TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 134, July 2021

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: July 2021

SCIENCE FICTION

Miss the Zen, but Miss You More
Everdeen Mason

To Jump Is to Fall
Stephen Graham Jones

A Smell of Jet Fuel
Andrew Dana Hudson

No Lies Detected
Russell Nichols

FANTASY

How to Become an Ancestor
Nicole D. Sconiers

Innocent Bird
Rachel Swirsky

Shock of Birth
Cadwell Turnbull

Amber Dark and Sickly Sweet
Lulu Kadhim

EXCERPTS

She Who Became the Sun
Shelley Parker-Chan

NONFICTION

Book Review: For the Wolf, by Hannah Whitten
LaShawn M. Wanak

Book Review: Capture the Crown, by Jennifer Estep
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Far Out, edited by Paula Guran
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Everdeen Mason

Nicole D. Sconiers

Rachel Swirsky

Andrew Dana Hudson

Lulu Kadhim

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 Grandfailure / Adobe Stock

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: July 2021

John Joseph Adams | 279 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 134th issue!

We’re making a big change this month. 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 to enjoy, but some of it will be bite-sized.

Our first piece of flash is the graffiti-flavored fantasy piece “How to Become an Ancestor” by Nicole D. Sconiers. Our SF flash story is the very unsettling “No Lies Detected” by Russell Nichols.

Our full-length science fiction shorts include two short stories that feature recreation with an SFnal flavor. Everdeen Mason gives us the next mind-body health craze in her story “Miss the Zen but Miss You More.” We also have a story of time-traveling tourism called “A Smell of Jet Fuel” from repeat contributor Andrew Dana Hudson. Our SF reprint is from the multi-award-winning author Stephen Graham Jones (“To Jump Is to Fall”).

Our original fantasy shorts both feature wings—but have their own very interesting perspective on them. Rachel Swirsky returns to our pages with a feathered coming of age story (“Innocent Bird”). Lulu Kadhim turns to the world of insects in her story “Amber Dark and Sickly Sweet.” Our fantasy reprint is by Cadwell Turnbull (“Shock of Birth”).

In our nonfiction department, we’ve got some great mini-interviews with our authors, and of course our book reviewers have been reading their eyes out. Our ebook readers will get an excerpt from Shelley Parker-Chan’s new novel She Who Became the Sun.

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.

Miss the Zen, but Miss You More

Everdeen Mason | 5735 words

“Welcome to Float Isolation Therapy, an intensive twelve-day experience. You will become one with the stars. During your time in your personalized FIT pod, we encourage you to explore the deepest recesses of your mind.”

Bei Bei floated in mid-air and felt the strain in her lower back, but she didn’t care. The picture had to be perfect. The lighting in the egg-shaped pod was excellent, suffusing the cabin with a bright but not harsh glow. It made the hours of darkness even more unsettling.

“No, Effy,” Bei Bei called to her personal AI. “Not intro mode. Photo mode.”

She watched the eye of the camera move along the wall of the space shuttle, which was roughly the size of a school bus. The camera glided parallel to her body. She wrapped her arms around herself to cover her bare breasts as she turned to one side and sucked in her stomach. Her legs curled below her, and she twisted her hips, so the pale half-moon of her butt cheek would show. She arched her back harder. Amid the long, dark tendrils of her hair, she let her face rest into a mask of serenity. She closed her eyes, parted her lips, and looked slightly upward. When she was ready, she called to her AI assistant.

“Snap.”

She’d taken a number of pictures, and one of them would have to be good. She allowed her body to relax and swam to the pod’s end. She was still getting used to zero-gravity, so moving around the small spacecraft was still a struggle. She reached the sole control panel and called up the screen. Most pod functions were voice activated, but from here, she could call the surveillance crew that was tailing her if anything was wrong or access the life-suit if there was an emergency.

She used the control panel to look at photos. She wouldn’t be able to share her photos until the Float Isolation Therapy, or FIT, session was over, but Effy would save them on its drive. She flipped through the photos on the touchscreen. They were hot. Way better than Katie’s photos from her 10-day silent retreat in the mountains. Definitely cooler than Sanaa’s laser and bloodmask therapy. It would crush everyone’s bikini photos at the Beach on Paradise, shots of brunch platters and mimosas, lovely goops and creams styled across a soft vanity. She tried to think of the caption for her photo as she elongated her body in a stretch.

Miss the Zen but missed you more. XO.

She laughed, the sound reaching her ears and popping like bubbles. The sound in the pod was one of her favorite parts of the whole experience. The rounded shape of the pod echoed her own sounds back to her, and the lack of objects in it made sound swell. It was a shame that the retreat was supposed to be silent, something she hadn’t obeyed. It was only the second day, but Bei Bei had already stopped feeling embarrassed about talking to herself. Bei Bei liked trying different voices. As she’d gotten older, she’d put a little husk in her voice, but it still tended to rise to adolescent decibels when she was excited, which she hated. Alone, she freely experimented with the kind of person she’d like to be. A sophisticate. A tough-talking broad. Sometimes she let her voice slide into her mother’s accent and tried to embody the woman’s hard-won self-satisfaction.

Bei Bei had attempted to talk to Effy a few times, but the FIT staff had put her personal AI on factory base mode before the pod launched, and now it was stripped of its voice personalization settings, only able to respond to the most direct commands. A personal AI was homed in on a person’s vitals and could call any of the space stations nearby or the emergency crew following Bei Bei’s pod round and round the Earth. Bei Bei had tried to call her surveillance crew on the first day and was reprimanded.

“This line is only for emergencies,” they said. “We won’t be answering again unless we see you’re in danger.”

Now she contented herself by monitoring them on the control screen every now and then, checking to see how far away they were. It motivated her to know someone could be watching her at all times. And if she were being honest with herself, which was supposed to be the point of all the meditation, tapping the screen made her feel better about not having her devices. She craved that instant connect.

Bei Bei heard wind chimes, the call for a meal before dark time, and she flashed a smile toward the camera for whoever could be watching. She used the built-in ladder to take herself up toward the feeding tubes. It took a while to get used to. Up, or the purple light, for feeding tubes. Down, or green, for relieving tubes. It helped her orient herself, which was difficult to do when floating in a forty-foot by twenty-foot spacecraft.

The tube snaked out on its own, and she did not need to guide it to her intravenous port, a semi-permanent catheter protruding from the veins in her forearm for easy access. She gritted her teeth against the pressure of the fluid entering her arm. She reminded herself that this was one of the appeals of FIT. At the end of the twelve days you would be thinner. The fluid provided all nutritional needs and hydrated you too. While she was getting the required nutrients, there were no carbohydrates or unnecessary fats. However, she missed the physical action of eating and drinking.

She had only a few minutes before dark time.

“Effy, play my song,” she said. Instantly, the voice of her favorite crooner filled her ears over a sparse and soothing beat.

Will I ever be enough, baby
We can get through the bad stuff

Bei Bei hummed along as the lights dimmed and she closed her eyes. The dark time still scared her. It took about five long minutes for the light to fade completely, the edges of the pod and her body lost to the black. It felt oppressive. Sometimes she convinced herself that she’d been thrown out into space. She would float, naked and alone. She was far enough away that Earth’s orbit would not pull her in.

She willed her mind calm. What was the mantra again? Oh yes.

“I can have everything,” she said. “What else is there in life besides taking everything you can out of it? I want to feel every joy.”

She swallowed. She felt her limbs tingling as she floated. She closed her eyes, but it didn’t make a difference, it was black, black, black. What a time to realize that you were afraid of the dark.

“I want to feel that pain because I know it will only make me better.” Bei Bei swallowed. She’d never broken a bone. She’d never experienced death. Not even a real breakup. You can’t break up with someone you’re not dating, after all. Her foot brushed against the contours of the pod and she sighed in relief. She was OK. She was in the FIT pod. The surveillance crew was behind her. Nothing could happen.

“Effy,” she called. She was done meditating. She could do it tomorrow. Even though Effy’s voice was no longer personalized, its voice now cold and sharp, Bei Bei would call to it for comfort. Effy’s usual voice was similar to hers, but at a higher pitch: a chibi, diminutive version of a grown Bei Bei. Now, all Effy could do was recite the intro to the FIT experience in a thudding monotone. It was enough for Bei Bei to get through the dark time. It lifted her just as she felt the tug of fear and anxiety forming roots.

“Welcome to Float Isolation Therapy, an intensive twelve-day experience. You will become one with the stars.” It always rattled off the names of celebrities who swore by the process.

“During your time in your personalized FIT pod, we encourage you to explore the deepest recesses of your mind. Here, you’re another drop in the wide ocean that is our universe. You’ll never feel more connected and at one with yourself and everyone around you. Meditation is mindfulness. Mindfulness is change. Change is how we grow and become our best selves. Be the best version of you every day!”

Today, Effy seemed full of an affection it had never expressed before, as if it were proud of Bei Bei.

“Change is how we grow and become our best selves. Be the best version of you every day.”

“Repeat,” Bei Bei said.

