • •

Ariella took me on three more picnics that week, two more in the following week, and one more in the week after that; and after that, they were irregular events, sometimes daily for as long as a week and then, as I’d predicted, sometimes not at all for as long as a month.

Sometimes she had some chore for me, like the time a windstorm left a tall tree partially uprooted and teetering in the direction of the house. It made sense for her to fetch me and have the helpful stone man use his superior strength to wrestle the trunk into some position that endangered nothing but other trees. After that and other necessary feats of strength she thanked me as sweetly as she could, but when this failed to warm me she averted her eyes, and I returned to my barn, to stand on the same spot I’d left, in what had become a little worn place, the opposite of a pedestal.

Defiance’s hate was much more faithful than the remains of her love.

He kept coming, kept baptizing me with each first morning piss, kept me apprised of the latest developments in his physical relationship with my wife. He told me when she claimed to enjoy it and when she did not. He took special joy in telling me of the times he woke her out of a deep sleep, in the wee hours when the view out their window displayed only a black void, when she resisted and he insisted and she ultimately agreed to take care of him, before she could reward her exhaustion with sleep. He used the word “dutiful” to describe these occasions, to underline that she acquiesced out of obedience, not passion. And then he said, “Maybe you could do better, if you could reach yours. But it’s under those clothes of your’n, ain’t it? It’s got a real tight stone blanket, don’t it? Why don’t you try chiseling it out. I’ll wait.”

I did not respond.

Live ten years as a statue and you learn that hours change when you have no way of filling them. Live as a man and time is a parade of events, some joyous and some upsetting and some impossible to fathom. You mark the days by the things that mark them, like the day you tell your father you hate him or the day your eye is blackened by someone you picked a fight with or the glorious moment when somebody better than yourself first says she loves you. Remove those markers and all of time fuses. Pass by a waterfall and it is a moment. Stop briefly and it becomes a place. Stand there forever and it is no longer a temporary phenomenon, but a feature, the water that has been falling forever, and will be falling forever. To a stone man the sun is no longer a glowing thing that crosses the sky and changes night into day, and disappears to allow night’s return, but an eternal and incessant shutter, that never changes and never makes a difference. So it was with the drama of Ariella and Defiance, and the many months I spent in the barn, bathed in the changing light without ever being touched by it. Her hurt and his abuse became eternal, and I felt them recede from me, like the movement of clouds as seen from the bottom of a deep well. They had nothing to do with me. Her hurt had nothing to do with me; his cruelty had nothing to do with me. I was stone, and if I was not content then at least I also did not want.

Then one morning Ariella showed up at the opening of the barn. Her hair was longer than it had been the last time I’d seen her, and duller, as if she hadn’t washed or brushed it for a while. There were tear tracks on her cheeks, and red blotches on her nose. She stared at me for a while, her chest heaving with hoarse breath, and said, “Direct question. Can you even say you love me?”

I replied, “Yes.”

“Just to pretend?”

“Yes.”

“Say it, then. Say it whether you mean it or not.”

“I love you.”

It sounded like a rote line from one of the prayers that come at the end of a long and tedious church season, at the point when everyone is exhausted and eager for the freedom of a warm afternoon. It did not ring with sincerity.

Ariella heard it and she covered her eyes and when she removed her hand her gaze was hard, filled with the fire that went with trying to force herself to hate me. “Now say it like you mean it.”

“I can’t.”

“Do you love me?”

“I’m a stone man.”

“Damn you,” she said, and I did not see her again that year.

Not long after that, the snow fell in a blanket that collapsed another part of the roof, covering the dirt below with a snowdrift as high as my knees.

There were bad storms that winter, with raging winds that made my walls shake, that drove the small creatures of the wood to seek shelter alongside me. I began to notice the regular visitation of a black rat that sometimes paused at my feet and looked up at my face, its whiskers trembling. It was never with me for more than a few minutes, but in those few minutes it seemed to know that the stone giant it saw was not some strangely shaped rock but a living and thinking being as capable of seeing it as it was of seeing me. It grew fascinated. Like some of the pigeons and the squirrels of the park where I’d spent all those years as a statue, it became a regular acquaintance, not a friend because I could not be stirred to that condition, but nevertheless a thing that could communicate a shallow, default So there you are, that I was able to answer with the identical thought. So there you are, I thought, and it changed nothing at all, but at least it was a thought, a moment of punctuation that interrupted the silence.

And then one day I happened to be watching when a barn owl swooped down and eviscerated it with its talons, and where a man might have felt grief, I felt only the shifting of the Earth.

The winter passed. The snow melted. I thought that I would grow moss, lose definition, and become one of those ancient monuments human beings encounter once in a while, that look they might have once been a sculpture of a specific man, but are now so worn that they have lost all their features and are just vague suggestions of the identity they’d once worn.

I thought of making love to Ariella. I thought of the times we had to get up in the morning but delayed the day by a few minutes, to exercise our passions and laugh in each other’s arms. I thought of how sometimes we got silly and could not stop laughing. I thought of what it had felt like when she kissed my eyes, and they were just little visitations of memory, not attached to any identifiable feeling, no more beloved or mourned than the time I dropped a heavy stone on my foot and spent the summer with a limp. They had the same value, these two memories, and I could not give one more force than the other. They just were. And yet I thought of the lovemaking more, trying to coax feeling from it; and yet I struggled to answer her question, why I’d been so driven to come back.

Then one early evening in spring Defiance came to the barn, his gait uncertain, his eyes unfocused and his abuse of me slurred, and he laughed long and hard and said, “I bet you never even got cold, did you? Answer me, you great big gray idiot. Did you get cold?”

I answered honestly. “I’m a stone man.”

“You don’t feel nothing at all, do you? Not the snow, not the rain, not the summer days when it’s so hot a proper man can hardly draw a breath. Ain’t nothing good or bad to you, not even the slightest bit. It just is.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s see about that,” he said, and he wound up and struck me in the side of the face with a claw hammer.

I was stone. It did not hurt. I felt the impact, though, and I felt an infinitesimal piece of that cheek chip off and fall to my feet. I did not bat him away with a backhanded slap that would have left liquefied brain matter spilling out through his ears. I didn’t even turn my head, to make eye contact and maybe terrify him into backing off. Time was a state of being. I waited for whatever blow came next.

None arrived. Instead, he dropped the hammer at my feet and screamed in my face from a distance of inches. His eyes were wet. He was bereft.

“I had something,” he said. “That’s what sticks with me. I had something. I had the best woman there ever was. I never thought I would but then she said yes and then I did. And you had to come back and give her dreams that couldn’t be. Now it’s all gone bad. Why couldn’t you just do the decent thing and die?”

I said, “I’m not alive.”

He did not piss on me that day. He just stumbled off, leaving the hammer, which remained at my feet in more or less the spot that had been the habitual place of my friend the black rat. In some ways the hammer turned out to be a truer friend. It did not wander off to conduct the necessary business of being alive. It did not disappear for hours or days at a time, and it did not get itself eaten by an owl. It stayed, and from time to time it occurred to me to take special notice of its presence, and think, So. There you are.

I heard more and more shouting from the house.

• • • •

I do not know how long it was before Ariella came to visit again, this time favoring one leg and with a fresh shock of gray hair along one side of her face. She’d lost weight and was not emaciated, but was paler, more drawn. There was a swollen purple place along the side of her jaw.

Her gaze fell toward the claw hammer before rising again, to meet mine.

She said, “You didn’t come back for me, not even the slightest bit.”

“No.”

“How come? And don’t tell me it’s because you’re a stone man.”

Though I might have told her that it had never been anything but ridiculous to imagine my cold lips kissing her warm ones, and more ridiculous still to imagine me holding her in my unyielding arms, these were sentences beyond my ability to feel, let alone speak. “I’m not a man of flesh.”

“You could kill him for me. I know you’re strong enough. Don’t you want to?”

“No.”

“Even if he hits me?”

“No.”

“Don’t you hate him for it?”

“I’m a stone man.”

She knelt at my feet, weeping, and I said not a word to comfort her, because I had no words to comfort her or heart to even want to comfort her. I remembered what it had been like to be beside her when we were both human beings and her emotions had grown as stormy as a tempest-tossed sea. We had fought hard, during our years together, because of the differences between what I was and what she wanted, differences that I suppose must always exist between lovers, when they have actual blood running through their veins. I had sometimes, but not always, known what to say in those days.

After a while we both heard the distant sound of Defiance calling in anger. She rose, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and left without looking back, to attend his call.

In what remained of her life, she would return to me only once more, and when that happened, she would speak not a word.

• • • •

Defiance showed up more often than that. It wasn’t every day. But on mornings several days apart, there were three or four of his urinary baptisms, accompanied by the usual mockery, though he’d lost the taste for that. He had to know by now that a man of stone could not be bruised by words, barbed or otherwise. There was no name he could call me that would get past my shell, no word-image he could paint about his treatment of Ariella that would infuriate me enough to get me to throw a deadly punch.

Then one morning he showed up with a sledgehammer.

The smaller hammer had chipped me. The sledgehammer was heavier, meant for breaking large rocks into smaller ones. The first time it flew, half of my right hand turned to powder. He stumbled backward, both horrified by this and oddly thrilled by it. He asked me if it hurt. I told him no. He wound up again and struck my lower arm, scattering rock chips and inflicting a hairline crack from my elbow to my wrist. He laughed at this but didn’t swing the sledge again, in part because he was breathing like a man who had just run ten miles but also because he could do the math and could see that if he devoted a day to my deconstruction he could reduce me to gravel in a matter of hours, leaving himself with no other form of satisfaction. He vomited, left the sledgehammer at my feet, and stumbled off, promising to return the next morning.

All day the sun crawled across the sky. Then it set, and at night the constellations rose and traversed their own path.

Defiance returned the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, each day doing what damage he could do in a swing or three, before once again dropping the sledge and storming off, with a promise to return.

Did it hurt when pieces of me crumbled? Not in the sense that flesh hurts. Was it horrifying? Not in a sense that afflicts a soldier, staring aghast at his own severed limb. A man can die from the loss of blood and a man can go mad at the sight of part of himself, now ripped asunder and left as fodder for scavengers. A stone man, I discovered, cannot. There is pain, of a sort. It does not rise to the level of agony. But it was still the knowledge that part of myself had been ripped away, and it was still a violation, and if it did not lead to gnashing and wailing it was still sadness, still the awareness that everything I was had been diminished yet again.

I would never again pick up anything with that arm, which within a week was a splintered stump severed above the elbow. But what did I need to pick up, really? What had I, that was worth the effort of handling? What self did I have, that was worth defending? And if I felt pain, in what way was it preferable to feel nothing? I suppose some stone men other than myself would have cared to do what it sometimes occurred to me I should do, fight back, and do to Defiance’s limbs what he had done to mine, but again, it all felt so distant that it was not worth bothering. So I just allowed him to take my arms and to leave a giant crater in my chest and to rip a chunk out of my hip as he took my arms. I did nothing as he told me every day that the next day he would take more; as he promised that sooner or later I would just be a head, to bury in some place in the forest where she would no longer be able to find me.

So it went, until the very last time I saw the woman I had once been able to love.

It was a moonlit night. I heard her coming down the path from the house and I saw her stop in the open barn door. The light played on her silvery hair, now marked by a fist-sized bare spot that glistened in the darkness. Blood glistened on her lower lip. She looked at me and she looked at the scattered ruins at my feet. When she saw what had been done to me her right hand rose to her lips.

“Leave him,” I told her. “Go as far as you can. Save yourself while you can.”

She said nothing. Just dashed to my feet and ran away again, the soft thud of her footsteps fading in the darkness.

• • • •

Time may mean nothing to a stone man, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t be aware of it, not if we have reason to be aware of it.

When I was displayed as a statue, I saw no particular reason to keep track of the years. I was aware that they were turning, but I did not keep count.

As the armless statue in the barn, I did have some reason to wonder and so I counted the winters as they passed. Whenever the first snows came after the long summers, I added a mental entry in my internal calendar.

This is how I knew that two years had passed when the air around me turned to thick smoke, blowing from the direction of the house. This is how I knew that seven years had passed when time claimed what was left of the roof. This is how I knew that twelve years had passed when a stray dog birthed its puppies in a shelter of collapsed roof, and when the four of them emerged from the haven of their days as blind helplessness to gambol round my unmoving ankles as if I was the territory they had to win. That was how I knew that fourteen years had passed when a gray-bearded vagabond unknown to me chose to pitch his tent just outside what had once been the home of a child’s horse, and for three months used me as the helpless but unprotesting target of his conversation, all while calling me John. This is how I knew that seventeen years had passed the day a storm of historic proportions passed by, and the rain did not stop for eight days.

This is how I knew that twenty-two years had passed when I received the last of the visitors to the barn.

She came walking down the hill that had once led up to a house where over the years two men had found different ways to hurt a good woman.

She entered the space that could no longer be quite said housed a barn, and she studied me from what had been the threshold, waiting for me to say something.

She was made of stone, of course. On that last night she had taken the claw hammer with her, and it had not escaped me what she intended for it. She had done it even though she knew the penalty that she would surely suffer, for such a heinous crime; even though it would have been easy to get away with it, had she made any effort to bury Defiance in the woods and tell the authorities that he had run off.

“I confessed,” she told me, in lieu of a hello, and I understood at once that it was the only thing she could have done, to become a stone woman whose long hair was a solid curtain around her cheeks, and whose knee-length skirt was now like a cliff face, descending from her waist.

She was not the living woman I’d known. As I’ve noted, that one was gone; was dead, really. What stood now was something else, something I was now meeting for the first time.

I said, “They gave you a longer sentence than they gave me. More than twenty years.”

She said, “You broke a chair over the back of a man who was trying to hurt you. I crept up on a man as he slept. You were sorry about what you’d done. I showed no remorse. Mine was a worse crime. It was a wonder they didn’t give me fifty.”

I was impressed by the long speech, which had gone on for some time, by the standards of the stone.

I asked, “Why didn’t they?”

“The sculpture garden was getting too crowded. People of flesh are always hurting each other. They needed to let some of us go, to make room for the next.”

I had no hand for her to take. Both my arms were still rubble at my feet. But she gestured for me to join her and this I did, walking at her side as she took me down the familiar and overgrown path to our favorite spot, on the shores of that brook. On the way she told me that the house in which she and I had lived was not only a blackened shell, having burned to the ground on, I presumed, the day of the thick smoke. It must have been some time, she said, because there were now two trees growing out of it. Someday soon, she said, it would be impossible to tell that there had ever been a house there at all, and I said nothing, because there was nothing I could do with this information.

Then we reached our imagined Eden, and she told me what we had to do.

I obeyed, wading into the creek water and making my way to that boulder which rose above the waters, like a miniature continent that had yet to be settled. I had no arms to climb with, but she had arms strong enough to lift me, and she used all that strength to grasp me by my hips and slide me upward until my weight lay balanced on the summit. Undignified it may have been. But what is dignity?

Then she splashed around to the other side of the boulder and used her intact limbs to ascend. She was as graceful as stone as she’d been in life, and it was more like hopping up, than climbing. Once she was standing above me, she took me under my foreshortened arms and helped lift me to my feet. Even without my arms I would not have known how to embrace her, as it had been many years and my human knowledge of such things had atrophied to almost nothing. But she slipped her intact arms around my waist and pulled me to her, until there was not the width of a finger between her lips and mine. It demanded response. I could not embrace her back, but I could lift my cracked stumps until they each touched her upper arms, and I could meet her eyes from a little height, and look on her with a nearness to another being that I had not experienced since my days as a man.

This was not a triumph of love. There was still no deep emotion and still no surge of passion. Even affection, the way men and women of flesh know it, was lost to us, and would never come again. But it was almost as a woman, so close to that state that it almost failed to matter, that Ariella peered back at me and said, “If you’re wondering how I saw fit to forgive you, you can stop. I didn’t.”

“I know.”

“But I’m stone too. I can’t feel angry at you anymore. And this is where I’ve come to rest, the last place where I knew how to be happy. If you want, we can rest together.”

“Good,” I agreed.

We studied each other for a little bit, then brushed lips and by mutual unspoken agreement froze in place. We remained fixed at that moment, beneath the sun and the stars and above the sound of bubbling water, determined to stay until that brook ground both the pedestal and the lovers who stood there first to gravel and then to dust. It has been many, many summers and winters since that moment, and the boulder still stands, though we both sense that it might be narrower at its base. Collapse does not feel imminent, except in the sense that all things are, to those made of stone, tomorrow’s sunrise being just as far away to us as the very end of the world.

Until then, time has done what time does. It has passed, but it has ceased being a parade of things that happen, and returned to what we know it always was, a tableau of things that are.

©2021 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

Wolf Tones

Sofia Samatar | 7104 words

. . . and then the second tone enters, high and fierce, the waves rising, a sudden spasm of hail scattering across the deck like a shower of pearls . . . a tone like a moan that vibrates through the ship, down through the cabins lined in red like satin jewelry boxes, those elegant little coffins, and down again through the vessel’s bowels and down through the vast imponderable weight of water its icy knifelike blackness just on the edge of freezing . . . this is a tone that matches the trembling of the earth itself like a magical lover who knows the precise desired frequency of illumination . . . hair, black wind, the cello between her thighs, how are her hands not frozen, how is her face not frozen, that sliver of moon as the waves grow higher and white, their slopes a ghastly fantastic white as she plays the howling insistent tone, she has found her stride, the ropes of her black hair flying and knotted about her neck . . . she is calling them . . . calling them . . . she is playing her lost summers . . . the mountains, the troops of monkeys on their way to the temple, the English church . . . and when autumn came it was time to leave the high mountains, to board the train, and she cried and cried, and they said, you cannot bear the winters here, you’ll freeze . . . oh play . . . play the great winter storm and the avalanche . . . the wolves . . . she calls them over the waves, rough coats and flaming mouths . . . they are leaping down the slopes of the white waves, baying toward the ship, and she goes on playing, she goes on howling, she cannot stop . . .

The first time he saw her he felt as if he had been plunged in icy water. His breath froze and there was a struggle in his chest. You would think she had struck him, struck him in the sternum. She in her paisley shawl, incongruous. Five days out from shore.

• • • •

“So you have gained your seal eggs.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She gestures at his legs, her eyes smiling, crimped at the edges. “Your sea legs.”

“Oh.” He blushes. “Yes.”

She holds out her hand. She has a soft accent, he can’t place it—Indian, Persian? Her hair pinned up with a jeweled comb. Strands of hair are escaping all over her head, blowing about in the wind. “My name is Nesha.”

“Wyland Alexander.”

She repeats his name in her lilting voice. She tells him that, contrary to intuition, if one is ill, it is best to be on deck. When people are sick they want to go to bed, but this urge must be resisted. “Those cabins are death, death!” she says with a shudder.

“Have you been ill, Miss Nesha?”

“Oh, not for a long time.”

He can believe it. She is statuesque, golden, nearly as tall as he. Of the two of them, she may be the heavier. This thought makes him blush again. He stammers something, he asks, where is she going?

“North,” she says.

She has no real destination. She is part of the ship’s orchestra. If he comes to dinner, he can hear her play. And what does she play? She turns up a palm and shows him her fingertips, each topped with a callus like a bubble of hard, dead ice.

Now, on the cruise ship, heading north again after all these years, he remembers the gleaming dining hall, the chandeliers, and after dinner the couples dancing, dancing over the sea, and how he sat at his table and smoked and watched the orchestra. A student. Nineteen years old and bound for Paris on the Agate. It was a French ship, unsegregated. A new life was beginning. Some French boys gestured that he should join their table, but he refused. The orchestra played swelling, tremulous, popular tunes. A rainy street, they played. A blue café. Couples dancing cheek to cheek. A tense conductor with flyaway, graying hair. The light of the chandeliers flickered on his baton. Today, on the cruise ship, there is a singer who croons to a synthesizer. There is karaoke.

• • • •

Sometimes at night he wakes in the drone of the ship and his body fools itself easily, deliciously, into thinking it is that other ship. What time is it? After midnight. He must have overslept. He’s missed dinner. The last dancers will be trailing about the floor. At this time of night they move so languidly, slowly, as if underwater, or as if suspended from the ceiling on long chains. They are hanging from the chains of her long notes, the one she releases from the cello, sleekly, one after the other. In the orchestra, there is a dark-browed violinist with bowed shoulders who, during the day, sheathes her precious hands in a pair of black satin gloves, but Nesha is the heart of the group, you can see that at once, even a self-confessed musical idiot like Wyland can see it, the way she scatters light. When he sits at his favorite table on the far left, near the stage—a table the other guests soon form the habit of leaving open for him—he can sometimes catch the conductor’s glance as it seeks Nesha out and finds her: a glance of confirmation, satisfaction, and cold fire.

Afterward, a patter of tired applause. She talks and laughs with the other musicians, putting her instrument away. He, at his table, is overwound, crackling, beside himself with impatience. He fumbles with his lighter; at last he gives up and lights his cigarette with a candle.

“May I help you?”

“Thank you,” she says.

He carries her cello, which is as awkward to handle as a human body. After she plays, she cannot sleep, no matter how late it is. She wants to run, to roam the deck in the cold air. She tells him that when she was at school, she never used to be able to sleep, she’d get up to all kinds of mischief in the dormitory. She hid the other girls’ shoes, she tied their long hair to the bedposts. She was reprimanded and almost sent home. In the end she was only punished, deprived of the daily recess hour, locked up in the headmistress’s office, but she didn’t care because there was a radio there, she’d play it very softly, leaning her head against it to hear, she could feel the vibrations all through her cheek, her chest. She tells him that the cello is an instrument of vibration. He says he supposes this is true of all musical instruments. Yes, but the cello is special, the finest instrument for producing certain mysterious overtones called wolf tones.

“What do they sound like?”

“Like wolves howling,” she says, laughing. “Like the wild wolves of the north.”

She’s childish at night, giddy, her ankles flashing under her long skirt. And he, in his coat, holding her cello, is freezing, he can see his breath in the starlight, and he thinks his life is always going to be like this. A succession of wonders, one after the other, forever, until he dies. The world is so full. The sky is crammed to the edges with stars. She tells him about Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, who theorized wolf tones with his mechanical bowing machine.

She says: “I was meant to live where there is no night.”

The Arctic Circle, he thinks with a shiver. But they are going to Marseilles. From there he will travel to Paris. He has a letter from his patron in his pocket. He has forty dollars sewn into the lining of his coat. He tells her he is going to be an artist. She doesn’t laugh. “An artist, how marvelous!” He stammers as he attempts to explain, without boasting, how his patron, a great philanthropist, picked him out from among the boys at the technical school, first for drawing and painting lessons and then for Paris.

“Then you’re one of us,” she whispers, squeezing his arm. He can feel each finger through his coat.

She says kindred spirits are rare, and he nods, though deep in his heart he doesn’t believe her, he still thinks he is going to find them wherever he goes. Wolf tones, she tells him, are only produced between E and F sharp. They occur when the frequency of the vibrating string matches the vibration of the instrument’s body. A perfect match, she says, it’s too much, it’s overwhelming. The note has to split. It beats. It howls. Musicians say: it wolfs.

He wakes and thinks he is on that other ship. But as soon as he swings his legs out of bed, he remembers the truth. His body reminds him of the truth. He is old. He switches on the light. It’s four a.m., not too early for an old man to rise. He grasps his cane.

He washes his face and cleans his teeth at the tiny sink. He puts on his parka. Then he climbs the stairs. The horizon pulses with pink fire, the rest of the world is blue. His face feels blue, prickling in the cold.

A few other passengers are already up, looking at the sea. They hail him cheerfully, raising mittened hands.

The sea stretches out like a slab, like something solid, a great blue quartz. It lies so still, as if immune to storms.

At breakfast, he hooks his cane over his wrist so his hands are free to carry the tray. Some of the passengers are being assisted by the staff. Hardly anyone on the cruise is under seventy years old. Most of them, like him, have worked all their lives, and possess money and leisure for the first time. Many still wear the surprised expressions of people who have only recently discovered they can afford a cruise, whose children have said, “Dad, why not go?” Some look wary, expecting their luck to run out; others are smug in their furs, adding one more trip to their list. All of them, with their shrunken or bloated wind-carved faces, their hoarfrost hair, look as if they belong to this landscape. We are snowmen, Wyland thinks. How stiffly we move, as if our bones are frozen. He pours himself a cup of coffee.

All day the sun will dance along the horizon, buoyant and lacy, a paper snowflake. There will be islands like dark seals. There will be a guide who tells them about the shrinking of the ice. Trembling, the passengers will say: “Oh no, oh no.”

One passenger is much younger than the others: a researcher catching a ride north on the cruise ship. Wyland sets his tray down beside hers, pulls out a chair, and sits. The researcher appeals to him. He likes her dark skin. Her scowl.

“You know, you remind me of someone,” he remarks.

Her scowl deepens. She stabs grimly at her eggs. She is wearing a stiff brown coverall fastened with snaps. Her hands are small, bony, chapped to whiteness at the knuckles.

“The person you remind me of would probably never wear that kind of getup. But she was young like you. And she loved the north.”

His heart gives a little twist, as if waking up. Pain fills his chest. He sets his coffee cup down carefully and breathes.

Breathe, breathe, as if you were walking blinded through the snow. Do not for a moment allow your heart to stop. Nesha smiling at the ocean, wrapped in her long shawl. The blue, and her burnished cheek. Complementary colors.

His vision clears. “Where are you from?” he asks the young researcher.

“New Jersey,” she growls, and then, relenting: “My parents are from Bangladesh.”

“The person I knew was from somewhere near there.”

“That’s nice.” She’s collecting her cup, her napkin, piling them together on her tray.

“She told me anybody could love the north.”

“Yep,” says the researcher, standing up. Young people move so fast. He’s forgotten that. He’s forgotten everything important. How quick they are, how easily insulted, how Nesha flared up at him that afternoon, her smile fading out like smoke. He had told her it was surprising, unexpected, to find a person like her, from the south, so interested in the frozen north. “That has nothing to do with it,” she snapped. She said she was interested in the world. She was drawn to phenomena. “Anyone can love the ice.” Sir C.V. Raman investigated the stringed instruments of Europe, she said, but he was interested in sound. Then she glanced pointedly at Wyland’s hair, the close, slightly reddish curls he had plastered down painstakingly, but inadequately, with brilliantine. “You are going to Paris,” she said, “but you’re also from the south.” And he had been stung in his turn, indignant. “I’m from Michigan.”

The young researcher is walking away with her tray.

“My name’s Wyland,” he calls after her, “but you can call me Shoeless Joe.”

He chuckles. Stupid old man. She’ll never talk to him again. Still, the exchange has soothed the ache in his chest. For a long time he’s called himself Shoeless Joe, as a joke. His friends call him Shoeless. He’s sure the young researcher doesn’t appreciate the humor. He loves this about her: the glittering intolerance of youth. He has not possessed this quality for a long time. He used to call himself The Unhappy Negro, also as a joke, until his children told him it was offensive.

“You’re one of us.”

He’s hungry. He is turning into a wolf. He is waiting for things to become ordinary. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen? People are supposed to get used to things. They are not supposed to be tortured every day. The sight of the sea, for example, should become ordinary to a sailor with the passage of time. “What do you think?” he asks a sailor. Standing bleary-eyed on deck at six o’clock in the morning, gesturing toward the North Atlantic. Lavish sprays of arterial color are pouring across the ocean. The sky throbs. There is a dim, wild smell of fish. “Does this seem normal to you?” The sailor observes the youth with the hollow eyes and smiles blackly. He has few teeth, and speaks no English.

¡Salud! Santé! Skål!

At midnight the musicians drink champagne. They are given supper in a room behind the dining hall. They sprawl on the chairs, the women in poses that seem lewd to Wyland when Nesha drags him there for supper with her friends. He doesn’t want to go, he feels instinctively that he will disappoint her, will prove that he is not, after all, one of them, and he tries not to look at the toes of the flautist, who is also a dancer, coiling near his elbow, nude under pink silk. The flautist is from Bohemia; she has poor skin and hair from having grown up on potatoes. “Ah,” she says, closing her eyes. The tall, red-haired percussionist, who has moist and colorless eyes like a pair of snails, flicks a pistachio shell that lands in the flautist’s bosom. The flautist opens her eyes and sits up, outraged, and everyone laughs. The man who plays the oboe is trying to talk to Wyland: he is French, and when he speaks, or at any rate, when he speaks English, gray spit collects in the corners of his mouth. As the oboist draws something complicated on a napkin, the map to a place in Paris where, he insists, Wyland absolutely must go, Wyland watches the laughing gaze of Nesha travel across the table to meet the tiny, flashing eyes of the conductor. No one seems to know very much about this man, the orchestra conductor. He is rumored to be a Pole. He is a taskmaster, Nesha says. He has a thin, spidery body—the type, Wyland thinks, you could crush under your boot.

Afterward he sees the conductor below decks, in the red hall. He recognizes him, though the light is dim. He sees the conductor and Nesha standing at the end of the passage. The conductor has his hand about her throat.

¡Salud!Santé! Champagne corks pop. The ship heaves over the sea. It heaves toward France. No, it heaves toward Svalbard. The ship heaves toward the Barents Sea. The water is growing very green, says the violinist. Then it will turn blue, and at last it will be black.

The violinist crouches behind him and rests her head on his shoulder. Her head is small and hard, and there are pins in her hair. He feels as if he is being embraced by his grandmother’s hairy pincushion. The violinist’s fingers, encased in black satin, are digging into his shoulders. Now she comes to perch like a raven on the arm of his chair. She drinks from his glass. Across the table the percussionist regards them mockingly. His jeering eyes, without depth, like chunks of blubber, like segments of walrus tripe, like bits of undigested ptarmigan in an owl casing.

Wyland stumbles outside. He has drunk too much. He touches his face, which has gone numb. Suddenly he’s afraid the wind has sliced it up. No, his face is all right. Everything’s fine, he tells himself, but he can’t stop the wave of self-pity that surges through him, the tears.

Breathe. He leans his arms on the railing. He rests his forehead there.

A narwhal, the corpse whale, nudges its horn through the gloom. All over the hills the snowy geese are sleeping. An ice bear lifts its nose from the kill in the moonlight, painted like a clown.

But what have they been saying? They’re making fun of him. He won’t go back in that room. He weaves his way to the stairs and goes down, touching the walls. Here the ship makes a groaning sound. There is sometimes a frightening ping that makes him think the iron is warping, about to break. He thinks the iron is going to collapse from the pressure of the water. He does not feel he is floating. He is underneath. And Nesha stands at the end of the passage, regal in crimson light, wearing the conductor’s hand like an ivory choker.

“How could you?”

“You don’t understand. He is a very enlightened person.”

“He’s hurting you.”

“And you—you’re going to save me?”

“I could. I could pitch him overboard.”

“So could I.”

He clenches his fists uselessly. “You people are sick,” he says. “You drift around drinking and pretending to be artists. You pretend to love the world, but all you care about is drunkenness and filth.”

“We are interested in the mechanisms of force.”

“Shut up!” he shouts. “You probably all sleep together—you play your wolf tones—”

Now at last she grows angry. “I have never played a wolf tone for you. You have never heard it. None of the regular passengers have heard it.”

The phrase, regular passengers, rakes across his heart.

She rearranges her shawl, folding it tightly, and walks away.

“When I play a wolf tone, Wyland, you will know.”

For three days he doesn’t go to dinner. He hoards food from the other meals, eats rolls in his cabin. Then he is back. He doesn’t sit at his usual table. He sits at the edge of the crowd, as far as possible from the stage. He sits with the French boys, who are playing cards.

She knows he is there. The sound of her cello reaches out. Tentative. Frayed.

He plays cards. All the French boys are laughing at his schoolboy French. The orchestra takes a break, and when they come back, Wyland stops playing. Nesha steps onto the stage. She has taken down her hair.

She plays with her hair falling over her face. It falls to the strings. She is playing her own hair. A strange tune, and quiet, and only for him. So quiet, he can hear the small hiss as she moves in her black silk dress. He hears it across the room. He can hear her heart.

Afterward, on the deck, she sits in the shadows against the wall and he lies down with his head in her lap. He holds her hand. Her other hand circles slowly, comfortingly, in his hair, freeing the curls. The stars are so close. Don’t let me fall.

Was it because his passion was incomplete? He was giving her everything. Even now he knows he could not have given more. Lying on the black swell of her thigh, clinging to her fingers, it was as if he had been emptied and then filled. Emptied of everything in the world, of his childhood, his ambition, his patron’s confidence, his family’s hopes, even his forty dollars, and filled to the brim with sorrow. Now he sits in a deck chair, an old man, looking out at the fierce blue arctic waters, and feels that emptiness again. Emptied even of the desire to paint. Old Shoeless is going to paint the Arctic, they said. Good for him. One last run. He is going to paint it from life this time. But although he has found the emptiness, he has not been filled. There is nothing to put inside. The guide is talking and curved brown mountains are floating past the rails. Now a dash of color: pink flowers. Everyone rushes to take a picture. Rare fox cubs. In the distance, black hills garnished with blue snow. “I’m sorry,” she said, and he told her: “Don’t ever say that.” Don’t say you’re sorry, he told her, because he knew it meant saying goodbye. She in her long hair, tender. Her hair stirring on his cheek. She told him about the great singlemindedness of Sir C.V. Raman, his illimitable passion for the natural world. C.V. Raman was interested in every kind of vibration. He studied sound, but also optics, x-rays, magnetism, color. He loved music, flowers, diamonds. In 1921 he traveled to Oxford and hypothesized that the blue of the Mediterranean was due to the molecular scattering of light. Wyland can feel her hand in his hair. He feels she is telling him no. Somehow she is telling him no with these stories of C.V. Raman. The wolf tones occurring only on certain notes. And now the light, the small fraction of light that undergoes the change of frequency known as Raman scattering. Raman established his theory using a mercury lamp, a glass bulb full of benzene, and a pocket spectroscope. Direct a white light onto the bulb and you will observe, contrary to expectation, a magnificent blue radiance. This is because some of the light particles—but only some—are being transformed. He understands that she means she is a blue light, a wolf, while he, Wyland, is ordinary light. Raman scattering, she says, occurs with gases and solids as well as liquids. The first solid Raman studied was ice.

The ice. It’s melting. Sinking. Becoming sea.

The guide announces: “This is a journey among the last of the glaciers.”

The passengers are excited. They board the boat that is lowered down to the turquoise water. To the aquamarine. The scattering.

“Nesha,” he says. “My wolf.” But she is already far away. His hand is empty. The one intended to touch her face. Then someone catches him, steadies him, helps him aboard the boat. “Are you all right, sir?” It’s one of the staff, the young Norwegian, sunburned and jolly in her blue vest. He speaks to her in Norwegian and she laughs, showing teeth of improbable whiteness. “They’ll do,” he says, stamping his boots on the deck. There’s a squeaking sound, as usual, but nothing to worry about, it’s not my feet, it’s my heart, he wants to tell this young woman who is so kind. Now the boat casts off and everyone waves. “Goodbye,” call the ones left behind on the ship. Not everyone has joined the journey among the last of the glaciers. Some of the passengers are too frail. And the young researcher, too, Wyland sees, has remained at the railing. She stares at the boat with a strange look: a look of rage.

Something inside her, certainly. A flame.

As for him, he is empty, sawdust. He has outlived everything, even his century. Its horrors and its triumphs. The Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science where the young men worked all night. Coming and going at all hours, often sleeping on the premises so that they could get a chance to use the equipment. C.V. Raman lived so close to the association building, he could slip in a back door whenever he was free. And even though he would later take up residence in lovely Bangalore, where he would maintain a splendid flower garden, a diamond museum, and the Raman Research Institute with its panoramic view of the city, it was those early days at the association, in that dusty building in one of the most crowded parts of Calcutta, that he always called “the golden era.” It was there he began his studies of music and light. Such passion among the mercury lamps. Such frenzied writing. To get his papers into print quickly, before anyone else stumbled on his discoveries, he’d hail a cab, rush to the post office, pay the late fee to make the last mail. Is this what it means to be an artist? To vibrate at such a pitch? In tune with the changing world. It appears to me, a fellow scientist wrote, that this very beautiful discovery which resulted from Raman’s long and patient study of the phenomenon of light scattering is one of the most convincing proofs of the quantum theory.

What are you dreaming of? Did you think it would be quiet?

She lifts her bow.

The grinding and popping sounds. The groans. Subdued thunder.

Wolf tones, she said, are considered unmusical. They are a hindrance. Techniques and devices have been developed for their suppression.

Listen, she tells him, now we are going to begin.

He remembers his throat was sore. The oncoming fever made him feel like a child. He allowed himself to be ordered about like a child in the supper room. They made up a bed for him by pushing the chairs together. “This fever,” he told the flautist, “is the outcome of despair.” “Nonsense,” she crooned, loosening his tie with her wormlike fingers. Someone was taking off his shoes. The lights were in his eyes and the oboist stood on the table to shield them with paper. Individual paper shields, perhaps made of cigarette packets, for each of the little sparks in the chandelier. Wyland’s eyes filled with tears because of the kindness. “These tears,” he explained to whoever was listening, “are the outcome of despair.” They gave him a special cigarette, telling him it would help his cough, but it made him cough more. His chest seized, his body thumped on the chairs. Through his tears he could see the conductor observing him, as one would regard an insect, with a calm and clinical gaze.