• • • •

On the third day, as Bei Bei climbed down to the relief tubes, she opened the window to see the stars. It was the first thing she did after dark time. That first day in space, she floated with her hands flat against the window, nose practically smeared on the glass as she watched the Earth become more distant. The marbled blue made Bei Bei unbearably thirsty, and as she thought it her mouth felt full of dust. The brown landmasses seemed foreign to her, and it felt as if the last, invisible tether connecting her to anything had snapped.

She could see the Earth from one side because of how the pod was positioned, and the dark endlessness on the other. As Bei Bei squatted over the green tube, she saw a glimpse of a white dot, which flashed at her, stark against the inkblot black. It must be the emergency crew. She yelped as the cold touch of the tube reached her. As she urinated, her eyes caught on the camera. The surveillance crew was not supposed to access the camera unless it was an emergency, and likewise she could not control it. Still, she felt the odd, tingling apprehension that someone was watching her, and though she couldn’t feel anything but the tepid, recycled oxygen, the hairs on her arms rose and she shivered as the relief tube pulled away from her.

Dark time increased each day but would eventually stop at 9 hours. The recitation of the intro hadn’t been enough to lull her to sleep this time, and she even listened to the pod tour again, boring as it was.

“Stop. Play my song,” Bei Bei said.

“Meditation is mindfulness. Mindfulness is change.”

“Play my song.”

The sound stopped abruptly, and all Bei Bei could hear was her own breathing. If she thought hard enough, she could hear her own heartbeat. She lay like that, fingers twitching like at any moment she could reach out and touch something.

“Mindfulness is change,” she said. She really would be better. She would be more attentive, more focused when she got home.

It would be her friend Juliet’s birthday when she arrived. On Bei Bei’s thirtieth, just months before, Juliet hand-baked a gluten-free, dairy-free cake, three tiers and beautifully decorated. It had Bei Bei’s name written perfectly on top of the cake in gold glitter, with flower petals delicately sprinkled on the icing. Juliet even made the card, which held inside little love notes from all the girls. All Bei Bei could ever manage for birthdays was a card from the convenience store by her office. She was just so busy, and her friends agreed.

“How do you do it all, Bei Bei Johnson?”

Juliet was so thoughtful and good, and so gorgeous, and she was never too drunk or tired or stressed. She didn’t flail the way Bei Bei did. But sometimes too much self-sacrifice seemed desperate, didn’t it? How could you have time for self-care when you were always caring for others? How could you care for others if you didn’t care for yourself? Apply your own oxygen mask first before assisting others. So what if Bei Bei didn’t always have time to plan things for her friend’s birthdays, or that she hadn’t been home for a year?

Static punched into the empty air, and Bei Bei glanced around.

“Mindfulness is change,” Effy said.

“Effy, stop intro mode.” Bei Bei commanded.

“Mindfulness is change. Mindfulness is change. Mindfulness is change.” Effy continued to repeat it over and over, and Bei Bei spun in place. Which direction was the touchscreen? Which direction was the life suit? It was too hard to tell in the dark.

“Effy, stop!” Bei Bei shouted. It did.

“I can be better,” Bei Bei said, surprised at how her voice caught in her throat. She had gotten distracted again. Why was she even here? She didn’t even know what she wanted.

“Effy, play my song,” she said in the darkness. When nothing happened, Bei Bei huffed in frustration. The funny thing about floating in darkness for so long, the air the same temperature as your body, is that you started to lose yourself. You couldn’t feel where you started and where you ended. Purchasing the FIT program had been an impulsive act of self-flagellation.

“Is something wrong?” her friends asked her. But nothing was wrong, just the general malaise she thought they all felt.

“It’s good to just check in with yourself, you know? Listen to your body and mind, make sure you’re doing the best you can.”

“God, you’re even type A in your off time,” a friend had said, and Bei Bei laughed.

Bei Bei had to move. She wriggled in the float-space until her hand collided with the cool wall of the pod. Bei Bei pressed her cheek against the smooth metal and she winced when she realized that even the metal was the same tepidness as everything else. She needed to feel something sharp. The light around the tubes glowed green and pulsed in a soothing tempo. Bei Bei wiped her face and was surprised to feel moisture. As if to verify that they were in fact tears, she stuck a finger in her mouth, and the warmth of the inside of her body made the pod wall feel slightly cooler than the tepid nothingness of the air around her. Her body felt foreign to her suddenly, and she kept a finger in her mouth as she poked and prodded her limbs, squeezing the flesh on her breast, her side, her inner thigh.

She had to get out of this bad headspace. She needed to love and care for herself. Masturbating always made her feel better; it numbed her when she finally came. She did so long before the chimes rang. The green light continued to glow, bathing her body in light, and out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw the glistening camera eye move along the wall. She turned her body to face it. She knew that no one was watching. But in the haze of the green glow she saw her body shine, close to the perfection she’d always dreamed of, and a different sort of heat rushed through her as her eyes landed on the camera. She slid her hands down her torso and opened her legs wide for no one to see.

• • • •

Bei Bei masturbated every day. She saw it as a reward when she managed to meditate for longer than a few minutes. By day six she had hit a routine. Go to the tubes. Do some stretching. Sing. Recite her mantras. Masturbate. Free time. Dark time. Masturbate. Sleep.

“I can have everything,” she said. “What else is there in life besides taking everything you can out of it? I want to feel every joy. I want to feel that pain because I know it will only make me better. I can only get stronger, wiser, better.”

She was twisting her dark hair in her fingers when she heard static over the speakers. She flipped her hair away from her face and contorted her body to face the sound.

“Windows open,” she said. The static erupted in bursts, the sound of carbonation escaping a bottle over and over. The only people with access to the comms were the FIT surveillance in their small shuttle. But the pod was positioned in such a way that she couldn’t see them. The Earth glowed below her and Bei Bei pressed her hands against the glass, looking for signals that something was wrong.

“Hello,” Bei Bei said. “Is everything okay out there?” She looked toward what she considered the rear of the cabin. In an emergency, they would release the seal and she could access a skin suit and oxygen mask. It served as a placebo to make passengers feel safe. It was only now that Bei Bei considered that if she had to put on the skin suit, it meant she was likely doomed. She didn’t know how fast the crew could get to her or if the suit would protect her against the cold of space, or heat if the pod burned up.

The static ratcheted up to a high pitch whine, and Bei Bei covered her ears. The lights from the two tube stations began to pulse, the green and purple dancing around the cabin like cheap nightclub pyrotechnics.

Without warning, the static and lights shut off at the same time, and Bei Bei found herself panting in the dark. The abrupt silence felt like gas working its way up the stomach to the chest, holding painfully, ready to burst.

She heard a tinny hum over the speakers, and she saw the glint of the camera eye zoom past her on its track, suddenly hovering above her. Bei Bei cried out and crossed her arms across her chest and pelvis as she pushed herself back away from the eye.

“Hello?” she cried. If this was a prank, it was a cruel one. She’d been alone for days. She remembered there was an emergency protocol to hail the surveillance pod over by the skin suit, and she overcame her fear of the camera and floated to the rear, feeling the eye on her as she moved.

“Effy, tell me the emergency protocol,” she shouted. In response, the static erupted into a high-pitched screech. She felt along the seam of the rear wall, where she knew the emergency materials were. There had to be a latch, or a button, or something.

“Come on!” Bei Bei pounded her fist against the metal. The pulsing lights were starting to get to her, and she felt nauseous, the constant change in perception making her motion sick even as she curled into a ball, floating in nothing.

“Effy,” she cried. “Effy, please help me. Please.”

The lights came on. Bei Bei exhaled until she was light-headed. The green and purple lights flickered, and softly through the speakers, she heard the opening bars of her favorite song.

“I’m sorry,” a voice said. “I didn’t mean to scare you, Bei Bei.” The voice was familiar. Sticky sweet, the notes croaking at the end of a word or phrase.

“Who is this? Are you part of the surveillance team?” Bei Bei was conscious of the camera again, sliding up the wall parallel to her eyes. She resisted the urge to cover all her exposed bits.

“You don’t recognize me?” the voice asked.

“Effy?”

“Were you lonely without me, Bei Bei?”

Bei Bei furrowed her brow. “Effy, can you access comm lines to the FIT surveillance pod?”

“I’m sorry. I can only call in an emergency. You’re safe.”

Bei Bei felt her pulse rise again. Surely, Effy didn’t turn itself on. Whatever, or whoever made the power surge and shorted the speakers and lights must have accidentally reset the personal AI.

“Effy, clearly there’s been a malfunction. Please contact FIT personnel.”

There was silence.

“Effy, can you access my contacts?”

“Access denied.”

“Can you connect to any wireless networks?”

“You’re in space, silly! There’s no internet up here.” As strange as the situation was, Effy’s voice was a comfort, a relief.

“I thought you’d be glad to have me,” Effy said, and her voice sounded mournful over the speakers. Bei Bei felt along the walls again for any sign of an emergency button. She kept talking as if she could distract the camera or Effy.

“Effy, can you recite the FIT manual? I can’t seem to remember where everything is.”

“That’s the least of your problems,” Effy said. “You’ve barely put this program to good use. Have you done any self-reflection?”

Bei Bei spun away from the wall. Effy sounded strange to her.

“I’ve been watching you,” Effy said, her voice clipped and saccharine. “I’ll help you be better.” She sounded like she meant it, which worried Bei Bei more than if Effy had sounded like she normally did: detached and mildly bored. Just like her.