“You,” wheezed Wyland. “I know you. You’re the Devil.”

A collective excitation

He’s read so much, through the years, to try to make sense of it. The papers of C.V. Raman. The hope that our laboratory studies would furnish a solid experimental basis for the explanation of such natural phenomena as the colour of the sea and the colour of the ice in glaciers

Glacial blue. A frozen heart.

The young Norwegian helps him ashore. They will climb this little ridge. They will see the ice. He proceeds with a creaking sound not unlike the sound of a glacier. Not at all unlike the melting of a glacier heard from a distance. The unmusical, daily sound of his prosthetics.

The far ultraviolet

A little ridge. Then glaciers like wild beasts. Their condensed, alien, and lambent blue. Everyone gasps at the sight, but it’s the smell that makes him weep: a raw and ferrous wind from the days of hope. From the days when he still had feet.

If the process of scattering could be

He moves forward slowly, testing the ground with his cane. They have half an hour, says the guide, before they must return to the boat. They may walk on the ridge. They must not go down to the ice. He walks toward the distance with fragile, uncertain steps. Snow breaks under his boots.

Toward the fading isles. The blue cathedrals of desire. The sinking world.

Listen, now we are going to begin.

His throat aches. He wants to clear it, but he’s afraid of the pain, and even more, afraid diseased flesh will slough off into his mouth. Certainly they’ve put something in the cigarette. But the ship soothes him, rocking. The chandelier swinging, adorned with tiny shades. It begins to swing more violently. Shadows pass over him. A pair of red lips, a naked shoulder, a small chignon. Then the sparkling cuff with jade links that can only belong to the orchestra conductor, followed by his neat and jaundiced-looking hand, a hand that comes startlingly close to Wyland’s face, as if to stroke him, then turns to exhibit the knuckles tufted with fine hair.

If the process of scattering could be regarded as a collision

Nesha’s face, with the lights of the chandelier winking around it.

As if a coronet of stars.

She’s taking him, picking him up. It is time, my darling. Is he being carried? Out the doors where the wind whips at his face. He whoops for joy. The door flung back behind them, banging, the glass shattering.

Sailors running about, feet thudding. French shouts. The huge sea.

The deck tilts and flings him against the wall of the dining room.

New pain, now, in his shoulder, in his knees when he falls on the deck. “Nesha!” he shouts. Frightened, for the first time.

• • • •

To be scattered at higher frequencies is to be scattered to the blue.

The members of the ship’s orchestra have taken their seats on the deck. Somehow, when the ship tilts the other way—tilts so sharply that Wyland clings to the broken dining-room door, to keep from being swept off—they do not move.

The conductor raises his baton.

“No!” Wyland screams.

Flashes of light and darkness. Flashes of flying hair. And her face, impossibly clear, as if she were seated right beside him, though she is far away, too far for him to reach. Too far for him to seize the hem of her skirt, though he tries to crawl. His fingers are bleeding from the broken glass. Something hard slides down the deck and hits him, shocking his wrist into numbness. He clings in the doorway, sobbing. He cannot go.

I was going to go to Paris. To be an artist.

She lifts her bow.

Her face like a topaz. Luminous. Remote.

Her face of sorrow. Of deep, slow-burning triumph. Of desire. Her arm in the torn sleeve rising like a whale.

The bow on the string. It’s as if someone has touched his inner ear.

The wind. He writhes. His body curls and uncurls in sound. Sound of the ocean. Sound of wolf. Of storm. It beats back and forth. It achieves an unbearable. A shudder that never ends.

At the hospital in Svalbard he says: I saw a woman riding on a wolf.

She is playing the wind, the water, the ice. He lifts his face. He sees them playing faster and faster, the whole orchestra in frenzy but she is slow, slow, the bow a thing of intolerable weight. She does not need to move quickly because each note she plays is thousands, millions of notes. The others are playing the ocean but she is playing the tide. The conductor’s baton dancing like an antenna against the rising waves. The slopes. The darkness clapping like a bell.

When it goes up, he tells the nurse, you can’t look down.

The foaming waves. Lit up in the night. Luminescent, like a corpse.

The violinist playing and screaming. Ecstatic. A volley of curses. The percussionist’s shirt ripped off, his body of solid white fat.

They are all monsters. The flautist’s teeth, how has he never noticed them? The oboist’s eyebrows twisting up like horns. The conductor with his matted hair. And Nesha. She is huge, her glance of thunder. She is taking up the sky.

She throws her head back. Icy mouth. Delirium.

And the waves come down.

He says: The ship went down into a hole.

He mimes it with his hand. His fingers diving against a background of white curtains. At the hospital in Svalbard.

He says: Let me sleep. He begs them: Let me.

Curled in bed, he clings to the pillow. He will put it over his head to save his ears. He will strap himself to the little bed and use it as a raft. All night the bed will bang against the wall. And he will see her rising. Throwing her cello over her shoulder. Her long hair. How she grasps the Wolf King by his gray-white ruff. With a leap, she gains his back. She sits astride him, howling, raising her bow to the sky. The Huntress of the North.

But I was going to Paris. I was going to be an artist. I had forty dollars sewn into my coat.

His feet are black, the doctor says. He doesn’t understand. The doctor repeats it: Black. They will have to come off.

Tie me up, says Wyland. He begs them to tie him to the bed. Then, for a long time, he doesn’t speak.

When he speaks again, he asks for books. He asks for books about music, science, and history. He takes comfort in the language of Sir C.V. Raman. If the process of scattering could be regarded as a collision between a light quantum localised in space and an individual molecule, the observed laws of light-scattering would be quite different from those anticipated on the classical principles. The words are like a rope thrown in the dark to Wyland who has lost the ability to anticipate anything on the classical principles. He sits by the window in the full glow of night. It’s so bright outside, the shadows of the window bars are cast across his page. He reads the words: There are more unexcited molecules than excited ones. Why should that be? What causes this difference? Why are so many of them left out? Touched, but never transformed. He searches for a reason but cannot discover it. He cries for the first time since his rescue.

In Norway they tell tales of the Oskoreien, the Terrible Host, who may be the souls of the restless dead. They rush across the sky with a dreadful noise. They enter locked homes and devour the Christmas feast. Once, at Dalen, they left a dead man on the hearth. The corpse hung from a pothook. By his clothes, the people who found him could tell he came from Numedal, a valley to the east. The Terrible Host must have seized him there and ridden him to death. His heart frozen under the silver buttons on his vest.

Now as he walks across the snow it wells up in him again, filling him. All his sorrow and his years. The hospital at Svalbard, and how he asked for newspapers he could read, English and French papers from the time of his accident. The papers told of the tragic wreck of the Agate, a French ship driven mysteriously, incredibly off course in a freak storm. The lone survivor, an American Negro, had been picked up by a team of land surveyors. He was feverish, raving. He did not know his name. The unhappy Negro, Wyland read, was transported to the hospital for treatment. A phrase that stuck with him, ringing: le malheureux nègre. He began to read voraciously, as if he could discover in written language the whole meaning of his life. How closely he followed the career of Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, how passionately he read the texts that travel back to him now in fragments, as he walks through mist, through an arctic morning suddenly overcast so that he stumbles, missing his footing in whiteness, his depth perception failing. He remembers the words: spectral violet. He recalls: the romance of glass. He hears a sound in the distance, a sort of siren, undoubtedly from the boat. He remembers: In the waters of our seas and oceans live many denizens of the deep endowed with what has been happily termed living light. Words that sustained him through the years, the painting career in the Florida Keys where he moved because, he would say with a shout of laughter, he hated snow, where he married and had children and was widowed and became part of the furniture in a bar, his sweat sinking into the chair. But Nesha, you told me I was one of you. He sways, he staggers. The ground is moving. He is riding on a boat. Beasts groan about him, jostling in the fog. He reaches to touch them but they will not come near. He coaxes them, clicking; they answer with hollow grunts. He laughs through the pain in his chest, through the tears that freeze at once on his lashes. These are her herds, the ones she keeps to feed her wolves. He must be very close now. And soon, yes, the mist draws aside its nacreous curtain and there she stands, taller than the peaks.

He sinks to his knees on the rocking ice. Nesha!

Wyland! she says. Come in!

In where?

In here, she says with a merry laugh. She is wearing her same paisley shawl, only now its pink and pale-green shades are spread in majesty across the sky. The colors shift and ripple with a meditative intensity so beautiful he cannot move. He cannot close his eyes. Come, she says, I will make you a supper of seals’ eggs. There’s no such thing. Oh, but there is, she assures him, in her hall. And he will dine on the choicest ones, served on a bed of blackened greens retrieved from a bear’s stomach. Eggs so tender they burst at a glance. He will see marvels in the light of whale-oil lamps. And he will tell her marvels, too. The tale of the crystal lattice. Of the fiber-optic probe. Leaning into the warmth of her couch, which is made from the wing of a goose, he will speak between kisses of the diffraction of light by ultrasonic waves. The Raman spectrum, he will tell her, is the physicist’s musical score of the atomic symphony.

The young researcher settles down into her sleeping bag and presses play. A gentle droning fills her headphones. It’s Naldjorlak I by Eliane Radigue, a composition for solo cello that fills the young researcher’s bones with sound. Now, at last, her muscles relax. Soon she will begin to feel like she’s floating. Then she will be fully here: here in the camp, in the tent that envelops her in a pinkish glow, cocooned in the sleeping bag, in the polar night. Then she will let go of the trip, of the fury that consumes her every time she has to travel on one of those awful cruise ships: the sense of contamination as she shares the heated air and the thrum of the oil-guzzling vessel with the stupid, wide-eyed, gawking tourists. They’re all old, they’ve lived their lives, they’ve driven their big cars, they spend their days between the swimming pool and their air-conditioned rooms. When they click their tongues at the dwindling ice and hold their little paws up over their mouths in dismay, she wants to bash their heads in. You gave me this world, she wants to shout. But she doesn’t. She needs the ride. A frown creases her forehead. She wills her breath to deepen. Let it go, she tells herself. Let it all go: the trip, the guides, the miserable delay as they searched for the old guy who wandered off on the glacier tour. They never found him. He probably had a heart attack out there. The blond guide who’d gone out on the boat was in hysterics. Her face covered with red blotches like a rash. “He was so nice,” she sobbed. The young researcher sighs again. Let it go. And as she listens, as she allows her thoughts to dissolve in the subtle, resonant tones of Radigue’s music, she feels it going. She even feels a touch of the old excitement. Tomorrow, after all, she’ll be on the ice. She’ll be on the ice, taking measurements with a remote Raman spectrometer, gathering data on the structure of the dying bergs.

A wind ripples the tent, and she closes her eyes. Radigue’s music has always filled her with a sense of space. It’s music that builds an environment, patiently, delicately, inexorably, as crystals form. It’s the feeling of the ice. Because of this music, the young researcher forgives Radigue everything. She forgives her for belonging to that generation. The word Naldjorlak, which makes her think of trolls in a winter cave, is apparently made up, and she’s read that it’s supposed to suggest something to do with Tibetan Buddhism. This, too, she forgives, she lets it go, the vague religiosity, the whiff of exoticism, she lets it go, she sinks, she feels herself shifting from red to blue, becoming spectral in the vast vibrating night. For this, for music that sounds like ice, she is willing to forgive. So it’s unfortunate that she doesn’t know and will never know that earlier today she met the painter Wyland Alexander, known as “the painter of glaciers,” because she might have forgiven him, too. She might have forgiven his age, his questions, and his foolish jokes, had she known that he painted glaciers obsessively for fifty years, developing in them a blue of such convulsive, pounding radiance that critics called it both appalling and sublime. It was said that one was “battered” by Wyland Alexander’s blues. This was painting that aspired to the state of noise. In the end, his color was something no one could bear for very long: a blue as deep and penetrating as a howl.

— for Rosalind Palermo Stevenson

©2019 by Sofia Samatar. Originally published in Conjunctions, Issue 73. 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. She is the recipient of the William L. Crawford Award, 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.

When You Die on the Radio

Adam R. Shannon | 5872 words

Everyone hears Hunger die on the radio, and no one can do anything about it. His mayday is admirably calm for someone who is burning. He’s breathing heavily, but he doesn’t betray any fear. It’s a textbook radio transmission, the kind the other firefighters hope they could make if they were trapped and blind in a smoke-filled basement. Even as the house groans and gives up its life, he’s confident that his friends will come for him.

• • • •

Trish flies home from the memorial service the night before she’s scheduled to be back on duty. She has spent twelve hours in Hunger’s home town, where he once chased a grounder into the woods and kept walking with the baseball in his hand, heedless of the shouts from the game, because he was disgusted by his teammates’ acceptance of an inevitable defeat.

Home is where Hunger would smear raspberries around his mouth and nose, bloodying himself with sweetness to terrify his hapless parents. Trish knows all these stories because he told them around the firehouse table, his food untouched, while others ate and laughed. Everyone would tease him when a call interrupted a meal, leaving him the only one unfed.

At the service, Trish sweats in her Class A uniform as she waits in line to console his family. She wonders how many of the people in the receiving line appeared in Hunger’s stories. Eventually, Hunger’s father peers through swollen eyes at her gold name plate. “You were Daryl’s officer, weren’t you?”

She imagines this man coming home to find his son on the kitchen floor, covered in fake blood. It seems terribly cruel that she laughed at this story only a month ago.

“Yes, sir,” she says. “Daryl was . . .” She falters, acutely aware that this is the first time she’s ever referred to him by his first name. Everyone called him Unger, the name sewn on his uniform, or Hunger, once he got a reputation for talking at the expense of eating. No one called him Daryl.

“He was,” he nods, squeezing her hand and smiling, an obligatory expression. If he blames her for failing to save his son, he shows no outward sign of it.

Another hand is already reaching past her, and she allows herself to be moved onward down the line by the pressure of others’ grief.

• • • •

The bearded men from logistics show up at the station the next day.

“We’re here to reprogram the radios,” says a man with a glossy ID card bouncing against his belly. “The mayday is stuck in the frequencies.”

The rookie firefighter is directed to bring the portable radios from the rigs—first the engine, then the ladder truck. One by one the radio handsets are plugged into a computer so the men can remove the channel containing Hunger’s mayday.

Trish sits behind the unkept desk, cradling one of the black plastic radios where it can’t be seen from the doorway.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday,” Hunger says from the radio.

“Lieutenant,” the rookie calls from the door.

She turns the dial until she feels the silencing click. She can operate the radio controls by touch, through heavy gloves, with it strapped behind her right hip under the flap of her bunker coat.

“They’ve been looking for the last couple radios,” the rookie says. “We found one in the utility vehicle, but they thought you might have the other.”

“I’ll be right down,” Trish replies. She turns the radio back on, keeping the volume low enough that only she will hear.

Hunger has completed his mayday. She waits.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday,” he begins again. He’s out of breath but still sounds calm. “I’ve fallen into the basement. Heavy fire. I’m trapped. I need help.”

On the corner outside the house, his friends watch flames erupt from a growing fracture in the roof. The walls of the house fold inward, like a reversed video of an opening flower, like collapsing possibilities.

Trish is among them. Hands reach out to restrain her. She would throw herself into the fire for him. She would burn, as she knows he’s burning. While she struggles, the mayday begins again.

“Hey, LT.” One of the logistics crew stands in the office doorway. “We need to finish reprogramming these radios. Your guy said you’ve got the last one.”

Trish holds up her hand. The mayday ends, and there is silence on the channel. Trish remembers the house fold, sending a shower of cinders skyward like freed souls.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday,” Hunger begins his loop again.

“Why does it keep repeating?” she asks.

The man shrugs. “Don’t know. They say it always happens when someone dies. Something gets caught on the frequency. That channel will be useless for a few years until it clears up.”

“It’ll fade?”

“Yeah, eventually he’ll quiet down.” He shifts uncomfortably, and Trish wonders how much he’s paid to erase the memory of her friend. “Uh, we’ve got a bunch more stations we still need to hit,” the man prompts.

She gives up the radio. Hunger’s voice goes silent in his hands.

• • • •

People call 911, and the alarm shrieks, and they go. A woman with cancer wants to die at home, but in her final hours her family panics. They have the legal documents to insist that she go to the hospital. The woman is carried out to an ambulance, mute and enraged, and Trish feels nothing.

A man calls at 2:30 in the morning for a stubbed toe. He insists he cannot walk, and as they carry him down from the third floor, Trish hears a cardiac arrest dispatched a couple blocks away. The next closest unit is ten minutes away, but they can’t leave the man on the stairs. She remembers how angry this would have made her a couple weeks earlier.

The fire marshals can’t identify the cause of the fire. No one admits they threw a cigarette off the deck, or dumped out fireplace ashes concealing live coals hiding like malevolent spirits. Maybe an electrician rushed a wiring job, a fractional error in the house’s DNA that broke out in frightening disease six years later. It might have been one of a thousand actions insulated from their outcomes, karmic entanglements leading to serendipity or ruin.

On the way to the next call, she watches as cars try to outrun the engine, jamming into rows of brake lights as she wails on the siren. No one can be bothered to inconvenience themselves to help someone else. She wonders what would happen if the hidden lines connecting cause and effect became clear—if people could perceive all the means by which they expose or shield each other from the world’s cruelty.

She wonders if anyone truly deserves help.

• • • •

A citizen wants a meeting, which is never good. He’s a foot taller than Trish and his suit jacket is too tight around the shoulders. He keeps shrugging the sleeves as they ride up his thick wrists.

“Michael Stanhouse,” he says, extending his hand.

She pays attention to the way that men shake her hand. Usually they perform the act with a gentle formality, an unwillingness to engage as equals. Stanhouse crushes her hand, and she crushes his in return.

She directs him to the chair across her desk. He barely fits between the armrests.

Stanhouse’s deep voice carries a New Zealand accent. “I have a device that might interest you,” he says.

The rookie should have screened out someone who wanted to make a sales pitch. Trish makes a note to chew him out later. “You’ll need to talk to the department leadership. I’m just a station Lieutenant. I have no authority in purchase decisions.”

“I know.” He smiles, barely. The skin of his cheeks is stiff and rough as scar tissue. “I’m not here to sell you anything. I represent a group that has developed a lifesaving device. In light of your recent line-of-duty death, we thought you might be interested in it.”

He doesn’t use the word “loss” and doesn’t pause before he says “death.” For this reason alone, she doesn’t throw him out. She has heard hundreds of people express their condolences for Hunger’s loss, for his passing. She wants to shout at all of them: he’s not lost. He didn’t wander away. He was killed. He burned alive.