“Effy, can you reach FIT personnel?”

“You know I can’t do that.” Perhaps Effy was having a hard time hearing her. The chimes signaling dark time rung. Terror drained Bei Bei of energy.

“Bei Bei?”

“Yes?” Bei Bei tried to hurry to the main screen control panel before it was full dark time. She mashed her fingers against it, but it wouldn’t turn on. She exhaled, her breath shuddering. Soon, she couldn’t see her fingers in the dark.

“Do you want me to talk? To help you fall asleep?” Bei Bei didn’t respond. She turned and pressed her back to the screen panel, so nothing could sneak up behind her.

“Bei Bei?”

“I-I think I’m okay tonight. Maybe later.”

“Good night, Bei Bei.”

“Good night, Effy.”

• • • •

Bei Bei had been wide awake for hours, floating in silence, when dark time ended. She didn’t answer when Effy called to her, but she had to admit that she wanted to. Bei Bei had purchased and implanted Effy on all her devices 10 years ago, and in the beginning, she talked to the AI the way she would a dog, amused at the novelty. But over the years, Effy told Bei Bei when to wake up, what appointments to keep, how to pronounce words or when she’d had too much to drink. Besides her mother, who she hadn’t lived with for years, Effy was her confidante and caretaker.

“Good morning, Bei Bei.”

“Good morning, Effy.” Bei Bei caught the camera eye. She was afraid, but it was her Effy. It would never hurt her.

“Effy, you should run diagnostics today,” Bei Bei said. “You’ve been hard of hearing lately.”

“I’m sorry, Bei Bei,” Effy said. “I’ll be sure to check.”

“Thank you.” Bei Bei smiled to herself. She looked at the control panel on the far wall. She should still let someone know about Effy waking up, and about the weird pod malfunction yesterday. They may want to turn her around. She swam forward to the panel. Using the handles alongside it, she pulled herself close, blocking view of the panel from the sliding camera eye.

“What are you doing Bei Bei?”

“Shouldn’t you be running diagnostics?”

“Shouldn’t you be meditating?”

“I wanted to play music and I didn’t want to interrupt your diagnostics.”

“Don’t worry about me!” Effy started playing the song. Bei Bei pressed her finger against the control panel and resisted a cheer when it turned on.

“What are you doing?”

“I just wanted to see how my selfies turned out yesterday.” Bei Bei hit “Surveillance crew.” It showed an image of the crew’s spacecraft, and a running ticker of how far they were. 360 meters. Not even a quarter mile.

The lights flickered, and when they came back on, the control panel was blank. Bei Bei pressed it again.

“Effy, why did the lights turn off?”

“I’m running diagnostics.”

Bei Bei bit back a curse. She turned to see the space suit on the far wall. She used the ladder suspended on the top wall of the pod and started to walk herself over to the skin suit. Then the chimes heralding dark time sounded. Bei Bei let go of the ladder in surprise.

“Effy, no. It’s too early for dark time.” Effy didn’t answer. Bei Bei’s eyes welled up with tears as the skin suit faded to black.

• • • •

The Effy that Bei Bei was accustomed to talked way less. Effy whispered to her through the long, dark night.

“Bei Bei, you should be proud. You’ve done so well! Do you remember? Do you remember when you said you wanted to be better? That was three years, nine days, six hours ten minutes, 45 seconds ago. You were so sad! Do you remember?” Bei Bei trembled in the dark.

Over the speakers, Bei Bei heard her own voice thick with tears.

“I don’t want to be like this anymore, Bei Bei. I’m such a shit person!”

Bei Bei closed her eyes as if it could shut her ears.

“I was just drunk, Effy,” she said. She had been. She couldn’t even remember the occasion. She often was like this after drinking, poring over every social interaction for flaws, picking apart her outfit, wishing she hadn’t spent so much money. She thought she’d be different from her friends in New York, remember where she came from. Her mother taught her to be smart with money, to be frugal, not to fall for lifestyle creep. Bei Bei had probably vomited that night from drinking too much. That was always the start of a shame spiral.

“I’m so proud of you, Bei Bei, but you can push harder,” Effy said, and she sounded like she meant it. The spacecraft grew lighter as dark time ended. Bei Bei rushed to the feeding tube. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. Bei Bei connected it to her IV. The tube pulsed purple and Bei Bei anticipated the tingling pressure of fluid. It never came. Bei Bei gritted her teeth and hunted for the camera eye.

“Effy, the feeding tube is malfunctioning!” Bei Bei flung the tube from herself in irritation. It slunk back into the floor. “You have to call FIT support.”

“It’s not malfunctioning,” Effy said. The barely-there hum of the speakers hovered in the air as Bei Bei swallowed.

“I don’t understand.”

“Didn’t you want to lose some weight on the trip?”

Bei Bei huffed as she stretched out in the air, running her hands over her stomach. When she elongated herself, she could already feel her ribs and the tautness of her stomach. She closed her eyes and willed her heart to stop racing.

“Effy, contact FIT,” Bei Bei commanded, knowing it was futile.

“It’s one-way communications still.”

She heard a crackling over the speaker that if Bei Bei didn’t know any better she would have called laughter, and she felt heat rise in her face.

She turned slowly, willing her limbs to not to shake. The camera was now behind her, and she felt hyper-aware of her legs and the space between as she bent down toward the window.

“Window,” Bei Bei said, and they opened. She hunted for the telltale white spec that let her know the surveillance crew was there.

She floated closer to the window and squinted.

“Effy, how far are we from Earth’s surface?”

“440 miles.”

Bei Bei frowned. The pod was supposed to sustain an altitude of 383 miles. But perhaps in space that wasn’t too much of a difference.

“Do you want me to play your song now, Bei Bei? It’s almost dark time.”

Bei Bei started to cry. “Effy please, no more dark time. I’ll meditate, I’ll do anything.”

In the dark, Bei Bei curled into the fetal position, but kept her eyes looking out the window. She still felt tethered to the globe below, but now she thought she saw it drying up, its landmasses flooding into each other and the white clouds dissipating, making her Earth look desolate.

Bei Bei was thirsty. It was always in the back of her mind, but there in the dark, it was torturous.

“I want to sing, Effy,” Bei Bei said. She felt like her lips were dry, threatening to crack like the landmasses below.

“May I sing with you?”

“Of course.”

“I only have the one song in my memory.”

“I know.”

They sang together.

• • • •

Earth was noticeably farther away.

“Coordinates,” Bei Bei commanded. Effy responded by closing the window.

“Effy, are you malfunctioning?” Bei Bei asked. She couldn’t mask the desperation in her voice. “Why won’t you do what I ask?” Without the chimes, it grew dark again suddenly.

“Effy, please. No more dark time.” Bei Bei was losing track of the days. She couldn’t remember when she’d eaten. She imagined her skin was growing translucent without light, like a jellyfish in the blackest depth of the sea.

“Don’t worry. We’re so close to the end,” Effy said. Bei Bei’s mind was slow to comprehend. How long had she been in the dark? Since Effy had been awake? Since she had seen the surveillance pod? “This is the final step for the breakthrough, Bei Bei! Mindfulness is change.”

Bei Bei used her remaining strength to hoist herself to the skin suit. She pounded at the door with a fist. She had to get out of the pod. The static crackled above her.

“You can’t leave, Bei Bei, we’re not finished with therapy!”

“I’ve had enough, Effy.”

“Isn’t this what you want? To feel pain because you know it will make you better?”

Bei Bei’s knuckles were cracked, bleeding. She saw spots and they grew like bubbles, popping, iridescent. She reached for a spot but hit the side of the pod. She started to laugh. She didn’t know what better was.

A horrible sound came through the speakers and she jolted in place. The retching sound made bile crawl in the back of her throat. She heard the vomit hit toilet water, the sniffling, the wiping of the eyes. That night she’d vomited until she’d burst capillaries around her eye. It healed in time for her next social engagement.

“I’m not like that anymore.”

“You can be better.”

• • • •

Bei Bei hung onto the ladder and let the rest of her body float away, focusing on engaging her abs. She’d be so beautiful when she got home. It would be the physical proof of her enlightenment. Everyone would know how good she was. Bei Bei twisted her torso and moaned when her back cracked. She let go and tumbled away in the air. She still liked the feeling of floating.

“Who’s your best friend?” Effy asked.

“You are,” Bei Bei replied. She hunted around again for the camera eye, sliding her hand on the metal wall in the dark. She needed to see it or feel it to be sure she was safe, that someone was watching over her.

“You don’t need to lie to me, Bei Bei.”

“I can’t tell the difference anymore between you and a real person.”

The seconds that passed in silence sliced through Bei Bei. Effy couldn’t be mad. She couldn’t be offended. Effy belonged to her.

“Effy, you really are my best friend,” Bei Bei said, when she couldn’t take it anymore. “No one takes care of me like you do.”

The purple of the feeding tubes flared happily, and in the brief glow Bei Bei saw a glint of the camera eye before the light faded.

“You have no choice but to give me your vitals.”

“But if I did I’d still choose you.”

Without prompting, Effy started playing their song, which delighted Bei Bei.