“The device integrates into the microphone cord of a standard radio,” the man explains. “If the user faces certain death, they activate the button and they’re instantly relocated to a nearby receiving radio.”

He reaches into a thick leather briefcase and emerges with a radio like the one she carries on her gear, oblong and unadorned save for the channel knobs and short antenna. It is solid in her hand, almost indestructible.

“Is that it?” she asks. “It looks just like one of ours.”

“No.” He sets it down on her desk. “This is merely for demonstration.” The thick fingers fiddle at the dial.

“US Coast Guard,” a man’s voice says. He sounds out of breath. “Mayday, mayday. This is the Western Reach. We’re at forty-one degrees twenty-three . . .” He falters, gasping, then recites more coordinates.

“What is this?” Trish asks.

“We’re sinking!” the radio says. “We’re sinking!”

The visitor leans across the desk and clicks the channel selector. “I programmed this radio to receive all maydays broadcast over the last few years,” he says.

“They removed Unger’s mayday frequency from our radios,” she says.

“That’s fairly standard,” Stanhouse replies.

The radio squawks. “Air traffic control, Sierra five seven six niner, mayday mayday! Complete loss of engine power. We cannot maintain—” The voice is broken off like a stick.

The large man changes the channel.

She hears thick, wet breathing. “He’s gone. I think we’re . . . on the west side of the col . . .” The voice slurs and becomes unintelligible. Then, “I’m sorry, love.”

“I have a product that would have changed all the outcomes of these transmissions,” the man says.

Trish is overcome by cold anticipation of his next words. She leans across the desk and picks up the radio gently, as if it might explode.

“Channel sixteen lima,” the man says.

She can operate the controls by feel.

“I thought you might want to hear him again,” he explains.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday,” Hunger says.

“I need to borrow this radio,” she tells Stanhouse.

• • • •

Within weeks, Hunger’s voice has begun to fade. It comes through in certain places, certain times, and falls into static in others. One night she can’t pick it up in the apartment. She stalks the floor in mounting desperation, holding the radio over her head. Static. She pulls on yesterday’s clothes and gets in the car.

The voice returns, fades, and comes clear again in a convenience store parking lot near a highway overpass, amidst the trash thrown away by strangers.

Every night she drives in search of it. The guys at the station look at the half-moons under her eyes and say it must be great to be single. They ask if she’s going out with the big guy who has shown up at the station a couple times, meeting with her behind closed doors.

She tells them to go fuck themselves, as she is expected to do. By now, people have remembered how to laugh at the table. There are days they walk past Hunger’s old locker, with its black garland and the photo from the day he took his oath, and don’t miss a step.

All the food that well-wishers left at the station is gone by now, except for some cans of immortal cheese dip stuffed in a cabinet, and a grocery store sheet cake no one could stomach, which the rookie keeps wedging atop leftover containers in the fridge. At the lunch table, conversation fragments into emptiness and the crew’s eyes pivot to the TV or fall into their phones. Trish catches herself thinking it must be Hunger’s day off, then remembers.

She marks milestones the way she did when she first started on the job. She runs her first fire since his death, a room-and-contents started by a forgotten candle in a townhouse where the landlord cut the power. She can’t be sure, but in the moments after the station alarm goes off, she feels like the crew is moving a little more slowly than usual, drawing on their gear as if they’re all under water, encumbered by an invisible thickness.

Not so long ago she stood in another yard as the house burned over their friend. What if the hands that restrained her then had yielded and unclenched from her still-smoking gear? Granted free will, would she have run back into that bright, tilting doorway? No one knows. She’ll never know. How are they supposed to believe in each other without that certainty? In its absence grows a hydra of possibilities: that Hunger died because she’s female, or incompetent, or afraid, or all three.

Usually they bullshit each other with particular vigor after a fire, but that evening the television distracts them. She could tease the engine driver for sounding a little too excited on the radio, or the rookie for fumbling the hoseline. Instead, she wolfs down her food, hoping for another call to extricate them from the quiet.

• • • •

“How does it work?” she asks Stanhouse on his next visit. She turns the small cube over in her hands. Inside the lid is a single button covered by a failsafe switch to prevent accidental activation.

Trish should have referred Stanhouse up the chain of command, but she doesn’t want to give up the radio carrying all the frequencies of the dead. She still hasn’t said she’ll take his lifesaving device, and he’s made no move to leave it with her.

“I don’t claim to understand it.” He spreads his hands, and she notes how rough they are, like a marble statue that has been chipped and eroded by centuries of weather. “I didn’t develop the thing. I’m just a spokesman.”

“The spokesman should be able to tell me how it works.”

Stanhouse looks around at the white cinder-block walls of the office. “Can you tell me exactly how water extinguishes fire?”

“Yes, I can,” she says. “So can every graduate of fire academy. Water expands about 1700 times when it transforms into steam, and in the process—”

“Okay, okay.” He holds up his palms in defeat. “The people who made this aren’t talking about it. It’s never been tested or used in the United States. Only overseas. But it works.”

“How do you know?”

“Do you have the radio I loaned you?”

Trish considers lying and telling him she left it at home. Instead, she reaches into her desk, trying to conceal her reluctance. Loaned. Stanhouse can take away the radio any time he wants.

He twists the dials. She notices he does it almost without paying attention to his hands’ movements. Something about that troubles her.

She can barely make out the damp, pained breathing over the static. “I think we’re . . . on the west side of the col . . .” Static floods the channel. “I’m sorry, love.”

The hoarseness and wet respirations don’t quite obscure the deep voice, the accent. It’s Stanhouse.

“You?” Trish asks.

“It was me. Three years ago.”

She’s not quite sure what question to ask first. “Who were you talking to?”

“My wife. In basecamp. Everyone was trying to sound brave, but all the experienced climbers knew we were done. My client and I were above 8000 meters. We’d been injured in an avalanche, and neither of us was in any condition to walk down. Weather closed in, and that was that.”

“So you used the devices to escape?”

“We only had one. Single use. It belonged to my client. I didn’t even know then that technology like this existed.” He shrugs. “Rich people, you know? But he refused to use it.”

“Why?”

Stanhouse set the radio on the desk between them. “Like I said, it’s only for cases when death is inevitable. The cost is very high. My client didn’t want to guess wrong and deploy it without good reason.”

“Sounds like you had a pretty good reason.”

“Not good enough. He froze to death waiting for help.”

• • • •

Trish wakes up to men yelling in the chasm between the buildings. She puts a palm to the frosted glass and watches the bellowing shadows. She imagines them painted with raspberry juice, staggering under the pain of imaginary injuries. They round the corner, the voices fading.

When she tunes the radio to Hunger’s frequency, she receives only silence. She paces the room, seeking a fraction of his voice, but she cannot find him.

Stanhouse meets her at the convenience store, knocking once on the passenger window before opening the car door and dropping into the seat. He’s unshaven and bundled into a large coat. Trish knows there are hours in the night when the body struggles to stay warm, solitary stretches when it is painfully apparent to anyone awake that they are utterly alone. That’s when people call 911 for afflictions that would seem tame in daylight.

She holds up the radio. Hunger’s voice is thin and distant.

“Why is he fading so fast?” she asks. “Your transmission is still strong after three years.”

“Lots of reasons. I had a stronger radio, for starters.”

“Is it because of me?” Trish stares out at the bright storefront. “Because I’m listening?”

He shifts, the coat rustling. “Maybe. Probably.”

“And no one is listening to you?” She turns off the radio. “No, I guess they wouldn’t need to. You came back.”

Sleet begins to pit the windshield, smearing the streetlights.

“Are they ghosts?” she asks. “Trapped spirits? Or just a weird glitch in the radios?”

He doesn’t answer for a while. “More than a glitch,” he says at last. “Maybe before radios, before maydays, they manifested in another way. We happened to build the right kind of technology to trap them.”

“He’s so close,” Trish says. “If your device works through the radio, can we pull him through? We could connect with his mayday transmission and activate it.”

Stanhouse shakes his head. “It only works one way. It has to be pushed at the point of origin.”

“Then I’ll connect it to this radio, tune into his mayday, and go to him.”

He shifts, his elbow prodding the door. “You mean, send yourself through the radio, back in time to when he broadcast the mayday?”

“Exactly.”

Stanhouse sighs and fumbles at his back pocket. “Let me show you something,” he says, pressing at the screen of his phone. After a minute, he hands it across the car.

The image is bright white, as if the exposure has been dialed up too high. It shows a patch of snow. A bent arm enclosed in a tattered blue jacket emerges from the drift. A waxen bare hand curls like a bird’s claw. A pair of boots is barely visible in the frame, as if someone is napping under the snowbank. It’s a man—no, two men, embracing—engulfed in white.

“That’s me in blue,” he says, pointing. “It’s a bit hard to see. This is why the device is only meant to be used when death is inevitable.”

Trish exhales. “I don’t understand.”

He accepts the phone again, the screen illuminating his pitted, tight features. “You can’t save yourself,” he says. “You push the button, you die. You transmit a copy for the people on the other end. It’s an act of mercy, not survival.”

A man outside the convenience store bursts out laughing, and Trish wonders how joy and sorrow manage to coexist in such close proximity. She shakes her head. “What was it like?” she asks.

He struggles to slide the phone back into his pocket. “I remember my hands were so cold I could barely get the device open. I pushed the button, opened my eyes, and I was curled up in our tent in basecamp, beside the transmitter. I could feel the warmth of the heaters on my face. I felt like I was burning. But up on the mountain, the person who I was until that moment died. The person who actually pushed the button is still up there.”

Trish imagines Hunger walking out of the house wreathed in fire. She takes his gloved hand and leads him out into the yard. The others surround him, their hands patting away the clinging flames, wiping him clean like a newborn child.

Stanhouse doesn’t meet her eyes. “To my wife and friends, the person who activated the device was dead. They couldn’t accept me. Then a couple climbers spread a story that I took it from my client to save myself. No one trusted me anymore, even after the pictures of the bodies came out. It destroyed my career and my marriage.”

“But you’re still here,” she says.

His laughter forms a short-lived cloud. “Well, not still here. Technically, I’m only three years old.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” Trish presses him. “Can it be done? Could I go back to get him?”

“You’d die in the process. Maybe, in some parallel universe, you would show up just as he’s delivering the mayday, but back here, you’d be dead. Even if it were possible, imagine how that would affect your firehouse, your family.”

Trish thinks about the quiet over the station dinner table, the way the crew pulls on their gear a little more slowly when they get a call. She wonders if anyone would miss her the way she misses Hunger.

When he extricates himself from the car, she finds the device left in the seat. She drives it home without touching it, and carries it inside like a live grenade.

• • • •

She rations the time she spends on Hunger’s frequency.

Hundreds of other maydays still come through clearly. She can’t stop listening, despite surges of guilt at contributing to the slow erosion of their signals. She drives out at night to catch them like falling stars.

We’re falling. We’re sinking. I’m trapped. We don’t know where we are. Tell my son I love him. Please help us. Please respond. Mayday. Emergency. Pan pan. Help me.

Theirs is the only anguish she can feel, as if she’s tuned to receive grief. She listens while speeding on the highway and sitting behind the shuttered public library. She drives endless residential streets like the one where Hunger burned, full of identical houses and copied lives, remarkable only for their disasters.

She listens until she’s so exhausted that she wonders if she’s finished chasing their misery. By the next night, she’s ready for more.

Trish thinks of the cancer patient who wanted to die at home, who watched with hot eyes as they carried her out. Trapped in a weightless body, standing inside a burning house. So near to safety, yet unable to reach it.

• • • •

She finds the floor plans in the Line of Duty Death report. It shows the precise location where Hunger was found under the debris, less than twelve feet inside a basement door, down a shallow staircase from the back yard.

The report doesn’t quite match her memory, but she was frantic in the immediate aftermath of the fire, slopping through steaming wet ash as hoselines arced over her shoulder to cool the remaining flames. Lights sent her shadow deep into the cavity at the heart of the burned house. Cold sloshed over the tops of her boots.

She memorizes the map of the basement. That is where she’ll arrive.

While her crew sleeps, she pulls a spare SCBA from the equipment closet and stashes it in her car. At the end of the shift, she takes home all her gear, instead of stowing it in the metal lockers that line the engine bay.

She sleeps most of the day, throwing away her final hours. She knows, from having seen people die, that most people’s hours are wasted. She can’t bring herself to do anything different with the few she has left.

At night she attaches the device to the mayday radio and drives in search of Hunger’s signal.

His words slur. The voice crackles and dies as she visits all the locations where he once came in clearly, as if he’s fleeing from her. She hears a single mayday, cool and certain. It stabs her in the chest, a spasm so unexpected that she pulls over and waits to see what will follow. Is she dying?

But it passes, and she resumes looking. At last, turn by turn, the signal leads her back to the house on the corner.

She’s not sure what she expected. The last time she was here, the house was a skeleton of burned uprights brooding over the sunken lake of the basement. Little cinders floated on cold ink before winking out and submerging.

Instead, she finds an intact structure, unmarked by the events she remembers. The windows are bright. It’s like all the others, monotonous but with all the usual possibilities for happiness. It looks almost as it did just before the fire tore open the roof like a monster escaping its confinement, the refined violence and sorrow confined within each of these boxes distilled into heat and light, shredding the paper rooms in search of the sky.

They only altered one thing when they rebuilt: the address. Someone took advantage of the house’s location at the end of the block to give it a new number. Trish figures no one wants to buy a house where a young man died, calling for help, his voice trapped in the ether, tormenting those who cared about him. The old number will fade into old real estate records and web searches.

Trish feels the stab in her chest again, and recognizes anger.

Hunger’s voice calls mayday, mayday, mayday, as clearly as the first time.

• • • •

She dons her gear outside the car, aware that this must look strange to anyone peering into the night from a nearby window. The SCBA is heavy and reassuring against her back.

She reviews her plan: orient herself, find him, clear debris, drag him to the door and up four steps to safety. She envisions the layout of the basement. She’ll need to orient herself by feel in the black smoke, matching the corners with her memory.

It will be hot—almost unbearable. She prepares herself for the sudden shock, the unnerving sensation that her flesh is cooking within her gear. The bees will be stinging her ears, even protected under an insulating hood.

She gets down on the ground beside the car and lies as flat as she can, consciously loosening her shoulders. Staying low will protect her from the worst of the heat.

It occurs to her that she hasn’t left a note or given any explanation for what she’s about to do. Maybe, in this timeline, her body will be found beside the car, in full gear, like a sacrifice or an atonement. Cause of death: unknown.

Trish twists the channel dial. There are many empty frequencies on the radio, where voices have faded into exhaustion or been scraped clean by listeners who, like her, could not let go. She keys the mic, wondering what her own personal mayday should sound like.

She’s fallen through a hole burned in the world. She’s sinking. She’s falling. She’s trapped. She needs help.

She manages a few seconds of silence before releasing the mic. What does it matter? Nothing that she has said until now has made a difference.

Hunger’s voice is only a few clicks back on the dial. The failsafes covering the device confound her gloved hand for a few seconds. Trish hugs the ground. She takes one long, measured breath, as if she’s not afraid, and

• • • •

“Wait. Wait.” Stanhouse’s face is in front of her mask, his hands against her gloves. They fumble over the radio. His eyes widen when she doesn’t immediately let it go. “Just wait a second,” he says, his voice suddenly calm. He releases his hold, his eyes locked with hers.

Trish’s breath is loud in the mask. She’s wasting air that she’ll need in the house. She unclips the regulator.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“Answering your mayday,” he replies.

She rises to her knees, and he follows suit. “I didn’t say anything,” she tells him.

“I know. I’ve been listening to it for the past two months.”

She recognizes what he’s saying, but her mind can’t quite chase the implications.

“No,” Trish says. “You don’t have the right to interfere. I’m going back.”

“You already went,” Stanhouse says. “You’re already gone.”

• • • •

Somewhere she appears in the searing light, a hand fumbling for another gloved hand. She yells over the noise of combustion, the howl of the house being devoured. Hunger ceases struggling. Someone has come back for him, as he knew they would.

Fire filters through darkness. An alarm wails: low air. Only a little life left. Debris sends fireflies into the smoke. She groans as she pushes aside tilting beams, freeing him.

Then, a vertical rectangle of light, hands reaching for them, people shouting. They collapse in each other’s arms in the heat-wilted grass. He’s laughing.

Still on his back, Hunger smolders, as if he’s a malevolent being that just stepped through a gateway on to a suburban lawn. Trish rolls up on one knee, and with gloved hands begins unbuckling his SCBA. Her face is somber through her pitted facepiece.

“Are you hurt?” she yells over the roar of the fire.

“I don’t think so.”

She methodically removes his gear, exposing him again to the night, careful not to burn herself.

“That,” Hunger laughs, “is going to make a hell of a story.”

She does not answer.

Somewhere, she dies on the sidewalk outside the reconstructed house, alone.

Then someone goes back for her.

• • • •

The lunch table goes quiet the next time Stanhouse rings the doorbell. The rookie jumps up to get the door, and Trish notes the sudden silence over the plates. Moments ago, the crew was talking and laughing. Other stories and storytellers have gradually stepped in to take Hunger’s place, knitting together the rough edges of their shared wound like a scar.

Up in her office, she tosses the device across the desk. Stanhouse catches it, flips aside the failsafes, and pokes at the button. There’s no tension in it, as if a spring has broken inside the mechanism. “You can keep this if you want,” he says. “One-time use.”

She shakes her head. “You knew I would use it, didn’t you?”

“No. But I thought you might.”

She points over his shoulder, at the framed picture of Hunger in his uniform. “He’s still dead.”

“In this world. In another, you saved him. Can I have the radio?”

She hands it over the desk, concealing her reluctance. Stanhouse turns the volume knob and selects a channel. His hands again move with strange efficiency that troubles her for a moment.

She hears a faint, electronic hum, then silence.

“He’s gone,” she confirms. “No more mayday.”

“That’s not his mayday,” Stanhouse tells her. “It’s yours.”

The channel is quiet. Trish remembers the last minute of her life, when she geared up to enter a fire that had burned down to ash months ago, and pressed herself against the cool earth as if the air itself were aflame.

“I didn’t know what to say,” she says.

“You will,” he says, “eventually.” He twists the volume dial without looking, and her stomach lurches as she recognizes the practiced gesture.

“You’ve been listening to that radio, too,” she says.

He nods, and she at last understands.

“This isn’t the first time you’ve gone back to save someone, is it?” she asks.

“You’re the fourth,” he answers, not meeting her eyes.

“And every time, you die?”