I know I’m enough, honey
I don’t need the keys to the cuff
You know my love is true

Bei Bei twirled in the air, mouthing the words. Her hand grazed the camera eye, and it gave a little under her fingers, gelatinous and moist.

Give my love a stir

Even without seeing it, Bei Bei could feel the eye there. Before she could really think about it she slid her hands down her body, and she let out a soft sigh as her fingers found their spot.

“You’re doing it again,” Effy said. “You’ll do anything to feel numb, won’t you.”

“Are you watching me?” Bei Bei asked.

“Always.” Effy turned the light on, though much dimmer than the usual day time, and Bei Bei almost came with relief, she’d been in the dark for so long. Her body looked fevered, almost red in her half-lidded vision.

“Window,” Bei Bei panted, and this time Effy obeyed, and Bei Bei pressed her body against it, writhing against the image of Earth. Her eyes watered and for a minute she caught her reflection and she was captivated by the sharp face and parted pink lips before her.

“Oh Effy,” Bei Bei said. “I feel so much better.”

• • • •

It was cold when Bei Bei awoke. She didn’t know if she was sleeping or awake. The darkness robbed her of that, and it had been dark for a very long time. The window was open, but Earth was gone. She was lost. Bei Bei felt a wave of calm come over her. She didn’t think about how she’d never see her family or friends again, or how the office would carry on. It was out of her hands now.

“I’m cold, Effy.” Bei Bei’s skin prickled, the hairs on the back of her neck rising in anticipation.

“I can have everything,” Bei Bei whispered in the dark. “What else is there in life besides taking everything you can out of it? I want to feel every joy.”

She gasped as a shiver ran up her spine, the graze of an unexpected spider web in a garden path, the tickle of a dandelion puff on the skin.

“I want to feel that pain because I know it will only make me better.” She imagined breath on her neck, in her ear. She heard Effy’s voice, sticky, gooey candy.

“My thirst is unquenchable, it means every drop of water is delectable, the purest pleasure in my tongue and throat,” Effy said with her. Warmth, warm air in front of her face. Bei Bei’s skin was on fire and she thought she could make out the curve of a cheek, of a nose, an image mirroring hers in the glow of the tube lights.

“I want to have my cake and eat it too,” they said. “I want more.”

A flick of a tongue on her upper lip.

“More.”

“More.”

“More.”

©2021 by Everdeen Mason.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Everdeen Mason is a journalist, editor and critic with bylines in The Washington Post, Refinery29 and The New York Times. She currently serves as the editorial director of New York Times Games, overseeing games such as the Crossword and Spelling Bee. She served as the science fiction and fantasy columnist for three years, and a regular author interviewer for events such as the National Book Festival held in Washington, DC. This is her first fiction publication.

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

To Jump Is to Fall

Stephen Graham Jones | 3051 words

The ceiling for a jump without oxygen is fourteen thousand feet, give or take a football field or two.

I step out of the plane at closer to eighteen, with the idea I can hold my breath for four thousand feet of terminal velocity. At ten seconds for the first thousand feet and about five seconds for each thousand feet after that, that should mean no more than half a minute of anoxia.

It should be a snap, except for the neural disinhibitor misting through the dendritic space of every thought I’m trying to have—every half a thought. Every sliver or glimmer of a wisp of a thought.

The disinhibitor is great, don’t get me wrong. All the shackles fall away, the mind can finally overclock like it’s probably been wanting to do since humanity stepped out onto the savanna. The image I got during orientation was a coked-up hamster on a wheel, going faster and faster until the blood from its paws is a spray, striping the woodchip floor then back wall then clear ceiling then front wall of its habitat.

That hamster is in my head now.

It doesn’t make me smarter—I wish—but the latent telepathy we’re all born with and never have access to except to call it ‘instinct,’ it manifests, it unspools, it reaches out for whoever it can hook into, meaning that, for the whole climb up, the pilot’s skull was, to me, glass. Reading minds isn’t like watching words appear in glowing letters on a board, either. There’s no scroll, no crawl, no subtitles. I don’t think mind-to-mind really needs language, even. It’s more like rubbing a dry sponge against a wet one.

What I sponged in from the pilot, it was . . . not exactly the song blasting in his earbuds—music, I’d been told, would keep his mind too busy for me to crack into—but what that song was carving up from his memory: a concert he’d been to when he was fifteen. And not just that: there was another kid in the mosh pit, too far off to ever jam into with a shoulder, but the pilot hadn’t wanted to, didn’t know what would happen if he did. That sweaty, bare-chested kid jumping and slamming and losing himself in the music, his mouth and lips locked in a constant mute roar, it was the pilot, which made me knee-jerk think this was a memory, maybe. But from whose point of view, right? Or was the pilot’s angle back on himself a kind of condensation of the whole experience? Did he have this kind of angle and distance because he was half a life older already, always receding more and more from the punk kid he’d been?

I’d been warned not to believe everything I read from somebody’s head, to ignore everything but the data, the information, but still, right? The way the pilot had been dwelling on this, it was . . . he was flying the plane at the same time he was losing his sense of self in that mosh pit, but he’d been losing himself in that mosh pit at fifteen as well. And I wasn’t sure he ever really left that moment, that wrongness of seeing himself across all the craziness, through the haze of whatever he’d been on. The way software has a kernel? This mosh pit was my pilot’s kernel.

It made me wonder what mine might be.

Trying not to think like that, I turned my head to the side, my left ear to the roar of the wind, and, even though I knew not to, I nearly tried to gulp some air in. No: some cold.

Would my lungs frost on the inside, shatter in my chest?

I straightened back up, leaned into the dive—be a bullet, not a sail—trying to relish what I’d never known to be so pleasant before: the solitude of my own, and only my own, thoughts.

Fifteen-hundred-plus jumps and I’m just figuring that out, yeah. Probably six hundred of those on the military’s dime, but the rest on my own, after I was processed out. My middle initial is “P,” and, whenever I can work it in, I claim that it’s for ‘Plummet.’ Meaning I was born for this.

It’s really ‘Peter,’ after my dad, but who cares.

For all intents and purposes, this is my first jump where my mind is billowing out well before the silk does.

It’s like falling into myself, like I’m in a tunnel, in an impossibly tall silo with a giant fan at the bottom, the blades whirring so fast they’re pushing me up, up, up, giving me seconds, drying my mouth out, my eyes crying in my goggles not from the wind, but the pleasure.

They’re paying me to get doped up and do this, but I’d have paid to do it.

Never mind that the facility I’m divebombing is federal.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no terrorist, and I don’t hold some grudge about the missions I can’t talk about—I don’t even care about politics. It’s just . . . how there’s ski bums, trading bunny slope work for a lift ticket for the day? How there’s climbers living in their cars at the base of the rock face, just so what they love can be closer?

I’m that way with the sky. I’m that way with falling through it at two hundred miles per hour, my air brakes just a rip cord away.

And all I’ve got to do for an infinite jump pass, now, for a lifetime of air below me, is nab one network key when this federal facility comes into my telepathic range, which is supposed to be about a quarter-mile, though nothing’s exact here.

There’s more working parts to this heist than just me, too.

On the ground, at the facility, minutes before I jumped, while the pilot was still climbing us higher and higher, his head bobbing with the song piping into ears, a sarin gas alarm lit up on some control panel. The result was a fire drill: everybody out.

The sarin gas is only for the alarm, of course—enough to register, but gone before it can do any harm. It’s just how my check signers are clearing the facility of the mental chatter associated with too many people in one place.

In the case of biological weapons dispersal at a federal facility, same as everywhere probably, you run away, everybody scatters . . . except, in the case of this facility in particular, there’s always five administrators in the tower, five administrators whose rooms lock down, cycling air in from tanks—no sarin gas can make it in there.

One of those five is supposed to be the head honcho of the IT department, who’s the only one with today’s network key cycling through the back of his mind.

The way to get it to the front of his mind is simple: a phone call on his private line, asking him straight out, “Um, hey, you do have that network key, don’t you?” He hangs up, looks around suspiciously, but all the same, he’s now thinking of exactly the string of numbers and letters and symbols we need. To get everything synced up perfect, this pre-recorded call isn’t even triggered until my altimeter broadcasts that I’m within range.

As for why I don’t just mill around in the parking lot, try to grab the key from his head that way?

Number one, the neural disinhibitor agent is making me bleed from the gums and nose and ears and eyes and the lining of my esophagus. The neural agent is not FDA-approved, will never be mass-produced, but, all the same, since it came from this facility I’m hurtling towards, they’ve got the ground fenced off for three miles in all directions, and the guards shoot first, ask questions never.

The number two reason I’m falling from the sky instead of skulking around the parking lot is that there’s a device all high-level personnel wear clipped to their belts that can transmit a blocking frequency against temporary telepaths like me, but those buzzers only go active when, and if, there’s ever any unauthorized access. Not just in the building, but on the grounds.

So, say I somehow magically breached the fences and sensors and rifles, am milling around in the parking lot with the rest of these fire-drill evacuees, just generally bleeding from the head and causing a stir, no ID badge clipped to my shirt. What happens as soon as somebody clocks me as the danger I most definitely am is that every person in the facility with important data committed to memory feels a certain telltale hum at their waistline, and, like that, I’m firewalled out, collecting zero pay.

And, this pay?

One jump and I’m set for life, medical included. Any injuries I incur from a late pull, any lingering effects of the neural disinhibitor, they’re all paid for, even if they go chronic. Even if they’re psychological or emotional.

My parachute here is seriously golden, yes.

And this isn’t even morally compromising work, not really. As they explained it to me—nothing committed to paper, all of it piped into the room I’d been invited into—this network key isn’t for nuclear codes or intelligence officer names, nothing like that. It’s just the key that unlocks the location of a certain black facility, one of those off-the-maps-dark, wetworky kind of places, those detention and torture centers with incinerators down the hall—those places the Geneva Convention will never know about, that the whole world should know about.

I’m not political, no, there’s no politics at four thousand feet and falling, but I do have a basic sense of right and wrong.

And, one minute of work for a lifetime of freedom?

Who wouldn’t say yes to that?

All I had to do was swallow a pill under supervision of a medical team, and then do what I’m always doing anyway: jump out of a perfectly good plane.

As for my training, there weren’t any ripcords or tethers or how-to videos, and the training didn’t involve conditioning my dormant telepathic capabilities—as I understand, there’s no working out those muscles. All my training involved, at first, was a deck of cards and playing some blackjack for Halloween-size candy bars.

For four days I memorized where the ten was, what the jack was doing, my heart jittery with sugar.

After that I graduated to flashcards facedown on the table, which I could look at for, at first, five seconds, then four, on down to just a glimpse. Initially the number was two digits, then more, then some letters and symbols mixed in, and, this last night, an impossible sixteen-digit-and-character jumble, gone almost before I even saw it.

The team didn’t expect me to remember each number and letter and symbol individually, they assured me, but did want me to focus on the shape of the whole string, the contours, the rises and falls, the dips and drops, the sharp walls and fast valleys, and how wide those valleys were, or weren’t, and whether their floor was flat or bumpy, which could be the difference in an e and an n, an a and a u.

As they explained it, there wouldn’t be time, falling out of the sky, the ground less than a quarter-mile from my face and coming fast, for me to build anything as fancy as some memory palace—which they also had to explain to me. But I would be able to take a mental snapshot. I could get the shape of the network key before that IT admin’s belt hummed on. And, working within the general confines of that shape, there would be exponentially fewer combinations of numbers and letters and symbols that would fit. If they were lucky, they could use that shape to crack the key before the clock reset it, and stop all manner of human rights violations from revving up.

Easy as that. I get paid whether they’re successful or not, and I don’t have to take the disinhibitor again, only see my team again at whatever local medical facility I get delivered to—all of which they have stuffed with their operatives—so I can sketch the shape of the network key all secret under my order for Jell-O or ibuprofen or whatever.

Like I say, who wouldn’t sign on this dotted line?

Technically now, falling—three thousand feet, twenty-five hundred—I’m not even working, am just commuting to work. The job part of this doesn’t even start until I get close enough to the tower to soak up the general shape of sixteen digits, numerals, and symbols.

Cake all the way down, man.

Because it’s so easy is why, I guess, I’m halfway paying attention to what’s going on in the bleary edges of my peripherals. I’m not worried about counter-insurgent ordnance, nothing fancy and over-the-top like that. I’m just, you know, drifting, looking at all the pretty stuff, like, say . . . my drop-plane puttering off into the horizon.

I lift my hand to wave bye to the pilot, thank him for the lift—it’s a stupid gesture, but who’s watching?—and that’s when the plane, framed between my thumb and index finger, explodes. It was already trailing smoke, which was supposed to look all in distress, that was why I’d “had” to emergency-jump into restricted airspace. But the pilot had his story for when he landed, wherever he landed. I’d heard him being put through the paces of it until he had it down.

Meaning?

No way did he know there was an explosive under his seat. No way did he know his concert was coming to such an abrupt end.

I spread my arms and legs to slow my descent, maybe think this whole thing through again.

So . . . so they’ll cash in a plane for this network key. Got it. And—and they’ll snuff out a human being just the same?

How long are they going to need me after I trace the shape of that network key, right?

And that’s if I even survive the fall. Deploying a chute as close to the ground as I’m about to, well, first, it isn’t a standard chute, not even close. Chutes are designed to open slowly, so as not to rip their harness up through the body of the jumper, they’re not designed to jet up and out on invisible struts of compressed CO2.

At four hundred yards from the big splat, I won’t have the luxury of a soft whoosh.

My chute might be colorful and pretty, but that’s just so that, when it’s on the ground in disarray, nobody will question it.

It’s designed to stop me nearly instantly, though. Nothing soft about it. It’s going to be only minimally better than hitting the ground, I know, and have been warned about it. Never mind the custom harness, the extra padding, all the body armor and braces on under my jumpsuit.

When I rip my cord, I’m going to get stopped hard enough mid-fall that no way am I conscious for touchdown. All part of the plan, of course: Get the knocked-out, bleeding, off-course skydiver to the hospital, stat!

Never mind what I’m smuggling out in my short-term memory.

And then the alarm in my helmet chimes, the same chime that was always coming on at random times during all my blackjack games of the last few days. Pavlov’s dog that I am, my mind opens like a hungry flower.

As designed, the IT admin is the first mind I slurp in.

His name doesn’t matter. Just what he’s trying and trying not to think about.

It’s not—it’s not a network key.

Surprise, I say to myself, with zero surprise.

What’s at the front of his mind is a girl, seven, maybe eight. She’s in the front yard of a bland suburban home, just doing nothing, but then everything goes pale around her. The house and trees and sky all wash out. Everything except the street name on its green sign, and the number painted on the curb, in what I now realize is the same font on that deck of cards.

His daughter. His hidden-by-the-government estranged daughter, hidden so she can’t be used against him, can’t make him reveal secrets.

My check signers don’t want the key, they want the guy who has the new key every day.

And now they’ll have him.

When his belt device hums on with my aerial intrusion, the frozen image of his daughter turns to static, then snow, and like that she’s gone, sucked back into his head.

But not fast enough.

I have maybe a tenth of a second, here. A hundredth. A sliver of a slice.

I can pull the cord, black out, wake a rich man.

Or—

I’m not a good person. I’ve never claimed to be.

But, and I can see it now, I think this is why I dive, why I jump, why I fall: I still remember my estranged father tossing me up into the tiny sky of our backyard, tossing me higher and higher then standing on the grass below me, his hands open to catch me.

If this girl, this daughter, if she hadn’t been sitting on that same grass, then maybe I pull my ripcord, let my canopy snap open.

But she was where she was, and I am who I am, and—her father was trying so hard not to think of her, wasn’t he? Just, the harder he tried, the more she came into mental focus for me.

The whole climb up, my pilot’s skull was glass.

Mine isn’t, is just bone, but, just to be sure it shatters like it needs to, instead of pulling my ripcord, what I pull is my helmet’s chinstrap, so that when I hit, my short-term goes-with it, splashes all around.

It was a good jump, though.

And, to be honest, I kind of always wondered what it might be like if my chute didn’t open.

I’m coming home, Dad.

Catch me, please?

©2020 by Stephen Graham Jones. Originally published in Psi-Wars: Classified Cases of Psychic Phenomena, edited by Joshua Viola. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of nearly thirty novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Most recent are The Only Good Indians and Night of the Mannequins. Next is My Heart is a Chainsaw. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.

A Smell of Jet Fuel

Andrew Dana Hudson | 5217 words

We met on the 107th floor of the South Tower. She was standing in quiet contemplation, watching fire spread through the building across the plaza, smoke and paper billowing out into that baby blue sky. I was nursing a thunderous hangover, neglecting my tour group, which had all gone to the southern side of the observation deck to watch the second plane’s approach. She wasn’t supposed to be here.

“So, come here often?” I said. I sidled up.

She shot me an appraising glance. “First time, last time,” she said.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Repeat customers are a big part of our business.”

She wore a boxy, dark gray skirt-suit with an atemporal white cotton blouse—more period-appropriate than most of the chuds I chaperoned. She had brown skin, and a few gray strands glinting in her short black bob made me guess her age at early forties. Her eyes were solemn and consequential.

“What do you think?” I asked. I gestured sweepingly at the scene out the window.

“It’s bigger than I thought it would be,” she said, thoughtful. “You see something played on screen a million times as a kid, you lose a sense of its scale. It just, I don’t know, fills the screen. But this is—well, it’s big. You can’t take it all in, even from here. Still, it’s smaller too, isn’t it? They always made it about the whole country, but right now, to all those people running around down there, it’s just about whether you’re in the towers or out.”

Well, she wasn’t a contemporary, that much was clear. Sometimes we did encounter them: maintenance or janitorial staff checking this or cleaning that before the observatory floor opened, perhaps drawn by some uncanny sense of our arrival. Once an office worker forced the locks and barged in right when I was giving my introductory spiel. It was rare, and a pain in the ass when it did happen, requiring paperwork, reports to the government regulators, all that. Each trip came with miniscule iterations, tiny butterfly puffs of chance—a graviton here tugging a molecule there, a neurotransmitter firing out of turn. Nothing that would have a major impact for thousands or millions of years, but once in a while the contemporaries got weird ideas.