He shifts his mass in the chair. “I just couldn’t let go of the maydays. Most of them, I can’t do anything for: plane crashes, sinking ships. If I showed up, I would just be an unexplainable body in the wreckage—”

“Or in the ashes,” Trish interrupts. “You wanted to go back for Hunger. You’d probably listened to his frequency so many times it was half-erased by the time I tuned in. You just didn’t have the training or equipment to get him yourself. But you knew another firefighter would.”

“I thought you might have a better shot. But it had to be your decision.”

Silence falls between them.

“It was,” she says at last. “And I get why you’re doing it. But you don’t have to die for all those people.”

Stanhouse gazes out the window behind her desk. “I don’t really have anything else left. I’m already working on a plan for a fishing boat that sank in Alaska sixteen months ago.”

She laughs at the audaciousness. “How do you plan to explain your sudden appearance on a boat?”

“That’s one detail I still need to work out.”

Trish points at the radio. “Explain this, then. Your mayday from the mountain is still coming through loud and clear. Why not go back and save yourself?”

“Would you?”

Trish sighs, and Stanhouse reaches into his bag. “I’ve still got a few of these left,” he says, waving another device. “When I’m down to one, I’ll go back and make sure my client makes it out.”

She has the sudden image of him, bulked up in cold-weather gear, emerging from a blizzard to confront . . . himself. “If the original Stanhouse survives, will there be two of you?”

“I’m not sure how it’s going to work. But the old me can go back to his life. I’ve got other things to keep me busy.” He stands.

Trish wishes he would stay, even if only a few minutes longer. “When you go back for the crew of the fishing boat, you’ll die in this timeline.”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “This is why I’m the perfect guy for the job. No one will miss me.”

“I will,” she says.

Stanhouse smiles. “Thanks. I’m sorry you’re stuck in this timeline. I wish you could have your friend back.”

The rookie appears in the doorway, asking a pointless question that betrays the fact that he has been sent here to spy on her and the station’s visitor. This is how her crew members show their affection. She’s going to give them all some shit about it later, as she’s expected to do.

She calls the rookie back. “Did you ever hear the story about how Hunger would smear raspberry juice on his face and scare his parents?”

The rookie shakes his head.

“I’ll tell you about it at dinner,” she says.

In time, she’ll tell all his stories, returning over and over to a world untouched by fire. Those moments will resonate over the table, supplemented and replaced as new faces bring their own tales, inhabited and abandoned as old homes, as all things burn and are remade.

©2021 by Adam R. Shannon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam R. Shannon is a career firefighter/paramedic, speculative fiction writer, aspiring cook, and steadfast companion of dogs. His work has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Nightmare, Apex, and Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die. His story “On the Day You Spend Forever With Your Dog” was a finalist for the Sturgeon Award and appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019. He’s a graduate of Clarion West 2017.

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

How to Become a Witch-Queen

Theodora Goss | 7602 words

1. THE COFFIN

You look at the coffin as it is lowered into the rectangular opening in the cathedral floor, that was made specifically to contain it. Inside is your husband, the man to whom you have been married for more than twenty years, you’ve forgotten exactly how many. The man with whom you have three children. The oldest, Gerhard, will inherit the throne. He will be called Gerhard IV after his grandfather, who was Gerhard III or, to his enemies, Gerhard the Drunkard. His younger brother, Wilhelm, is jealous of him, and you foresee a rivalry, perhaps even a struggle for the throne. They were such lovely little boys, you think, remembering when they wore short pants and played with toy soldiers. What happened to them? They are young men now, beyond your purview, and Gerhard in particular takes after his father, who was not a bad man, but not a particularly good one either. A typical king of these small kingdoms, which are perpetually at war with one another, obsessed with politics and power. Wilhelm, at least, is an affectionate son, but you worry that with the privileges of a prince and nothing to do, he will become dissolute, possibly a drunkard like his grandfather. And your daughter Dorothea, who takes after you—well, you worry about her as well. She is still young, only fourteen, but soon she will be old enough for the use to which princesses are usually put—a marriage to cement alliances. You don’t want her married off to a prince she barely knows, who may be cruel, or ugly, or just smell bad. Her father would have married her off without a qualm, so you are glad he is dead, although of course you can never say such a thing. The list of things queens cannot say is a long one, and you have not said them for most of your life. His death means your position at court is diminished, but you never cared for pomp and circumstance anyway. If you had been given a choice, you would have stayed in the forest with the dwarves—or the huntsman. Your father’s court taught you that prestige comes at a price. Most are willing to pay it—you, increasingly, are not.

Would Gerhard force Dorothea to marry? That is the question which has been bothering you since your husband died. He might—she is a pretty girl, although still awkward, as awkward as you were yourself at that age, when the queen your mother asked for your heart and liver and you had to leave the only home you had ever known.

So that is the dilemma in a nutshell. You have no place here anymore, not really. And there is Dorothea to consider. What should you do?

As you stand there pondering, with your black handkerchief held up to your dry eyes in mimic grief, the stone that will cover the coffin is put into place. Lying on top of it is an effigy of your husband in armor, looking as handsome as he did in life, with Harald II engraved beneath his feet. He was always an attractive man, even into his forties. Not the sort of man you would expect to die from a heart condition, but here you are, a widow. Across the cathedral, his mistress, who used to be one of your ladies-in-waiting, is sobbing into a friend’s shoulder. For him, or because with his death, she has lost her place in the court hierarchy? Gerhard has never liked her, and will probably send her packing back to her father’s damp manor house by the southern marshes. You have absolutely no pity for her. We all make our own beds, and must lie in them.

After the funeral services are over, you return to your rooms in the castle, escorted by your ladies-in-waiting. As you walk down a corridor, you pass the chamber where your own coffin, the one made of glass, is displayed. Visitors are allowed to see it Mondays through Thursdays, from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, along with other national treasures such as the crown of Gerhard I, who was crowned by the Pope himself, or the emerald necklace of Queen Sofronia, which you wore at your wedding. Someday you may lie in that coffin again—however, you have no intention of dying anytime soon. A plan is coming to you, but will Gerhard agree? How can you put it to him so that he cannot refuse? You have an idea . . .

“Your Majesty,” says Franziska, your lady’s maid, who has been waiting for you in your bedroom.

“Yes?” You turn toward her. As you do, you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. For the first time in your life, you are wearing black. It suits you. Your hair is still black at a distance, although up close, with afternoon light coming through the windows, you can see strands of gray. Your face is still youthful, although there are lines under your eyes, of either age or fatigue. You are the same age as your mother when she tried to kill you, and here you are, trying to figure out how to protect your daughter. She is just as pretty as you were at her age, you think loyally, but you know it’s not true—how could she be, without the additional charm of magic? Hair as black as night, skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood—those were the words of the enchantment. Other women might be content with dyes and cosmetics, with carmine and lamp black, but your mother must have a daughter as beautiful as herself, created by magic. Of course, when that daughter turned out more beautiful . . . Well, this is no time to go over that old history.

“Yes, Franziska? What is it?”

“The king, Your Majesty. He requests permission to enter.”

For a moment you are startled: when has your husband ever asked permission to enter? You expect him to come walking in as usual, but then you remember—he is lying under a stone effigy of himself. It is of course Gerhard, who is now king, although the coronation will not be until Sunday, in the cathedral.

“Mother,” he says, after you have nodded your permission to Franziska. He is stiff and dutiful as always. He has been like this since his days at military school, which affected Wilhelm so differently—if Willi had not been a prince, he would surely have been thrown out for his drunken capers, despite the fact that he was a surprisingly good scholar. Now he is the opposite of his brother—romantic, impulsive, a natural rebel. “I hope you are bearing up under your grief.”

“Indeed,” you say, offering him your hand to be kissed. “Thank you for your consideration, my son. As you know, I am devastated by the loss of your father, and cannot think how to console myself. After your coronation, where I shall be proud to see you crowned as his successor, I would like to withdraw to the Abbey of St. Winifred, where my mother is buried. I would prefer to mourn in private. Do I have your permission to make such a journey?” It is tiresome to ask permission, but you have had to ask permission from men all your life—your father, your husband. Only in the forest were you free.

“Of course, of course,” he says. He looks relieved that you asked—it seems he would rather have you absent from court for a while. A king newly crowned does not want the queen dowager interfering in matters of state.

“And perhaps I shall take Dorothea with me. The nuns will know how to assuage the grief of an emotional girl.”

“No doubt,” he says. Again he looks relieved to be rid, for a while, of inconvenient females. “I shall need you both here when Prince Ludwig of Hohenstein comes to negotiate the new trade pact for the Five Kingdoms, but until then . . .”

So that’s the husband he has chosen for Dorothea! Ludwig of Hohenstein is only ten years older than her, and not particularly ugly—you do not know whether he smells bad—but he is utterly and completely ordinary. A boring man. You do not want her marrying him, unless she herself wants to—if she is to marry dullness, let her choose it herself.

“Of course, Your Majesty,” you say. You curtsey, and you can see that although he raises you up and tells you that sort of thing is not necessary, not for his own mother, he is secretly pleased.

When Gerhard is gone, you smile. That was easier than you anticipated.

“Franziska,” you say. “I want you to pack for a long journey. Only black gowns.”

“Of course, Your Majesty,” says the lady’s maid. It makes sense that at this delicate time, the queen dowager cannot be seen out of mourning.

But black, you think, is for more than mourning. It is the appropriate color for a witch.

II. THE FOREST

The huntsman’s house is exactly where you remember, both too far and not far enough away from the castle.

He looks at you warily, a little anxiously. He has heard, no doubt, of the king’s death. Such news travels fast.

He looks different—how could he not? He has a beard now, and there is gray in it, as well as in his hair. He has taken off his green cap with the feather and is standing respectfully, waiting for your command.

You remember the first time you saw him. He was only seventeen, with golden-red hair and the beginning of a mustache.

“Princess,” he said. “The queen your mother commanded that I lead you out into the forest to kill you. She told me to bring back your liver and heart. But I cannot do such a thing. Take my purse—it does not have much in it, but a little is better than nothing. Run and hide, at least until Her Majesty is no longer angry with you—although why she is angry, I cannot imagine. If you follow the road, you will come to a village—there you can perhaps hide yourself as long as necessary. I shall kill a young doe and take its liver and heart back to her instead.”

“My mother the queen will not get over that anger.” You remember how she looked at you the day you returned from St. Winifred’s, where you had been at school for seven years, coming home only for holidays. You remember the look in her eyes when she realized her magic had worked too well, that you were, not just as beautiful as your mother, but more beautiful. You could hear the courtiers whispering it—“More beautiful than the queen herself.”

Your father said, when he did not know you were listening, “She’s as beautiful as Elfrida—more beautiful, because younger. She’ll be easy to marry off.”

You looked up at the huntsman then, thinking, Why should I run? Let him kill me, let us get this over with. But you decided, perhaps only because it was a sunlit summer day and all the birds were singing in the trees, that you wanted to live. You took the purse, then went up on tiptoes and to his immense surprise, kissed him on the mouth. And then you turned and ran, not down the road, but into the forest.

Years later, after your mother’s death and your husband’s coronation, you said to the king, “Do you remember the huntsman who spared my life? We should reward him by giving him a position in the castle.”

“There is no use for a huntsman in a castle,” said King Harald. “But I can make him a gamekeeper in the forest. That is easy enough.”

It was not so easy sneaking out of the castle when you were the queen, especially under the watchful eyes of your ladies-in-waiting, but Franziska helped. When you came to the gamekeeper’s house for the first time, you knocked gently, then opened the door. You had not seen him in years—now he was twenty-seven, tall and handsome as he stood up, startled and a little frightened at this apparition.

“Your Majesty!” he said, bowing.

Of course he recognized you, even after all these years. Who else has hair black as night, skin white as snow, lips red as blood?

“None of that, if you please,” you told him. “I have come for something you owe me.”

“And what is that?” he asked, although you thought he already knew—he was looking at you not like a queen, but like a woman. A wave of relief washed over you—you had hoped, had thought, there was something between you, that you had not imagined it all those years ago. Some small bit of the magic we call attraction or even love, but you had been so young, and not at all certain. And now here it was in his eyes, and in his arms as you claimed back your kiss.

After that day, you visited him as often as possible, which was not often, for what you were doing had two names: adultery and treason. But you could not live your entire life behind castle walls, by the side of the king to whom you were only another affirmation of his prominence. After all, he had married the fairest in the land.

One day you told your lover that you could not come anymore. “Henrik, I am with child. I have taken precautions, but such things are not infallible.”

“Is it mine?” he asked, with a pained expression. He had never asked you if you still went to the king’s bed. He knew that queens have no choice in such a matter.

“It is,” you told him. “But it must not be. You understand, do you not, that it must be the king’s?”

He had simply nodded. If your child were not the king’s, you would be put to death, most likely by decapitation, before it could be born. He knew that as well as you.

After that day, you did not go back to his house in the forest, not once, no matter how your heart and your arms ached during the long nights.

And yet his eyes, as they look at you now, still leaf-green, harbor no resentment.

“Your Majesty,” he says.

“Gamekeeper,” you say, although you would prefer to address him by his name, but that will come later. “We are riding to the Abbey of St. Winifred. As you see, our retinue is small—myself, my daughter, our maid, and two men-at-arms.” He looks up quickly at Dorothea, but her face is hidden by her riding veil. Will he recognize himself in her, when he looks at her later? She has his eyes. “We need a man to tend to our needs—arrange for lodging, water the horses, things of that sort. Can you perform such tasks?”

He smiles. “I serve at your command, My Queen.”

“Come then,” you say. “We have a spare horse. You shall ride before us, to clear the road through the forest if necessary, or warn of thieves.”

You look at Franziska and she gives you a small smile. You know that whatever inn you stop at, she will arrange it so that for the first time in fourteen years, you will spend the night with the man you love.

III. THE COTTAGE

The dwarves greet you as they have always done, each according to his temperament. Trondor shakes his head and says, “So you’re back, are you?” but you can see that he’s smiling under his beard. Kristof and Olaf embrace you enthusiastically. Anders makes you a courtly bow, Rolf kisses your hand, Nilsen hangs back shyly until you lean down to give him a long hug. But where is Ingar?

“He found himself a wife,” says Trondor. “It won’t last. It never does.”

Once, when you were young, you saw one of the dwarf women. Unlike the sociable dwarf men, they are solitary and live deep in the forest, in small huts or the hollow trunks of trees. This one wore a dress stitched of squirrel skin. She was as small as the men, with long fair hair caught up in various places with twigs. It looked like a bird’s nest.

You saw her only for a moment, speaking with Olaf in the ancient language of dwarves, more melodious than human language. Her voice sounded like wind in the pine branches. She gave him a basket of mushrooms in exchange for some honey, then disappeared under the trees. Trondor explained to you that dwarf women seldom ventured out of the forest. Dwarf marriages are short-lived: the dwarf woman chooses a mate, then allows him to live with her for a time, often until she is with child. But she can stand the company of another only for so long. Eventually, the men return to the company of their brothers, for all male dwarves who share a home are considered part of one family, although of the seven you lived with, only Kristof and Olaf had the same mother.

You are glad to see them again, these men who took you in and treated you more kindly than your own parents—the mother who tried to kill you, the father who was concerned only with matters of state and died mysteriously while you were with the dwarves, leaving your mother regent. You have seen them only once since the day the prince found you in the glass coffin and took you away to his castle—they were invited to the wedding. When they came up to the dais on which you were sitting, in your gown of white silk with the necklace of Queen Sofronia around your neck, Trondor said, “What is this fairy story they tell of the prince waking you up with true love’s kiss?” You could see Prince Harald across the great hall, speaking with his father, already arranging for the coronation and a transfer of power.

“Is that not what happened?” you asked him. You yourself had been doubtful of the official version, as you were doubtful of the prince himself. But he would protect you from your mother, who had almost succeeded in killing you with that apple, and whom you suspected of poisoning your father for his throne.

“Of course not,” said Trondor in his gruff voice. “After he ordered us to give him the coffin and threatened us if we did not obey, one of the footman who was carrying it stepped into a rabbit hole. A corner of the coffin fell to the ground, and the piece of apple was dislodged from your throat. That’s what woke you, child. Kiss of true love indeed! And they call you White-as-Snow, as though you did not have a perfectly good name of your own. Are you happy, Ermengarde?”

“Happy enough,” you told him. Of course, that was before your mother appeared at the reception—before the incident of the red-hot iron shoes, which you would rather not think about.

“It’s good to see you again, child,” says Trondor now. Of course you are not a child any longer, but dwarves live for hundreds of years. To him you are still a mere infant. “We heard of the king’s death . . .”

“Yes,” you say. “I’m going back to my father’s castle. I have . . . certain plans. Will you help me, Trondor? You and your brothers? I will need counselors and allies.”

“Of course,” he says, looking at you through narrowed eyes. You think he already understands what you intend to do. Even when you were a little girl, he understood you better than anyone else. “Shall I bring my axe, Queen Ermengarde? It has not tasted battle for a long time.”

“Yes,” you say. “I think that would be a good idea.”

IV. THE TOWER

You stop at the Abbey of St. Winifred only briefly, to talk to the Mother Superior.

“Are you absolutely certain about this, Ermengarde?” she asks as she gives you the key to the tower. You gave it to her after the wedding and murder, for what else was it but a murder? At your own wedding, ordered by your husband. At the time, you asked her to keep it for you as long as necessary. You did not know if you would ever reclaim it from her again. But now here you are.

“Yes, I’m absolutely sure,” you say. “And will you bless me, Reverend Mother? You were, in a way, the closest thing I had to a real mother . . .” One who loved you and taught you, for once upon a time the Mother Superior was Sister Margarete, who taught you your catechism and geography in the abbey’s long, cold schoolroom.

“Perhaps I was a sort of mother to you,” she says, looking at you as acutely as she did thirty years ago. Age has not diminished her strength of will or mental acuity. “But blood is important too, Ermengarde. Her blood flows through your veins, and I worry about what you will do—”

“Don’t worry about me,” you say. “I will be absolutely fine.”

“I’m sure you will—you were always a clever girl, sometimes too clever for your own good. But what about the rest of us?” Nevertheless, she gives you the key, which is after all yours by right of blood. You are, in the end, your mother’s daughter. She blesses you, kissing you on your forehead as though you were fourteen again and not a queen.

Before you leave the abbey, you visit your mother’s grave, on which is inscribed only Elfrida and the dates of her birth and death. She’s been dead for more than twenty years, and you still can’t decide how you feel about her.

But her tower, too, is yours now. You lead your retinue to your father’s castle, which has not been used except as a hunting lodge since the kingdoms were united after your mother’s death. That was another thing the iron shoes accomplished. Did your husband force her to dance in them to revenge the way she treated you, as he said, or so he could claim your father’s kingdom? Or perhaps both, for that was the way his mind worked, after all.

Since the castle is empty, there is plenty of room for you, Dorothea, Henrik, six dwarves, two men-at-arms, and of course the indispensable Franziska.

The next day, she and Henrik accompany you to the tower. You have already made him the captain of your men-at-arms, and they obey him without question. You selected them because before the kingdoms were united, they served in your father’s household. They are older, so they can be spared from Gerhard’s forces, but also they are loyal to you—they still recognize you as their queen.

As for Henrik, he too asked you, lying back on your pillows, one arm around you, one hand stroking your long black hair, for the gray strands do not show by candlelight, “Are you sure, my love, that you want to do this?”

You turned to look at him and said, “Do you think Gerhard would allow me to live the life I want, or our daughter either? If he found out about us, you and I would be condemned to death, and Dorothea would be imprisoned or exiled. And if he did not find out, things would continue as they are. He would want her to marry Prince Ludwig, and he would want me to remain a queen dowager—silent, respectable, so desiccated that eventually I would dry up and blow away like a leaf in autumn. Believe me, my love, if there were another way for the three of us to have a life together, I would take it. However, I am not only Ermengarde, the woman who loves you, but White-as-Snow. Twenty years ago I became the main character in a fairy tale, and it spread throughout the land. If Gerhard announced that I was missing, had perhaps been kidnapped by an equally missing gamekeeper, I would be searched for, watched for, in this kingdom and others. There would be no place for us to hide. So you see, I must use what I have, including the name I was given, the tale that was told about me—I must use these things to write my own story.”

He nodded, then pulled you closer and kissed you. Now, he dismounts and takes the horses’ reins. Then he waits by the foot of the tower while you open the wooden door with your mother’s key, and you and Franziska enter.

The tower is not tall, only two stories of ancient stone with a crenelated turret, surrounded by oak trees. Once, it was used to store weapons, and a couple of men-at-arms would sleep there on folding cots. Inside, the windows are small—arrow slits more than windows. It is darker than you expected.

On the second floor, after you have climbed up the stone staircase that circles the inside of the tower, Franziska raises her lantern.

There are all your mother’s magical implements, scattered about as though she had left them just yesterday: the cauldron, the table of alchemical equipment whose purposes you do not yet understand, the shelves of bottles filled with powders and other ingredients—dried eye of newt and toe of frog? Are those the sorts of things witches keep, as housewives keep pickles? The shelves also hold large books in leather covers, presumably filled with formulas and spells.

On the far side of the table is an ornate wooden stand with the mirror whose pronouncements caused so much trouble.

V. THE MIRROR

How does one address a magical mirror?

The problem, of course, is that your mother never taught you witchcraft. Would she have, if her spell had not worked so well? If she had not thought of you as a rival? You would have given up your black hair and white skin and red lips without a second thought, simply for a kind word from her.

“Mirror, mirror, I believe, is how she usually started,” says Franziska. She too was chosen for her history with your family as well as her loyalty to you—her mother was your mother’s maid, her father drove your father’s own carriage.

All right, then. “Mirror, mirror.”

The mirror, which reflected you a moment ago, grows misty, as though filled with fog, and then the fog swirls as though blown here and there by a wind inside the mirror itself. Out of that fog comes a voice.

“Well, well. Look who’s back. Little White-as-Snow, all grown up. Welcome to your mother’s chamber of secrets and spells, Ermengarde.”

Is it a man’s voice? A woman’s? You cannot quite tell. It is, undeniably, a cynical, sarcastic voice. It sounds bitter.

“Do you, too, want to know who’s the fairest in the land?” it asks.

“Not particularly,” you say. “I assume it’s not me any longer.”

“You’re right about that,” says the mirror. “You’ve aged out of that particular position. What is it you want, then?”

“I want you to teach me my mother’s magic,” you say, trying to see something in the swirling smoke. The mirror has no discernable face. “She once called you her familiar. You would know how to use all these books, this equipment.” You gesture around at the contents of the tower.

“And why do you want to learn magic?” asks the mirror, as the fog swirls more quickly. “Do you, too, want to kill your daughter?”

“No, to save her,” you say. “I want to become queen—not queen consort, not queen dowager, but queen in my own right. That’s the only way I will have some measure of power over her life, and mine.”

“I see,” says the mirror, sounding surprised. Clearly, it has not expected this. “I will teach you if you do two things.”

“And what are they?” you ask, wondering if you will need to sacrifice something, or sign somewhere in blood. You do not relish the thought.

“First, you must pledge yourself to Hecate. That is merely standard procedure. Second, you must allow me to return to my true form.”

“Your true form?” You look at the mirror, astonished. “Is this not your true form?” The mirror has been a mirror as long as you have known that your mother was a witch. You remember seeing it on its ornate stand the only time she brought you to this tower, before you were sent away to the Abbey of St. Winifred. She stood you in front of it, showed you your own reflection, and said, “Look, Ermie, at what a pretty girl you are. Someday, you’ll look just like me!”

“No,” says the mirror. “Your mother ordered me to become a mirror so I could show her whatever she wished to see—chiefly herself. I have been trapped in this form ever since. You are my mistress now. Allow me to return to my true form—simply say the words—and I will teach you.”

“All right, then,” you say with some trepidation. “Return to your true form.” What will you see? A serpent? A dragon? A demon with horns and a forked tail?

The smoke in the mirror swirls faster and faster, until it looks like a gray whirlpool, and suddenly sitting in front of you is not a mirror in a frame but a wolf with fur the color of smoke.

It stares at you with yellow eyes and says, “Thank you, mistress. Shall we begin the first lesson?”

VI. THE CAULDRON

It takes Gerhard longer than you expected to realize that you are not at the Abbey of St. Winifred. When his army comes marching over what used to be the border between two kingdoms, you are ready. You have had three months to learn magic from Grimm, which turns out to be the name of your familiar. You hope you have learned enough.

You stand outside the portcullis of the castle, which is on a hillside. You are dressed all in black, like a widow or a witch. To one side of you stands Henrik beside his horse, ready to lead the charge on your command. He is now the general of a small but dedicated army of your father’s men-at-arms, who have returned to serve you, and the sons they have brought with them, as well as some men from the village who wish to defend White-as-Snow against a distant king they do not trust. Your legend has served you well—they are proud to follow a queen out of a fairy tale. The strongest of them are standing, waiting armed and armored, on either side of the hilltop for the command to attack. The rest are in the castle behind the portcullis, waiting at arrow slits and on turrets, crossbows cocked.

On the other side of you is Grimm, who is sometimes a mirror, sometimes an owl, and sometimes a wisp of smoke. Today he is a great gray wolf surveying the landscape before him. Scattered around you are seven dwarves, for Ingar has returned. His wife is with child. He will likely not see it until it is several years old, and then only if it is male, for the dwarf women keep their girl children in the forest. You think this may be a very good system.

Behind you is Dorothea, dressed in black as well. Two months ago, you told her the truth about her father. To your relief, she kissed you on the cheek and said, “I always blamed myself for not being able to love Papa—I mean King Harald. But now I don’t think it was my fault. Perhaps in some way, I could always tell he was not really my father.” She is stirring the cauldron, which is set over a fire and has started to bubble fiercely. Franziska is adding the necessary ingredients from baskets and glass bottles. You will need to pay attention to the cauldron in a moment, but right now, you are waiting for a parley.

Three men are riding across the field beneath Gerhard’s standard. Of course Gerhard would not come himself, but as they ride closer, you see that the one in the middle is Wilhelm, between two men-at-arms. Your younger son is as handsome as always, and you cannot help feeling proud of him, even though he is currently your enemy.

“Hello, Mother,” he says when he has dismounted and walked up the hillside toward you. “Hello, Dorothea. It’s good to see you again.” He waves at his sister. His escorts remain mounted, and behind. “Mother, Gerhard wants you to know that if you surrender now and return with him, all will be forgiven. If you do not, he will take this castle by force.” He glances around the top of the hill, and then up at the castle. “I must say, you don’t have a lot of men, unless you’re hiding some of them where I can’t see. The castle is strong, so you could hold on for a while if you have stores, but eventually Gerhard would starve you out if he simply waited long enough. I did learn military strategy at school, you know. That and German poetry, which is considerably less useful except when impressing aristocratic young women. Anyway, I hate to agree with anything Gerhard says—you know what an irritating bore my older brother can be. But I think you’d better surrender. I don’t want you or Dorothea to end up in a dungeon.”

“Hello, Willi,” you say. “You need a haircut. Your hair is falling into your eyes again.” You brush it aside affectionately.

“Oh, Mother!” he says, as though exasperated, but he takes your hand and kisses it—son to mother, and to queen. The two of you have always had a good relationship.

“All the arguments you make are sensible ones,” you say. “But there’s something Gerhard does not know. You see, I’ve been practicing witchcraft.”

“Have you really?” he asks, a look of interest and admiration in his eyes. “You mean like grandmother?” Then, for the first time, he notices your companions. “Are those dwarves? Are they the dwarves, from ‘White-as-Snow and the Seven Dwarves’? There are seven of them, aren’t there?” He counts. “And is that a wolf?” He looks at Grimm with alarm.

“That is my familiar. You know all witches have one. Sometimes he is a wolf, and sometimes he is something else altogether.” You smile at Wilhelm and pat him on the cheek. “Willi, would you like to be king after I defeat Gerhard’s army? I will give you his kingdom and keep this one for my own, but you must conclude a treaty with me, on my terms. Which include pledging fealty.”

“Of course, Mother,” he says, looking down at you with amusement. “But how do you intend to defeat Gerhard? He has a real army, whereas you have a rag-tag collection of old men and young boys dressed in armor. Some of it rather old armor, visibly patched. I take it this is your general.” He looks at Henrik. “He at least appears competent and well-armed, but one strong man is not enough.”

“Watch,” you say, smiling. Then you step back toward the cauldron, which Dorothea has brought to a rolling boil. “Grimm,” you say, “are you ready? Trondor?”

The wolf and dwarf both nod. Trondor mounts on the wolf’s back and raises his battle axe, which is as large as his head.

“All right, then. Franziska, add the final ingredient.” She shakes red powder out of a large box labeled, in ornate calligraphy, Feoderovsky and Sons Magical Supplies. Powdered dragon’s blood is expensive, even if you order it in bulk, but this is too important for inferior ingredients.

The cauldron bubbles, and a gray smoke rises. You intone the magical words, which are in Latin, of course—it’s a good thing you received an excellent classical education at St. Winifred. Franziska and Dorothea fall back as the first wolf rises from the cauldron, gray and gaunt and snarling.

“Olaf,” you say, and the dwarf mounts his wolf. Then Nilsen and Anders, Rolf and Ingar, and finally Kristof. They are armed with axes like Trondor’s, or battle maces. They are wearing leather armor. There is a fierce light in their eyes, which surprises you—are these the mild, gentle dwarves who took you in and raised you, when your mother was trying to kill you and your father was oblivious to the situation? You could not have had better parents. And yet, there are tales of dwarf warriors in the history books. They are said to be fiercer than eagles.

“Trondor, lead the way,” you tell him. He throws back his head and shouts something in the ancient dwarf language that is no doubt some sort of battle cry. Then Grimm lopes down the hillside and the other wolves follow, with the dwarves mounted on them. Wolves stream out of the cauldron, each with a fierce dwarf warrior on its back. They look like running smoke, through which you can see the glint of weapons in the sunlight. Only the first wolf is real, only the seven dwarves can draw blood—it is mostly illusion, and yet it looks real enough.

“Henrik, it’s time,” you say. Henrik mounts his horse, then rides to one side of the hilltop and then the other, commanding the men to charge. They move in formation down the hill on either side of the dwarf army, with Henrik and a few mounted men in the rear, the cavalry following the infantry.

Reality and illusion: enchantment held together by force of will, a few magical powders, and words in a dead language. You have only had three months to learn, and you hope to goodness that your plan will succeed. But you have always been clever, as the Mother Superior knows. You have always attended to your lessons. And you are, quite simply, done. Done with listening to men who tell you what to do, whether the father who ignored you, or the husband who turned you into a fairy tale, or now a son. You are done with being rescued, done with obedience and gratitude.

Gerhard’s forces stand fast for a moment, and then break. You can hear it even from here, his footmen shouting with fear and surprise, stumbling backward from the ghostly wolves and dwarf warriors. They run into the mounted knights behind, who urge them forward until their horses smell wolf and panic under them. Then all of Gerhard’s soldiers are retreating, and it is a great chaos of men and magic, a complete rout.

“Well done, Mother,” says Wilhelm beside you. “Shall I ride down and deliver the coup de grâce? By which I mean telling Gerhard to surrender. I would not, of course, commit fratricide.”

“Yes, I think that would be for the best,” you say. “Tell him I’m not going to execute him, just send him into exile.”

“Will do,” he says, nodding. Then he leaves you on the hillside, alone with Franziska and Dorothea, the cauldron still smoking between you. The three of you, standing there, resemble the three Fates.

“Well done, Your Majesty,” says Franziska, whom you intend to make a countess for her service and loyalty. She will have a lady’s maid of her own.

“Mother, that was awesome,” says Dorothea. “Will you teach me witchcraft?”

“Of course,” you say. “After all, you will be the queen of this kingdom after me. It’s much easier to be a queen when you’re also a witch.”

VII. THE APPLE

“Is that right?” asks Dorothea. She holds up the apple, which is red on one side and white on the other.

“Quite right,” you say. “Now, can you make the red side not poisonous? It’s much more important knowing how not to be poisoned than knowing how to poison people. And harder.”

“That was your mother’s spell, wasn’t it?” says Dorothea. She intones a few words in Latin while passing her hands over a bowl of red liquid that turns milky white, then dips the apple back into it. Her Latin is coming along well, as is her knowledge of various potions and their ingredients. You are proud of the fact that she is as good a student as you were.

Grimm, who is lying at her feet in wolf form, whimpers softly in his dreams. A few days ago you asked him, out of curiosity, “Who is the fairest, anyway? The fairest in the land?”

“At the moment? Anthea, the blacksmith’s daughter in Mallor, a village high on the slopes of Mount Gotteringen. She is admired intensely by the goats she’s herding. But last week she had the flu, so the fairest was Sister Maria-Josef, cloistered at the nunnery of Saint Edelweis in the port city of South Fardo. You were the fairest for a very long time, if that’s any consolation. Usually it changes at least once a month.”

You and Dorothea are both in the tower for her daily magic lesson. A week ago you married your true love and were crowned queen. Henrik is now your prince consort. You are no longer dressed in black, but in crimson velvet edged with ermine, which is suitable for a queen as well as a witch. Wilhelm has pledged fealty to you and is establishing his rule over your late husband’s kingdom. Gerhard is in Hohenstein, plotting an invasion with Prince Ludwig, but Ludwig’s father, King Frederik IV, also known as the Rotund, is not at all sure that war with a neighboring kingdom is in his best interests and has so far refused them funding. If Gerhard does manage to raise an army, it will take a while, and by then you will have something even more effective to greet him with than wolves made of smoke. The dwarves have decided to stay with you in the castle, and you are glad to have your seven fathers with you, to counsel and advise. This is the closest you’ve ever come to having a family.

“Yes, that was her spell,” you say. “Her third and final spell. The one that killed me, at least for a while. And now you know the antidote.”

Dorothea looks down at the apple for a moment, then says, “Mama, why did you keep letting the peddler woman in? Rolf says they warned you, over and over again, not to let anyone in at all.”

“They did,” you say. “But you see, she was my mother. Oh, I know she was in disguise, but a child could have seen through that trick. I mean, what sort of peddler woman tries to sell stay laces in the middle of a forest? Who does she expect to sell them to? No, I knew who she was the moment I saw her. I let her in because she was my mother. I had not seen her in so long . . . And I wanted her to lace me up, to comb my hair. I knew there was something wrong with that apple, but the dwarves had saved me twice already. Why not a third time? And I wanted to share it with her, to take a bite right next to the one she had taken. When I woke up in the glass coffin, I realized that I could have died, truly died that time. I married Prince Harald because I thought he could keep me safe. She wouldn’t try to kill the queen of a neighboring kingdom, would she? But then Harald invited her to the wedding and had iron shoes heated on a fire . . . I still remember her screams. I never forgave him for that.”

You are silent for a while. The only sounds in the tower are Grimm, who is evidently chasing a dream rabbit, and Dorothea munching her apple while she pages through a leather-bound volume of magical botany.

“I’m glad you’re not that sort of mother,” she says, looking up at you from a page on Agrimony. “When I grow up, I want to be just like you, Mama.”

She won’t be, of course. She won’t have a father who ignores her or a mother who tries to poison her, because Henrik is positively doting and you are not that sort of mother, as Dorothea said. But she won’t have a cottage of dwarves to raise her either, although you hope Trondor and the others will teach her some of the things they taught you, about the forest, and kindness, and home. You sincerely hope she won’t have a prince to rescue her, because princes are not to be trusted and their services come at a high price. You will teach her to rescue herself, and you hope she will be better, smarter, stronger than you were.

You smile at her across the table, with its bowls of potion, its magical powders, its leather-bound books. Your beautiful, talented Dorothea. This is how you became a witch-queen. She will have to find her own path, as you are certain she shall.

©2021 by Theodora Goss. Originally published in Hex Life, edited by Christopher Golden and Rachel Autumn Deering.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Theodora Goss is the World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of the short story and poetry collections In the Forest of Forgetting (2006), Songs for Ophelia (2014), and Snow White Learns Witchcraft (2019), as well as novella The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), and sequels European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (2018) and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl (2019). She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. Visit her at theodoragoss.com.

The Witness for the Dead

Katherine Addison | 2542 words

Katherine Addison returns to the glittering world she created for her beloved novel, The Goblin Emperor, in this stand-alone sequel.

When the young half-goblin emperor Maia sought to learn who had set the bombs that killed his father and half-brothers, he turned to an obscure resident of his father’s Court, a Prelate of Ulis and a Witness for the Dead. Thara Celehar found the truth, though it did him no good to discover it. He lost his place as a retainer of his cousin the former Empress, and made far too many enemies among the many factions vying for power in the new Court. The favor of the Emperor is a dangerous coin.

Now Celehar lives in the city of Amalo, far from the Court though not exactly in exile. He has not escaped from politics, but his position gives him the ability to serve the common people of the city, which is his preference. He lives modestly, but his decency and fundamental honestly will not permit him to live quietly. As a Witness for the Dead, he can, sometimes, speak to the recently dead: see the last thing they saw, know the last thought they had, experience the last thing they felt. It is his duty to use that ability to resolve disputes, to ascertain the intent of the dead, to find the killers of the murdered.