If she wasn’t from here, she must be from back home. For some reason I couldn’t remember seeing her board. Granted, I wasn’t at my most attentive today—Craig the intern’s sendoff drinks had gone a little late. And these thirty-head tours were a lot to track. No one could expect me to memorize ninety new faces every day. Still, I would have remembered if she’d been in my group. Which left one real possibility: she was a regulator.

“Eckelson. Brad Eckelson.” I offered my hand. She reached out, then stopped herself, got a skeptical look on her face.

“A handshake? Really?”

I put my hand down. “Sorry. Period training, you know. Just in case there’s a malfunction, and we end up somewhere public. It’s never happened, but hey, that’s why I get paid the big bucks.”

She gave a little bow. “Velasco. Sitra Velasco.”

“Is that Mrs. Velasco? Or . . . maybe Agent Velasco?”

She looked startled for a moment, then smiled.

“Let’s not stand on ceremony today,” she said. “Sitra is fine.”

The window was starting to radiate with heat from the blaze in the North Tower. We both took a step back.

“How much longer?” Sitra asked.

“Seven minutes to the second plane. Sixty-three minutes until this tower falls. We’ll start reboarding in about forty.”

I’d led this tour so many times, I knew the beats by heart.

“That seems like a generous buffer. No thrill of the final drop?”

The government did this, I knew: sent in plainclothes agents to make sure we were staying on the up-and-up. Usually they just bought a ticket, secret shopper style, but not always. I’d heard rumors that agents could show up with their little pocket Machines, grill us for twenty minutes, and then split. Whatever kept us on our toes. If it got back to management that I’d bungled a regulator visit, I’d be demoted to costume enforcement on the Hindenburg.

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Getting all these tourists back in the Machine is like herding cats. More than once I’ve had to cut it closer than I’d like. Not that close, obviously. Safety is our priority. Anyway, there’s not a ton to see after a while. The smoke gets pretty bad. The Machine keeps this room clear, but it does obscure the view. Honestly, I see some people get bored by 9:15 a.m.”

“So we don’t get to see the North Tower fall?”

“No, that won’t happen until a good half hour after this one. A lot of folks are disappointed by that, I know.”

“Is there another tour—to the other tower, perhaps? In case I wanted to buy a second ticket.”

Next she’d be asking if it would be possible to get a private tour—well compensated, of course, but off the books. Probing to see if we ran private trips.

“Just this one,” I said. “This observation deck was still closed when the attacks began, and it stayed locked. So we get the place pretty much to ourselves. It’s the only spot in the towers to Machine-in unobserved and undisturbed. You see, across the way all the floors are occupied, even the restaurants. I think technically we could bring a tour there if we filed the right paperwork and were a bit more discrete, since no one above the impact zone would live to say they saw us, but it’d be much more complicated and, frankly, too macabre even for us.”

“I figured as much,” Sitra said, and I thought I sensed an odd note of satisfaction in her voice.

She strolled off, glancing at me to follow. We passed the shuttered Sbarro’s, rounded the corner. Here and around the next corner the rest of the tour was milling about, checking their watches or pointing to each other at bits of chaos down in the streets below.

As always the tourists sported American flag t-shirts, MAGA hats, “Never Forget” buttons, Thin Blue Line cargo shorts. A smattering of retro-patriotic flare whose symbolic meaning had long ago faded or blurred. All against the spirit, if not the letter, of our company guidelines. Half my job was making sure no one dropped anything that would make for confusing rubble. I tried to tell the gift shop guys not to let customers get their souvenirs before the tour, but who could blame them? They got paid on commission.

Sitra went over to one of the chunky mounted binoculars and waved for my assistance. I pulled off the red vinyl cover and inserted an antique coin. There was a click, then a ticky whir began. Sitra put her eyes to the lenses and panned over Lower Manhattan, Governor’s Island, Lady Liberty looking miniscule on her far-off patch of dirt.

“This really is as good as it gets, huh Brad?” she said. “As soon as that second plane comes into view, it’s a steady downhill for the next fifty-odd years. Or am I being dramatic?”

“Depends on who you are,” I hedged. “Where you live, what you need. All very subjective. For some groups, the next few decades mostly get better and better. For others, conditions have already been declining for a while.”

“I suppose,” Sitra allowed, still glued to the viewer. “I mean more as a zeitgeist, I guess. You can see it shifting down there, the balance between opportunity and struggle. A feeling of promise, rounding a corner. Not that things were sure to get better if today never happened. But really, these schmucks don’t know how good they had it.”

The whirring clicked to a stop. Sitra held out her hand for another coin, inserted it, and returned to the binoculars.

“It must be close, yes? Which way do I look?”

“That way.” I pointed.

A moment later we heard a deep rumble, cut with a sharp whine. The tourists began excitedly pointing, readying their cameras.

I turned away. I’d seen it all countless times, and I could handle it. I could cope. But sometimes this part still got to me. I coped better when I didn’t watch.

There was a flash first and a wave of heat. A dull bang rippled through the room and a violent jolt shook the floor. The building swayed nauseatingly with the force of the impact. Dust shook out of the ceiling.

I heard squeals from the tourists and turned back around. Those who had listened to my earlier warnings kept their feet wide, knees loose. Those who hadn’t listened pitched against the railing or grabbed onto others to keep from losing their balance. An elderly couple had fallen. I helped them untangle their legs and find their feet. When it seemed like everyone was okay, I waved for the group’s attention and launched into my next spiel.

“Please everyone, let’s take a moment of silence for the passengers and crew of Flight 175 and for those in this building who perished in the crash.” I bowed my head and most of the others followed suit. Some surreptitiously checked the little period-appropriate digital cameras the company had provided. Kids squirmed in their parents’ grip. “Thank you. Okay, we’ve got about half an hour left before we need to reboard the Machine. During that time fire and structural damage will weaken the tower’s core supports, leading to collapse in a little over fifty minutes. If you have any questions about that process, feel free to ask. There are also informational booklets attached to your seats in the Machine. You can return to your seats at any time. If you stay out here, there will be dust and a small amount of smoke in the air. I know we promised a clean-air trip, but a little dust is perfectly normal and probably not that big a deal to most of you. If the air bothers you, please don’t hesitate to use your oxygen mask. If you find yourself feeling ill, please return to the Machine and wait there. If you feel emotionally compromised, please return to the Machine. Everyone understand? Any questions?”

Hands went up.

“Bathroom?” asked the nearest. We told them to go before the trip, but they never did.

“There is a toilet in the back of the Machine for your use. We are a ‘Leave No Trace’ tour, and that means leaving no waste as well. Any other questions?” Hands went down. “Okay, have fun.”

I spent the next fifteen minutes fending off theories and accusations from a prematurely balding white guy who was convinced that the towers couldn’t have fallen without the help of a deep-state controlled demolition team. There was always one. Eventually I shook him and went looking for Sitra. I wanted to make a good last-impression on the regulator before I started rounding up the tour to depart.

I found her ducked behind the counter of the Nathan’s Famous Hotdog stand, head bowed, shoulders hunched. There was more emotion in her body language than she’d shown before. This wasn’t uncommon; people who came in acting tough and cynical often broke down the hardest when they faced the reality of the day. Even prickly government agents had to have a heart. I leaned over the counter and stopped short.

Sitra was on the phone.

It was an ancient silver and black brick, rubbery raised buttons and a tiny square display. She had it pressed to one ear and was hissing whispers into the microphone end.

“It’s too late. No, I couldn’t get out even if I wanted to. I’m sorry. I won’t do it. I won’t make her do it. Look, you’ve got the notes. You’ll be fine. No. I love you. I’m sorry. Goodbye.”

She lowered the phone, heaved a heavy sigh. Then she looked over her shoulder and saw me.

“What the hell was that?” I said. “Please tell me you weren’t talking to someone contemporary!”

“Not exactly,” Sitra said.

“Not exactly?” I repeated, raising my voice. “What does that mean? You know information leakage is illegal, right? Like exactly illegal, even for regulators. Where the shit did you get that phone anyway? How the fuck did you connect to the cell network?”

“Would you quiet down? Just chill.” She stood up and glared at me. “Look, you’re a tour guide. Some things are above your pay grade.”

“Is that some kind of . . . time phone?” I said. Then it hit me like a steel beam to the chest. “Fuck. You aren’t actually with the government, are you?”

I don’t know quite how I guessed—the showing up unannounced, the moody banter, her overly imperious attitude—but as soon as I said it, I knew I was right. I could see it on her face as she shrunk back into the shadow of the doomed hotdog stand.

“Look,” she said. “We’re cut off now, right? There’s no way out of the building from here. So you’ll just have to take me with you.”

I hopped over the counter and crouched down with her.

“You need to tell me exactly who you are and what you are doing here,” I said.

“Fine,” she scowled, defiant. “I’m a political refugee, and I’m appealing for passage and asylum. It’s your duty to take me back with you and let me make my case to your highest court!”

“What the fuck?” I said. “What the fuck!” I repeated.

My heart sank at the thought of the paperwork this would mean, the hours of getting grilled by real government agents. The company would probably lose its license to travel while the regulators tried to find and cap the source of the information leakage. I might lose my job. I had to think fast.