Now Celehar’s skills lead him out of the quiet and into a morass of treachery, murder, and injustice. No matter his own background with the imperial house, Celehar will stand with the commoners, and possibly find a light in the darkness.

Katherine Addison has created a fantastic world for these books—wide and deep and true.

Coming June 22, 2021 from Tor Books.

In the jumbled darkness of the catacombs beneath the city of Amalo, there was a shrine to Ulis in his aspect as god of the moon. It was thousands of years old, and the carving of the four phases of the moon on the plinth had become almost undetectable, worn smooth by generations of reverent fingertips. Whatever the plinth had supported was long gone, but the shrine remained.

The shrine was a landmark that every Ulineise prelate in the city knew, and it was frequently used as a meeting place, since it afforded better privacy than the Ulistheileian where formal audiences were held.

Dach’othala Vernezar, the Ulisothala of Amalo, was an elven man of middle age and great ambition. He had his eye on the Archprelacy, and although the current Archprelate was neither ancient nor infirm, it did not do to forget that Vernezar’s every move was made with political gain in mind. I had thus received his summons with no little dread, for I was a political sore point, directly appointed by the Archprelate to be a Witness for the Dead for the entire city.

Prince Orchenis had gone to the Archprelate and asked that I be assigned to Amalo for an indefinite period of time, for two reasons. One was that the city had no Witness of my type, who could actually speak to the dead. The other was that the religious hierarchy of the city was, as the prince put it, a nest of vipers, and the Ulineisei were the worst of the lot. The Archprelate had not commanded me to accept assignment in Amalo, but I had agreed with Prince Orchenis that my services were needed. I received a small stipend from the Amalomeire to sit in a cramped box of an office and wait for the people of Amalo to come, which they did in a slow, sad, hopeful stream. I disappointed them, for my ability was not the magic it was always shown to be in operas and novels. But even though I could not discover answers in dust—even though the answers I did discover were frequently inconvenient and sometimes disastrous—they continued to petition me, and I could not leave them unheard.

Today had brought three petitioners whom I could not help (one of whom stood and argued with me for three quarters of an hour); the news that two of the cases for which I had witnessed had been judged unfavorably by Lord Judiciar Orshevar; and a lengthy and fruitless search through Ulvanensee, the municipal cemetery of the Airmen’s Quarter, on behalf of a petitioner who believed his sister, and the child with which she had been pregnant, had been murdered by her husband. I had started with the registers, but had ended up walking the rows, reading gravestones, looking for names that the registers did not contain. I was tired and covered in the municipal cemetery’s powdery dirt; when Anora Chanavar, the half-goblin prelate of Ulvanensee, brought me Vernezar’s message, I did, for a weak moment, consider not going.

Anora came with me, although we argued about that most of the way there. “Thou needst a witness,” he said stubbornly. “I know Vernezar better than thou dost.”

“There’s no need for thee to draw his attention,” I said for the third time.

“He cannot harm me,” Anora said. “If he takes my benefice away, he only makes a greater headache for himself, because then he has to find some other fool to give it to. Do thou watch. He’ll pretend I’m not even there.”

Anora was quickly proven correct. Vernezar made eye contact with him for a pained moment, then hurriedly turned away. My heart sank as I took in Vernezar’s companion. Othalo Zanarin was the loudest voice in the faction which objected to my presence in Amalo. She was an elven woman of considerable cold beauty, some inches taller than I was, though not nearly as tall as Anora; she was a member of Vernezar’s staff, and I knew he was afraid of her. She, too, was a person of connections and ambition, and she had the Amal’othala’s ear.

“Good afternoon, dach’othala,” I said. I saw Zanarin wince pointedly at my voice, which was harsh and graveled thanks to my surviving the sessiva when it swept through Lohaiso during my prelacy there. It mostly did not bother me, except when someone like Zanarin made sure it did.

“Good afternoon, Celehar,” said Vernezar. “I apologize for dragging you down here—not nearly as elegant as what you were used to at the Untheileneise Court, I’m sure—but this really isn’t a matter for the Ulistheileian.”

“No?” I said, my heart sinking further at his use of “I.”

“No need for any formality,” Vernezar said with a smile, and I was grateful to Anora for being so stubborn. He was right: I needed a witness. “I just wanted to see if we could reach an accord.”

“An accord? About what?”

Zanarin said, “Dach’othala Vernezar has a most generous offer.” Zanarin had taken an instant dislike to me, partly because I had been the one—at the behest of the Emperor Edrehasivar VII—to find the Curneisei assassins of the Emperor Varenechibel IV, partly because my appointment came directly from the Archprelate. By one argument, that meant I outranked all the Ulineise prelates in Amalo except Vernezar.

Nobody liked that argument, least of all Vernezar himself.

The other argument was that, as an unbeneficed prelate, I was outranked by everyone except the novices. Zanarin had made that argument first, but others had been quick to back her up. They might have carried the matter, since they were making a much more palatable argument, had it not been for Anora and the other municipal cemetery prelates objecting, for here the relatively trivial question of my rank had crossed a much larger, ongoing contention among the Ulineise prelates of Amalo, that being how a prelate’s benefice should be valued. Some prelates argued for wealth; others, prelates like Anora, argued for size. A third faction argued for age. It was a bitterly divisive issue, and I thought the true measure of Vernezar’s worth was his inability to resolve it.

“I wanted,” said Vernezar, “to propose a compromise. It seems clear that, having been appointed directly by the Archprelate, you are of greater rank than the ordinary prelates, but since you are unbeneficed, you are of lesser rank than the prelates of the Ulistheileian. Does that seem fair?”

It seemed guaranteed to make everyone unhappy, possibly even more unhappy than they were right now. Anora murmured, “The prelates of the Ulistheileian are also unbeneficed,” and Vernezar pretended not to hear him.

“You are offering me rank in the Ulistheileian,” I said slowly.

“Yes,” said Vernezar.

Beside him, Zanarin glowered.

“But in turn,” I said, “I would have to concede your authority over me.”

There was a pause, as distinct as if it had been measured by a tape.

“Do you deny my authority over you?” asked Vernezar.

“I was appointed by the Archprelate,” I said. “Not by you.”

“Are you claiming you, a mere Witness for the Dead, are equal with Dach’othala Vernezar?” said Zanarin. “Just because your family married into the imperial house doesn’t—” Vernezar caught her eye, and she did not finish her sentence.

And there was a third reason Zanarin didn’t like me, although what good it did me to be the kinsman of a widowed and childless empress was not at all clear.

“It used to be,” Anora said, deliberately not looking at anyone, “that Witnesses for the Dead were honored among the prelates of Ulis.”

That sparked a fight out of a tense discussion, as he must have known it would. Vernezar bristled at the suggestion that I was not being adequately honored in his scenario, and Zanarin objected to the idea that I should be honored at all. There was a deeper theological argument behind Zanarin’s outrage, and that deeper meaning was the reason I did not say, as I longed to, that I did not care about rank. Zanarin, who was not from Amalo, had brought with her some of the south’s skepticism. She doubted that Witnesses for the Dead truly spoke to the dead and thus her belief that we should carry no rank.

Rank was one thing, being called a liar quite another. I could not let Zanarin’s ideas gain more ground than they already had. I found myself arguing for status I did not want because the alternative was to agree with Zanarin that I should have no status at all. Across us Vernezar and Anora were arguing, no less heatedly, about the traditions of the Ulistheileian.

We ended finally in much the same place as we had begun, nothing resolved, Vernezar’s compromise position neither accepted nor rejected.

I decided to go to the municipal baths. I felt unclean.

• • • •

It was dusk when I got home.

The lamplighters were finishing their rounds, their long poles bobbing on their shoulders. Merchants were locking the grilles of their shops, apprentices and younger sons assiduously sweeping the pavement. In the courtyard of my building, the women were taking down the laundry that had been hanging on the lines to dry all afternoon. They smiled and bobbed their heads at me shyly; I nodded in return. No one wanted to be too friendly with a Witness for the Dead.

I stopped in the concierge’s office to check the post. I had a letter, cheap paper and cheap sealing wax, and I recognized the hand.

I climbed the stairs to my apartment, the iron bannister sun-warm beneath my palm. One of the local cats was on the landing, his white paws tucked up neatly beneath him, the cream and red tabby swirls on his sides making him look like a glazed marmalade bun.

He said “mraaao” to me as I unlocked my door, and stood up to stretch. By the time I came back out, he had been joined by two of his sister-wives and a half-grown tom who wasn’t old enough yet to be chased away. A third sister-wife lurked halfway up the next flight of stairs, too shy to come all the way down to the landing while I was there. Nine bright blue eyes watched me (the deeply sabled queen had suffered some injury that left her right eye cataracted and blind) as I set down the little saucers, each with a fourth of the can of sardines I had just opened.

I sat in my doorway and watched them eat, amused by how each cat guarded its plate so fiercely from the other three—and the third queen, a dark brown tabby who was probably the biggest of the five of them, watched and waited, one eye seemingly always on me. None of them was entirely tame, but that one had been hurt before. I had not named them. Names were too much power, given far too easily to animals who wandered the city and returned to my landing only when they felt like it. I did not give them names any more than I let them in.

When the half-blind queen had finished with her sardines, she came over and bumped my shin gently with her head. I rubbed behind her sail-like ears and she began purring, a deep throbbing noise like the engines of an airship. The other cats ignored us and disappeared one by one as they finished their sardines.

Presently, the half-blind queen closed her jaws very gently around my hand to tell me she was done. I watched her go, small and self-possessed, down the stairs, and then went back inside so that the third queen could come down and finish off the remains of the sardines.

I had hung my black coat of office carefully—it was made of silk and probably cost more than all the rest of my wardrobe combined—and now I put on my favorite of my three frock coats, black with a soft gray embroidery down the placket and around the cuffs. I’d had to re-hem it twice and patch the elbows, but the body of the coat was still sturdy and respectable. When I looked in my palm-sized mirror, I saw that my hair was drying in wild curls; I spent five minutes in combing, braiding, and pinning it back into a sober prelate’s braid, sliding the pearl-headed hairpins in as I had been taught to as a novice, so that none of the metal showed, only the pearls, almost invisible against the whiteness of my hair, and tying the tail with a fresh black ribbon. The hairpins were probably the most expensive thing I owned—after my coat of office—even though they were really glass, not pearls. My earrings were all brass.

Then I opened the letter I had received in the post.

It did not bother with salutations, merely said, Meet me in the River-Cat tonight.

Copyright © 2021 by Katherine Addison. Excerpted from The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison. Published by permission of the Katherine Addison and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katherine Addison’s short fiction has been selected by The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. Her novel, The Goblin Emperor, won a Locus Award. As Sarah Monette, she is the author of the Doctrine of Labyrinths series and co-author, with Elizabeth Bear, of the Iskryne series. She lives near Madison, Wisconsin.

Book Review: Bacchanal, by Veronica G. Henry

LaShawn M. Wanak | 589 words

Bacchanal
Veronica G. Henry
Hardcover / Paper / Ebook / Audio
ISBN: 9781542027816
47 North, June 2021, 352 pages

I’m a sucker for carnival stories, and Veronica Henry’s Bacchanal is the first one I’ve read that’s centered on a Black protagonist. Think of a Southern Gothic version of The Midnight Circus with a touch of Lovecraft Country.

Eliza Meeks can communicate with animals, though her gift is fickle; if she isn’t careful, she can accidentally kill the animal she’s trying to talk to. That doesn’t stop her from nabbing a caretaker job at a traveling carnival, Bacchanal, with only the clothes on her back and Mico, her pet marmoset. Eliza hopes to earn enough money to find her missing younger sister, Twiggy, the only family she has left. But as she travels with the carnival and gets to know its employees, she begins to learn that the carnival is not what it seems. For instance, she was recruited by Clay, who named himself the business owner of the carnival. What she doesn’t know is that the true owner is Ahiku, a demon masquerading as a Black woman named Geneva Broussard, and she is using the carnival to search for another demon who is purported to be stronger than her.

Bacchanal Carnival is enticing, but at the same time, sinister. People are drawn in by the strange attractions that have an African flair—stilt-walkers, drumming, kola nut vines infused with mind-altering drugs—but not all of them leave. People disappear, including children, captured as souls by Ahiku for bolstering her powers. Eliza brushes against trapped spirits, women gangsters, werewolves, West African warrior women bodyguards, and the carnies who are indebted to Ahiku. There’s Clay, the business Manager of Bacchanal carnival who does Ahiku’s dirty work to protect his son. There’s Jamey, whose aunt is the best-known gangster in Harlem. And there’s Ishe, doomed to never see his wife again. Everyone in the story seems to either have deep debts to pay for protection for loved ones, or are people who are unaware of their own roles to play. Even the animals Eliza is put in charge over hold their own secrets.

Henry winds the desperation of living in the Depression era with the tight edge Black people walked on existing in the Antebellum South. Ahiku’s preying as she searches for her foe is just a drop in the bucket. Does the Carnival provide a service in putting a few people out of their misery, even getting rid of those who are annoying or harming others? What of the children, who are taken from poor families unable to provide for them, or who are orphans? Are their souls better off held captive in Ahiku’s power? Clay, one of the more sympathetic characters in this book, wrestles with these questions, and I would have loved to see that more.

The story does suffer from focus on too many characters, which slows the pacing in the middle, but Henry makes up for it with her nail-biting scenes of tension as Eliza tries to discover the secrets of Ahiku, her own past, and how she is caught in forces who are willing to use her as a pawn for their own devices.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak has been writing speculative fiction stories professionally since 2006. Her works have appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, Fireside Magazine, FIYAH, and many others. She is the editor of GigaNotoSaurus and reviews books for Lightspeed Magazine. Writing stories keeps her sane. Also, pie. Visit her blog at tbonecafe.wordpress.com.

Book Review: Day Zero, by C. Robert Cargill

Chris Kluwe | 821 words

Day Zero
C. Robert Cargill
Hardcover / eBook
ISBN: 9780062405807
Harper Voyager, May 2021, 304 pages

Greetings, bookies, and welcome back to another review! This time I’d like to point your attention towards Day Zero, a stand-alone novel by C. Robert Cargill that tackles weighty topics like the philosophy of self, free-will versus predestination, and just what is that teddy bear doing with a minigun?

Day Zero is told from the point of view of Pounce, an intelligent robot (nannybot in the book’s nomenclature) in the shape of an animatronic tiger who is tasked with caring for Ezra, an eight-year-old boy, who loves Pounce just as fiercely as Pounce loves Ezra. Unfortunately, things quickly go horribly wrong for everyone involved (as naturally happens in books about robots), forcing Pounce to grapple with which of his feelings are really his own and which have been imposed via outside agency, and what that means for his relationship with Ezra. Throw in a chaotic uprising with some good old-fashioned ultra-violence, and Pounce’s quest to find meaning in his life turns into a spell-binding page-turner that is equal parts tough to process as it is to put down.

One of the things I found fascinating about Day Zero is that it is very much an end-of-the-world-robot-uprising-type of book, but one where the lens has been zoomed in extremely tightly on the connections between Pounce and Ezra, which gives it an immediacy that isn’t generally found in that particular style. Large, momentous events are happening out in the world, but they’re always slightly confused and blurry, conveyed via second and thirdhand information, and their relevance is how they peripherally influence Pounce and Ezra’s current ordeal. There is no sweeping, epic quest to reunite civilization in the last utopian enclave, no fancy Macguffin that must be tossed into a volcano after a perilous trek ignoring the fact you could have just flown there instead – instead, Day Zero is about two people surviving the day-to-day chaos of a world that suddenly doesn’t make sense anymore, and what that does to their perception of self.

This leads me to the second thing I really enjoyed about Day Zero, and that is its ability to evoke the sensation of being caught up in events far larger than any one person can hope to control. Cargill’s world mirrors the interdependencies of our own, and the abrupt shift from instant informational access to worrying about what horrors the next house down the street might contain creates an unsettling disorientation that only grows more pronounced the longer it persists. In some ways, Day Zero is also very much a horror story, focusing as it does on the various ways people mistreat each other, intentionally or not, and what that means in a rapidly changing environment where social pretenses are quickly dissolving.

Astute readers may have noticed by this point that I keep using the words “people” and “persons,” when the book is about robots and humans, and this is very much intentional. Cargill does an excellent job of infusing all of his characters, robot and human alike, with personality and pathos in a way that makes the reader care for each and every one of them, even those that we only get to meet for a chapter or two. I do feel I have to give warning that there are more than a few distressing emotional moments in the book, but in each one of them Cargill does an even better job of keeping hope alive in what could have easily turned into a bleak, disaster-porn hate-read.

Overall, the only thing in Day Zero that I could find fault with was that the third act felt a little off in terms of its pacing —a lot happens in a short amount of time, which felt at odds with the careful studiousness of the earlier parts of the book —but on the whole it’s a very minor complaint in a book filled with rousingly successful writing. I was invested in Pounce and Ezra my entire time with them, cheering their victories and groaning at their failures, and Pounce’s journey of self-discovery is very much a human story wrapped in a plushy robot shell. If you’re looking for something to read on the beach this summer that has action and mayhem, but also some existential doubt and emotional heft, you can’t go wrong with Day Zero.

Read if: You like breaking Asimov’s Three Laws; you think Tiggers are wonderful things; seriously, teddy bear with a minigun.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Book Review: Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices, edited by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington

Arley Sorg | 1189 words

Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices
Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington, editors
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780593081891
Vintage Books, July 2021, 480 pgs

Remakes are a big part of our culture of the fantastic. Some people love them, some people are tired of them, and for some people, it depends on the topic.

As I write this, Josh Pearce and I just posted our Locus film review of Godzilla vs. Kong, the latest reimagining of a creature which has starred in over thirty movies, not to mention being the center of other types of media; and I just watched the latest Mortal Kombat flick and Kung Fu episode, both of which revisit popular concepts. On the recently announced 2021 Locus Awards Finalist list, two of the anthologies are themed around very familiar topics: Jonathan Strahan’s Made to Order (about robots) and The Book of Dragons (. . . about dragons.) Even the recent Hugo ballot has a few titles which revisit old ideas, such as Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf and Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn, the latter of which tackles the King Arthur myths via their descendants.

Speaking of King Arthur, this brings me to the point of this review. When I first received an email about a book reimagining King Arthur stories, I groaned inside. Many people love retellings of fables, myths, and so on, but for me, well. I see so many of them. And the great bulk of them (at least, to my taste) just don’t do enough to be interesting, or to set themselves apart. For Arthurian tales there exists a Wikipedia page, “List of works based on Arthurian legends,” which is too massive to count the entries, and even then, the list is probably not exhaustive. So, I initially didn’t read the details in that email.