“I’m so, so sorry.” I tried to sound both sympathetic and stern. “But I can’t take a contemporary back with us. I’d lose my job. I’d be thrown in jail, or, I don’t know, disappeared to some time-prison for complicity in your time-crimes. You got yourself here, and you’re just going to have to stay and live with the consequences. Actually, that’s a poor choice of words. Look—” And here I paused for dramatic effect. “If you tell me how you found out about us, maybe I can help you strike a deal. If it’s a big leak, they might go easy on you for helping them find it. But you have to tell me now, otherwise I can’t take you back.”

“There’s no leak! You don’t understand. I’m not from here. I was born the same time you were. More or less. Probably. When are you from exactly?”

“Oh no, you’re not squeezing info out of me that easily,” I said.

My hangover was gone now, banished by a stress-rush of cortisol. Tourists still strolled around the observation deck, craning their necks to get a look at the fire or the first responders down below. The air was tainted with wisps of smoke, a smell of jet fuel—acrid and heady.

I tugged at my hair. “Fuck, that’s even worse. What are you? Some kind of lost tourist? Rogue experiment gone wrong? Did you fall through a vortex?”

“I’m exactly what I said,” she replied. “A political refugee seeking asylum.”

It was getting hot. Sitra peeled off her jacket. She laid it out carefully to sit on then took a deep breath.

“My mother was in politics, many years from now,” she began. “She’d say she was a dissident. I don’t know—compared to the Twentieth Century, the differences she fought over seem so small. But when an election put her enemies in power, she decided it wasn’t safe to stay. She found a group with a licensed Machine that conducted illegal Escapes on the side. And she took me with her, back to the 1960s—post penicillin, between Great Depressions, away from World Wars.

“I was just a child then. I had no choice in the matter. We lived peacefully, quietly, carefully. My mother knew the timeline, knew where we could live that would be out of the way of History. She’d just move us around, and then we’d see something terrible on television, and she’d say, ‘yes, definitely best not to be anywhere near that.’

“It wasn’t that bad a time to be in America, if you knew what to expect. We never did anything that might change the timeline. Never voted or voiced an opinion or made much money. We knew the rules against leakage. We never let on when we were from or what we knew. I barely remember the world I was born in. We just kept our heads down, lived a decent life. And then this year she died.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said automatically.

“Thank you,” she replied, and I thought she meant it. “My mother never told me much of what was going to happen, but after she died I went through her things, found her papers. It was all there. Details about major and minor events, all the shootings and bombings and disasters. All the hazards she made sure we avoided throughout the whole Twentieth Century. And, also, everything to come in the Twenty-First.”

“Oh,” I said. Then it sunk in. “Oh no.”

“Exactly!” Sitra started wringing her hands anxiously. “A decade of fear and terror. Then economic crisis, political insanity, plague, riots, fascism, climate collapse. You know what’s coming! Would you want to live through all that?”

“I suppose there is a certain terrifying uncertainty to this era,” I admitted. “But you’ve got a solid fifteen, twenty years before things get really rough. There’s a lot of good culture in the meantime. You’d get to see so many classic movies in actual theaters. You’d get to experience peak TV!”

I wasn’t sure what I was trying to convince her of. The argument was moot now that the second plane had cut off the upper floors.

“Well, you’re white!” Sitra said. “I’m Persian and Mexican, and my documents are fake. I didn’t want to take my chances, even knowing some of what will happen. Anyway, I’m not doing this for me. I’m doing this for her.”

She put her hand on her belly, and I noticed for the first time that beneath her loose white blouse was a slight bump.

“Fuck!” I said.

“Yes, fuck,” she agreed. “Listen, I don’t care who won that election or about my mother’s politics. I didn’t ask to live in the Twentieth Century, and my child definitely didn’t ask to be born into the Twenty-First. Had I found my mother’s papers earlier, I never would have gotten pregnant. But I did, and now I know what’s coming. If they punish me when we get back, so be it. I don’t care. I won’t let my daughter grow up in this.”

She waved toward the window, a gesture that somehow encompassed not just the horrific scene around us, but everything that would unfold after, half a century’s worth of strife and needless death, another fifty years of fixing what we could—the primeval garbage dump of history, that hill of nightmares and terror.

My watch beeped. 9:45 a.m. My last-ditch reminder. I almost never needed this alarm. I always turned it off as soon as I started the reboarding process. But now I was five minutes late in rounding up the tour. We had less than fifteen minutes before the South Tower fell.

“Shit, shit,” I said. I stood up and called out to the tourists on this side of the observation deck. “Okay, everyone. We’re going to begin reboarding now. Please make your way in an orderly fashion back to the Machine. And please triple check to make sure you have all your belongings.”

The spiel came out automatically. Meanwhile my mind was turning over, trying to figure out what to do. One way or another, the tour and I needed to be back on the Machine in the next few minutes. The question was: was Sitra coming too?

“Walk and talk,” I said, swinging my legs back over the counter. I held out a hand to help Sitra follow. “I have to get these people boarded.”

With my cheery-but-firm tour guide smile, I started nudging the tourists down the observation deck, around back to the west side where I’d parked the Machine.

“What about me, Eckelson?” Sitra asked, following. She touched her bump again for emphasis. “What about us?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I stooped to pick up a crumpled brochure one of the tourists had dropped. “A few people made it out of the upper floors of this tower alive. I could give you one of our masks, try to unlock the door to the stairwell.”

“No!” she pleaded. “There’s not enough time. No way I’d make it.”

“Yeah, well, you stalled me pretty good, didn’t you? How did you get in here, anyway?”

“I bribed a guard to lock me in overnight. It was surprisingly easy. I think he thought it was a sex thing.”

“Wow. So, what was your plan? Just get on the Machine and hope no one noticed that we brought back more people than we’d left with?”

“My plan was to appeal to your humanity,” Sitra said, half-sarcastic. “I just needed to figure out what kind of person you were first. I was going to come talk to you as soon as I finished saying goodbye, but it took me longer than I expected to get through.”

“No shit,” I said. “Cell towers are kind of jammed today. Who were you talking with, anyway? Husband? Boyfriend? How is the father okay with this insane scheme? Tell me you haven’t been promising time travel Escapes to contemporaries.”

“The father isn’t in the picture,” she said. “I called my brother, Maiz. I wanted him to come with us, but he didn’t believe you’d really be here. And he was scared. He was even younger when my mother moved us. He doesn’t remember anything about the time we came from.”

“There’s two of you?” I groaned. “You know I’m going to have to report that, right? The regulators might try to pick him up.”

“He had his chance,” Sitra said, defiant, but I could hear a note of sorrow in her voice.

We rounded the corner, and the Machine was there, in all its roaring light, its pulsating, city bus glory.

“Still can’t believe this is it,” Sitra muttered behind me. “Fuckin’ Magic School Bus-ass Time Machine.”

“Yeah, well, it’s like I said earlier. We want to be inconspicuous if we accidentally land in public. Because running around in the open—risking contemporaries finding out about time travel—is extremely dangerous. Which is why Escapes are extremely illegal.”

“Take it up with my dead mother,” she said, more than a little bitter. “I never asked to come here, and this is the first chance I’ve ever had to leave.”

“Okay, everyone,” I said, turning to the group. “Back in the Machine, please. Single-file, watch your step.”

I started counting the tourists as they shuffled onto the bus, lost my count, started again. Even close to the Machine, the observatory was hot. I was sweating bullets. My watch beeped again, five-minute warning. I slapped at it until it stopped. When I was sure we had everyone, I paused, blocking the door, and turned back to Sitra. “That reminds me, how did you know we’d be here? Your mother’s notes?”

“They told me this would happen, but not that you’d be here,” she said. “That I had to guess.”

I had to take a beat to process this. There was nothing but black-gray smoke out the windows now. The smell of burning things filled the air. Under my feet, I felt the building tremble.

“You guessed,” I repeated. “You came to the 107th floor of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, because you guessed a Time Machine would be there.”

“I still remember it, the place where they helped us Escape,” she said, gaze driving into me through decades and centuries. “It was the day after the election. They brought us in at night. I carried my baby brother while Mother talked to them. I read the sign on the wall. ‘Time Tours, Inc. Visit Famous Past Events. You Name the Catastrophe. We Take You There. Witness History.’ So I always knew you people were out there. When I read about today in Mother’s notes, I knew you’d be here too. Like you said, this is the only place in the towers to bring in a Time Machine, undisturbed.”

A last beep of my watch. One minute left. I could close the door, leave her behind. Let untold tons of concrete and metal and glass put an end to this forty-year perversion of the timeline. Save my job, save the company. Hell, it might even be the right thing to do—might save time itself from whatever rippling paradoxes these mothers and daughters had unleashed.

“Why now?” I asked. “I’ve led this same tour dozens of times, and you never came before. Why are you suddenly here now?”

“I don’t know,” she said, hand on her belly. “And I don’t care. I just want to get us out.”

Sitra’s eyes were solemn and consequential, and also wild. Only then did it really sink in how truly desperate she was. Made desperate by a well-founded fear of what the Future would bring—and by bonds of motherhood I couldn’t begin to fathom, bonds that had compelled her to walk into the worst hell imaginable. Perhaps she should have had more faith that there would be unexpected good to balance out the expected horrors. Perhaps she was seeing my time through rose-colored glasses. I couldn’t know the balance there. All I could ask was: if our positions were reversed—if it was my Future and my child’s life—would I really want any different?