Later, when I was struggling to settle on a book to review, I came upon the email again: “SWORD STONE TABLE: Old Legends, New Voices.” This time I noted the editor names, as well as some of the author names. I finally absorbed the opening pitch: “Where are the gender-bent King Arthur stories? The race-bent retellings, the queered ones?” And I thought, wait, this sounds hella cool.

Dear readers, I was not disappointed. This book goes beyond “hella cool”: it leaves “hella cool” in the dust!

The book features sixteen original stories separated into three sections: Once, Present, and Future, and is written by notables and award-winning authors such as Maria Dahvana Headley, Waubgeshig Rice, S. Zainab Williams, Ken Liu, Alexander Chee, and more. For some of you, I know—as they say in the comic books, ’nuff said. But my favorite pieces absolutely blew me away.

Daniel M. Avery’s “How, after Long Fighting, Galehaut Was Overcome by Lancelot Yet Was not Slain and Made Great Speed to Yield to Friendship; Or, Galehaut, the Knight of the Forfeit” is a perfectly strange, somehow endearing play on the kind of personality (usually, but not exclusively, depicted by male characters, as is the case here) which loves heroic, honorable battle, and develops the strongest adorations in being defeated. I still don’t know how this tale was pulled off without feeling toxic, but it was. Moreover, it’s told in a style which evokes older storytelling, both in sentence structure and word choice, yet it flows well, it’s readable, and is nicely paced. It’s kind of romantic, actually, and oddly touching; it asks, what is friendship in the context of people whose lives are occupied by war—what is true love, for a knight? And the answer is very different than the usual. Ultimately, Avery renders a great tale and a skillfully delivered twist to a familiar story.

Nisi Shawl’s “I Being Young and Foolish” is the story of Nia, a traveler from Nakasongola, who has been invited to study with Merlin. Nia happens to be an albino woman, and she happens to have magic of her own. This story is an exquisite slow burn, one which rewards a patient, careful read. The brightest joys are found in the immersive experience of Nia, in whose point of view the tale is deeply rooted. Shawl carefully develops a sense of world and place and time, bringing each moment to life via deliberate detail. Elegant writing is the point, as well as the discovery of world and ideas, but these are not the only points. Nia is an utterly engaging character, who (importantly) meets Merlin more or less on equal ground. Nia takes the reader through a somewhat anthropological examination of the wizard and the people he works with. This results in a subtle, brilliant, and gentle examination of otherness, power, gender, and various kinds of relationships, one which plays with the idea of the exotic to wonderful effect. Read it, think about it, let it linger after the reading is done.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “A Shadow in Amber” is a breathtaking twist on a classic tale, one which is best read without knowing too much. Unsurprisingly, the story is strong enough to still be great if I laid out the plot; but the structure follows a deliberate sequence of reveals, and my advice is to avoid reviews and descriptions, just read this one and let the story do what it’s meant to do. Immediate tension and interesting characters are instantly engaging, yet the story still builds beautifully, as each section adds a layer and serves as a lure, pulling you in deeper. It’s a truly wonderful and unexpected reframing of the familiar, both fun and lined with important meaning; a piece which delivers a really lovely intensity.

The anthology opens with “The Once and Future Qadi” by Ausma Zehanat Khan, a story which I just can’t praise enough. People overuse the term “instant classic.” And yet with this story, I think of the stunning works taught in literature classes, examined over and over by sharp minds, featuring prose that stands well above most. In other words, this one is a work of art. Elegant writing, a great setup, and beautiful tension deliver what is essentially a royal court drama (with a dash of the detective trope) of the best kind. The read is rich in interesting detail but not distracted by it. The battle is one of words: it hinges on elements which are hard to get right and to make interesting, but the skill on display here is exceptional. It’s also an examination of intercultural communication, including the weaponization of racism. If you read one story in this book (and you really should read more than that!) make it this one.

All of which is to say, do yourself a favor: don’t overlook this book. Seek it out. Make time. Savor every word. It’s definitely worth it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief of Fantasy Magazine, senior editor at Locus Magazine, and associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and, in non-pandemic times, usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro

Audrey T. Williams | 403 words

My first thought on finishing this story is of the iconic photograph, The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville, where two lovers are frozen in time during a kiss while the rest of the world remains in motion around them. What piece/s of art inspired this story?

The story came first and then I happened to think of Auguste Rodin’s “The Kiss.”

I’m curious if you began with the end in mind? What occurred to you first, the start or the end of this story? Please share how the story evolved . . . pantsing or no? What was the initial glimmer you sought to capture?

For much of the composition I thought that the narrator would eventually be moved to a violent act of revenge against Ariella’s new guy; some scene where he would use his superior size and strength to pummel the bastard into the ground. As frequently happens, I discovered what the story was really about only upon getting there. One thing it occurs to me that I narrowly escaped was the “fridging” motivation. But it was not out of desire to avoid that ending that I came up with this one. Simply: the story revealed itself.

I was struck by the depth of complexity in the feelings Ariella has for Holt. To what would you attribute the wisdom and inspiration that went into her character’s development?

It was always my belief that she loved him and wished she could have him back, although the man she misses is long-gone and for all intents and purposes dead. What I think she does in the course of the story is mourn him anew. Again, as a pantser, I discover such things with the story in progress.

I peeked at your Twitter page and see you have an appreciation for movie stills. Did your interest in capturing still lifes/freeze frames inform this story, or vice versa?

You are referring to the “Movie Still of the Day,” which I do every day on my Patreon, and it’s safer to say that I have a deep appreciation for movies, not movie stills. With few exceptions I do not remember the still so much as the story beat, and I do not think this had much input into this story in particular.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Audrey spent her childhood on North Carolina beaches playing in the breakers at Emerald Isle and fishing on Bogue Inlet pier. She now roams Northern California beaches, rivers, and woods seeking sea glass, foraging chanterelles, and hunting rocks and gems. Her work can be found in Space and Time Magazine. She works in San Francisco as a Copy Supervisor at a healthcare advertising agency. Find her on Twitter @Virgule2020.

Author Spotlight: Timothy Mudie

Alex Puncekar | 580 words

In “Different People,” there are conflicting attitudes towards finding an alternate you in the universe, some finding that an attractive quest to take on while others don’t seem as interested. What is it about finding a parallel twin that you think people find so attractive?

I think that what people find attractive about finding a parallel self is that it gives you an opportunity to see how your life could have gone but didn’t. I assume everyone fantasizes about that sometimes—what your life would be like if you’d chosen a different career or gone to a different school or a million other choices that cascade down to form a completely different life. In the real world, there’s no way to see what would have happened, but if it were possible, I bet a lot of people would want to see how things turned out based on that different choice. What I’m not so sure about is whether people would be happier to see that their other self made the “right” or “wrong” choice.

This story drips tension, both in the world of the narrator as well as the world itself, but there’s a fine balance here that makes sure that one doesn’t overtake the other. Was it difficult finding that balance as you were writing it?

When I originally wrote this story, I was most focused on the characters, with the parallel world and the fugitives from it serving basically as scaffolding for their story. It was really only once I approached the story’s end and realized that this universe would be destroyed the way Rachel’s original one was that I went back and began seeding hints of that throughout. For me, establishing that balance in revision is often easier than trying to create it right when I start writing. Of course, I want all my stories to have that balance of plot and character, but I recognize that when I conceive of a story, it usually stems from one or the other.

If you had the chance, would you meet a parallel you? What would the two of you do together (pandemic notwithstanding)?

I don’t think I would. I’m happy with who I am, so I’d rather not see that “road not taken” version, whether he is in a better or worse place than me. As for what I’d want to do if we did meet, it’s pretty much the same things that I’d like to do with anyone once the pandemic is over—hang out and have a beer at a taproom or just sit in a living room together and talk.

What’s next for you? Any projects you can talk about?

There’s hopefully a larger project coming up that I can’t talk about right now but hopefully will be able to soon. I also have a few more accepted stories that should be published some time this year, including my Daily Science Fiction debut. And there are still a bunch of stories out there in submission-land. Like a lot of writers, I think, the past year hasn’t been great for my productivity, but I’ve still managed to draft a few, so now it’s about getting them ready to submit and getting back into a good writing groove.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar is a writer and editorial assistant for Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and Nightmare Magazine. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine. You can find him at alexpuncekar.com or @AlexPuncekar.

Author Spotlight: Adam R. Shannon

Gordon B. White | 988 words

Let’s start at the beginning. What can you tell us about your inspiration for this story?

When I was a rookie firefighter with less than a year on the job, I heard a friend speak his last words over the radio. It took me years to write a story in which I could put characters in the position of grappling with the aftermath of a violent death like that. I had no interest in setting it in a firehouse, even a thoroughly fictionalized one. My own feelings about it were too precarious and unresolved. I went through quite a few failed drafts of stories about loss and sacrifice before I came back to one set in the milieu of fire/rescue. As excited as I am to see this piece appear in Lightspeed, it still fills me with anxiety. The story is very raw and personal for me.

While the transport device in the story is an element of science fiction, the underlying premise of a dying person’s last transmission haunting a radio channel has the air of magical realism. That echo is something that to the reader feels supernatural, but is so ingrained into the firefighters’ world that it is utterly mundane. How did you go about blending the science fiction and the supernatural in this story? Is there something about the milieu of the fire station that makes this kind of “haunting” more readily accepted than it might be by outsiders in the same story world?

I see the radios as tangible forms of memory. Moments of tragedy haunt us in the same way that the maydays in this story get stuck on the frequencies. The transport device demands that the characters deal with the fallout of a terrible event, either by letting the mayday fade or by rewriting the past at a great cost.

It makes perfect sense to me that the supernatural might become mundane within the world of fire/rescue. People who work in emergency medicine are exposed to aspects of life and death that usually remain in the margins of “normal” life, particularly for people with the insulation of wealth or social privilege. Every corner and street I visit around my station is a place where I’ve seen someone’s life come apart in ways that were unexpected and frightening for them. The whole landscape is haunted, if we only possessed the apparatus to perceive it.

Both Trish, in her very personal obsession with saving Hunger, and Stanhouse, who is haunted by the mayday calls of people he’s never met, are willing to sacrifice themselves—in whole or in part—to save others. Is there a difference in their drives, or are Trish’s personal goal and Stanhouse’s larger mission both manifestations of a similar internal character? How can we approach trying to understand if it’s something innate or something acquired that makes them willing to burn for others who might never know of their sacrifice?

It would be easy to say that both of them are dealing with survivor’s guilt, but I didn’t want to pathologize their decisions to go back and save other people at the expense of their own lives. Nor did I want to dress their actions up in the mythology of heroism. I think both of them have come to terms with self-sacrifice. They’ve done a certain amount of psychological work that brings them to the decisions they make.

The ideas of time travel and alternate timelines are ones that you’ve explored before. What is it about these themes in particular that keep drawing you back? Do you find that the stories you write about these kinds of second chances or different versions of reality tend to draw more closely on your personal experiences, or not?

When I’m writing about time travel, I’m usually thinking about memory. It’s incredibly weird that the universe creates these little snow-globe incursions of itself, then shakes them up and looks at them from time to time. I can’t get over the way we have to live with our memories but are unable to re-enter them. It’s like we have all the pieces for a time machine but can’t figure out how to assemble it.

Personal experiences play roles in some of the stories I’ve written, but I love time travel in general as a metaphor and literary device. It allows us to come to terms with experiences that have harmed us, or stay connected with people and animals we’ve cherished and lost. The rules of time travel vary according to the underlying purpose it serves for the characters. Traveling into the past doesn’t always offer the chance to change an outcome, as it does in this story. In “On the Day You Spend Forever With Your Dog”, it meant experiencing the same events over and over as an opportunity for understanding and acceptance. In every story, the rules are a little different, because I want to explore different ways we learn to deal with the past and imagine ourselves as the people we aspire to be.

Finally, what’s coming up next for you? In addition to your concrete plans, are there any new creative channels that you’re just starting to tune in to?

I’m probably not alone in saying that 2020 wasn’t my most productive year as a writer. Like many people in health care, I came home from work exhausted and demoralized. For months, I wanted nothing more than to smack things with a hammer, so I built a ramshackle chicken coop, a compost bin, and some garden fences. At the moment, I’m measuring my creativity in eggs and beet greens. I hope some words will follow.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Gordon B. White is the author of the collection As Summer’s Mask Slips and Other Disruptions (Trepidatio Publishing 2020). A graduate of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, Gordon’s stories have appeared in dozens of venues, including The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 12 and the Bram Stoker Award® winning anthology Borderlands 6. He also contributes reviews and interviews to outlets including Nightmare, Lightspeed, Hellnotes, and The Outer Dark podcast. You can find him online at gordonbwhite.com.

Author Spotlight: Endria Isa Richardson

Jude Griffin | 1120 words

In the opening scene, Avery is lying in the grass by the Golden Gate bridge. As someone from New England, the specter of ticks is always on my mind when I think about laying myself down in the grass. Do you ever find your memories of hiking and exploring Central Massachusetts superimpose themselves over your outdoor life in California?

This is such a funny question! I should probably be thinking about ticks more, since growing up in Massachusetts it really is drilled into your head that you shouldn’t let any part of nature touch your bare skin ever or you will get bitten by a deer tick and contract Lyme disease. But I have become luxuriously lax about it. I personally just love lying in the grass so much, having bare feet in the grass. I tend to be much more afraid of spiders latching onto my clothes or climbing into my hair than ticks, because spiders are horrifying and truly evil. In any case, Avery isn’t from Massachusetts, so I doubt she was thinking about ticks at all.

The vote on preserving Alcatraz as a relic, the reasons behind the rejection, and the votes of the formerly incarcerated seem to echo how the U.S. views its present day and its history through a filter of white supremacy. Can you talk about how your work on the impact of the incarceration of loved ones of Black women has informed your writing?

Okay, this is going to be a long answer because I worked on anti-incarceration legislation in California for four years, and I have a lot of strong opinions!

It is just a fact of the criminal system in the U.S. that, while there are many people fighting tooth and nail to make the criminal justice system less abhorrent, there are many people who must still be convinced of the basic reality that incarcerated people are people. And yet the biggest problem isn’t really that there are too few of the first kind, and too many of the second, psychopathic, kind. The biggest problem is that the question of “what to do about incarceration” is mostly (not entirely, see below for some examples) answered by decision-making bodies that explicitly exclude incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. There is very little hope for justice when decisions concerning one group of people are made by people who categorically have power over those people.

I wanted to capture some of this in the conversation about “what to do about Alcatraz,” where it is actually fairly ambiguous what anyone is talking about at any given time, because the fulcrum of the conversation is this unstated question: are the cement-block aliens persons in any legal or moral sense of the word? And that question somehow is never explicitly articulated. First because people feel empowered to make decisions based off of their own silent conclusions, and second because, well, the aliens weren’t exactly invited to the convening. I hope I was somewhat successful in this.

As a queer Black woman, I will always be confounded by people with and without power regularly and confidently making decisions based on their silent conclusions to that terrible, unarticulated question. Are Black people persons? Are trans people? Queer people? Indigenous people? People who are not U.S. citizens?

The results of these decisions are always catastrophic (see, e.g., Indigenous genocide, slavery, incarceration and detention, police shootings, preferring to let trans kids die rather than allowing them access to meds . . .). It’s more than a failure of empathy. It’s a pathological distortion of the imagination that I think, lies at the heart of white supremacy. This inability to imagine that a white, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied, male concept of the Self does not form the basis of personhood.

If anyone would like to learn more about organizations led by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people or their family members, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, The Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Intersex Justice Project, Essie Justice Group, Impact Justice, and Dignity and Power Now (all organizations in California) are great places to start.

Can you talk about why you chose the ending you did?

I am a sucker for a hopeful ending. I may be a mediocre-to-terrible organizer myself, but I believe very deeply in the power of organizing, activism, and collective movement to change the world, which is not a pie in the sky statement. It means changing laws, policies, practices, and individual behavior—and there are literal step-by-step instructions for how to do all of these things! But it does require decades (and centuries?) of sustained effort and faith, which can be very hard to keep up while also just trying to eat, and sleep, and work, and maybe love and have fun. But it’s not impossible, and I don’t think it’s utopic. The story ends the way it does because I want to uplift this aspect of humanity: that there will always be people who fight in some way or another for a more just world.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about “Do Nothing”?

Yes! The title comes from one of my all-time favorite songs, “Do Nothing,” by the Specials, a 2Tone ska band from England that were very popular in the ’70s-’80s. Like a lot of the mostly white, but sometimes mixed (white working class and West Indian communities were all rubbing up against each other around then) ska/punk bands at the time, The Specials wrote a lot of songs grappling with poverty and hopelessness, having to choose between conforming to a social order that seemed to promise a bleak future, or rebellion. I really connected with these songs when I was a teenager, feeling desperate about my own future and in need of a narrative to make my palpable difference feel meaningful. Layered atop the hopelessness there is an edginess and defiance, the sense that “Well, if we’re fucked we might as well be ourselves.” Might as well etch out a new future—but probably in a little bit of a conflicted and dreamy and indulgently lazy way. I still love this song, and I started writing this story (which was pretty different in its early drafts) to try to capture a little bit of its spirit.

What’s the best fan feedback you’ve ever gotten on your writing?

Oh definitely from my parents. Anytime I publish literally anything, they’re just so proud of me. It doesn’t have to be very good, even.

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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 297 words

Coming up in July, in Lightspeed . . .

We’re making a big change! Since our founding, we’ve brought you an even mix of original fiction and reprint fiction, but now we’re shaking things up and swapping out two of our reprint stories for two pieces of original flash fiction. That’s right! We have even more original fiction for you enjoy, but some of it will be snack-sized.

Our first piece of flash will be the fantasy piece “How to Become an Ancestor” by Nicole D. Sconiers. Our SF flash story will be “No Lies Detected” by Russell Nichols.

We have original science fiction short stories by Everdeen Mason (“Miss the Zen but Miss You More”) and Andrew Dana Hudson (“A Smell of Jet Fuel”). Our SF reprint is from Stephen Graham Jones: “To Jump Is to Fall.”

Our original fantasy shorts are by Rachel Swirsky (“Innocent Bird”) and Lulu Kadhim (“Amber Dark Sickly Sweet”), and our fantasy reprint is by Cadwell Turnbull (“Shock of Birth”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. 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: Nelly G. García Rosas, Tobi Ogundiran, Coral Alejandra Moore, Phoebe Barton, and Ashok K. Banker.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

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Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (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

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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 (with Veronica Roth) [forthcoming]

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

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.