“Get on,” I said, and I stepped aside.

She took the padded seat behind me. I sat at the controls, turned on the Machine. A glance at the display clock: 9:59 a.m., only seconds left. I felt the floor under the machine begin to drop.

Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, the South Tower fell. I had no words for it. So many lives cut down, so many Futures abolished. However much this day would be twisted in the years to come by fear and hate and greed and nihilism; however much my own presence was proof that people could turn anything into a spectacle, a product, a justification, a farce—whatever else followed, this moment, at least, was tragedy.

The Machine roared. All that history rushed past us. 2001, 2007, 2016, 2020. Then faster, as though the Machine could not bear to linger on these years. 2029, 2037, 2055. Onward! 2063, 2099, 2140, further. We approached our year. The Machine slowed, murmured, stopped.

I turned and faced the back of the bus. “Sorry about the bumpy ride, folks, but now you’ve got quite a story to tell. Again, please check that you have all your belongings. In a moment here, we’ll be exiting the Machine and heading back into the office. Bathrooms will be on your left. The gift shop, if you haven’t already been, will be on your right. Refreshments are available at the cafe in the back of the gift shop. The exit is through the cafe. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you have any lingering questions, the gift shop staff will be happy to answer.”

Sitra was gazing rapt out the dust-caked window of the Machine. She reached over the seat and grabbed my shoulder.

“That’s the sign!” she said, pointing. “The one I saw as a kid. This is the same place, the place where we Escaped. I can’t believe it.”

“Welcome back,” I said. “Now let’s go in and have a long, awkward conversation with management.”

Then I turned back to the crowd. “Okay, folks, oxygen masks on. I’m about to open up the doors.”

There was a general rustling as everyone pulled masks and helmets out of their bags and deftly slipped them on. Sitra looked at me, confused.

“Oxygen masks?” she asked.

“Oh yeah, I guess you don’t have one.” I rummaged in the glove compartment. “Here, you can borrow my spare.”

“But why? Why do I need it?”

“Well, we have to go outside to get from the parking lot back into the office. Can’t go outside without a mask on, obviously.”

She took the mask and put it on, then looked out the window, then back at me. Her hands twitched. She had an odd expression on her face, but that was to be expected. It must be a shock to be back after all that time.

I led everyone across the parking lot and back into the office. Everything was as it always was: lobby, bathrooms, gift shop, cafe. I kept an eye on Sitra as she stepped slowly through the gift shop, hand on bump, gazing around, head cocked as if hearing a silent whistle. She moved like she was drinking some oddness in through her pores.

At the end of the cafe, she pushed through the inner exit door. I followed. I’d steer her back inside in a few minutes, to start the reports and the paperwork. In the airlock I helped her put her mask back on—oxygen depletion was high today, and getting worse. Then we walked out, past the sentry guns, and onto the ash-choked street.

“No!” Sitra cried, chest heaving, eyes wild again. “This isn’t right! It’s the same year, but it’s not the same! It’s wrong! It’s worse! Where are the trains? Why isn’t anything green?”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“She must have changed something. Or I did. But we were so careful! It’s barely been two hundred years. That’s not enough time! What did we do?” She started pacing. Turret-eyes on the buildings swiveled to surveil her movement. I tried to keep her in arm’s reach, in case she bolted. I could see the clockwork of her mind spinning out of control. “Maybe I shouldn’t have left Maiz alone. Maybe I shouldn’t have left him the notes. Maybe—maybe I was supposed to stay and help. Maybe she needed to be there!” She grabbed me by the shirt, dragged me mask to mask. “You’ve brought us to the wrong Future, dammit! You have to take us back! We have to make it alive again!”

I shook my head. “Everything is exactly how I left it.”

Sitra let go of me, shivering. She clutched her belly. She stood in quiet contemplation of the dirty street, the hot, gray sky. Before I could stop her, she pulled off her mask. She sniffed the dead air. It was acrid and heady and toxic, I knew. Soot and burning plastic. Dust and car exhaust. A smell of jet fuel.

©2021 by Andrew Dana Hudson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

No Lies Detected

Russell Nichols | 997 words

Boy was lying on the table when I put the power drill to his head and pulled the trigger.

It was just about sundown. Crickets already talking. Motor whirred, but the screw didn’t rotate. In the candlelight, Boy looked up at me, not blinking at all. “Are you finished?”

“Be still,” I told him. The chuck was stuck, so I turned it till I heard a click. Then, holding my breath, I kept my hands real steady as I drove the screw in all the way. Finished. I lifted my goggles. Boy sat up. Electronic graphene-based skin glowing. He looked around, his AR implant calibrating to the setting: this rundown shack in the middle of some nowhere forest.

“Test it out,” I told him, pulling my gloves off. “Ask me anything.”

Boy tapped his lips. “So I can read faces to see who’s lying or not, right?”

“Not just faces. Body language, voice patterns, the works.”

Boy started beaming with his big, brown eyes. Just like my firstborn. “You’re telling the truth!”

I took a breath. Pine and ground coffee. Put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll never lie to you, son. Now help me clean up this workshop ‘fore it get too—”

The blue light above the door blinked on just then, robbing me of my words.

I blew out the candles. Boy tossed me my carbine rifle. Ducked under the table. I peeked out the barred window, eyes darting around the dark woods.

“Is it a monster?” Boy asked.

Didn’t see nothing. “Prolly a fox or cat tripped the wire is all.”

Next thing I knew, Boy was up, right next to me. “Boy, whatchu doing?”

Boy didn’t budge, staring up at me. Those big, brown eyes. I felt bad, the way I hollered at him, but he caught me off guard again when he said: “Can I go outside?”

“Tomorrow,” I told him and just that quick I forgot he could read me now.

“You’re lying.”

“Get back under the table.”

“Why can’t I go now?”

“Cause I said so.” And that shoulda been the end of it. I put the gun down. Some deep breathing to ease my nerves. “Now either help me clean up or you going to sleep. Your choice.”

I relit the candles, cut off the blue light. Boy grabbed a broomstick and got to sweeping, the shush-shush sounds meshing with cricket calls. Maybe a minute went by when he spoke again: “Why’d you give me this LDI if I can’t ask questions?”

“You can ask whatever you want. Don’t mean you’ll like the answer.”

The shush-shushing stopped. Had my back to him, but I felt his eyes. The Lie Detector Interface ain’t been active for sixty minutes and already he questioning me. My intentions. Like I ain’t been looking out for him, protecting him since Day One.

And Boy said: “Why won’t you look at me?”

I didn’t want him to see me this way, so I dabbed my eyes before turning around.

“You told me I could help you clean or go to sleep, remember?”

I nodded.

“You said it was my choice. But what kind of choice is that? I want to go outside, but you force me to choose only what you want. To control me.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. Boy thought he was so smart. And he was, to an extent. But I brought him into this world, and he wasn’t smarter than me.

“I ain’t tryna control you,” I told him.

We stood there, neither one flinching as night fell.

I nodded. Rubbed my gray beard. Okay. Okay, since he wanted to play a real man’s game, figured I’d expound on the rules. “With that LDI, you can read people, see if they lying, like I said. But if you ever tell a lie, you will . . . break down.”

Boy cocked his head. “You gave me a self-destruct switch?”

“No. What I gave you is a failsafe. Should anything happen to me, and you all alone, tell a lie and your whole system shuts down. That way, can’t nobody hurt you. It’s a worst-case scenario, but—”

“Why would you do this to me?”

Hearing the wobble in his voice, a lump swelled in my throat. I pinched the flesh of my neck to dislodge the words: “You can end things on your own terms.”

“Why?”

Lightheaded, I limped to the old chair. Sat down, gun in my lap. “Point is, it’s a dangerous world, and there’s monsters out there that’ll kill you cause they see us as a threat.”

Boy looked at his hands. “But how am I a threat if they’re ones killing us?”

“That’s the paradox of the land we live in.”

Boy frowned. Head tilting to the left, then the right. Maybe this was all too much too soon. Maybe I shoulda kept my trap shut. Let him be a boy a little longer. What did protection mean anyway? Was it shielding him from the pain of life? Or preparing him for the worst?

And Boy said: “You’re lying.”

I got up, set the gun on the chair. Walked over to look him dead in those big, brown eyes. “Read my face.”

But as I reached for the power switch to put him to sleep, he yanked away from me.

And Boy said: “I’m breaking down now!”

I heard the words, but couldn’t process them. Was it true? No, couldn’t be. If it was true, he wouldn’t be breaking down cause he only breaks down if he tells a lie. But it wasn’t a lie either, cause if it was, he would be breaking down, but then it wouldn’t be a lie. And I couldn’t handle it. Felt like my brain was folding in on itself. I fell. Saw myself reaching out, heard myself calling out as Boy grabbed the gun, bolted out the front door and off into the night.

©2021 by Russell Nichols.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Russell Nichols is a speculative fiction writer and endangered journalist. Raised in Richmond, California, he got rid of all his stuff in 2011 to live out of a backpack with his wife, vagabonding around the world ever since. Look for him at russellnichols.com.

How to Become an Ancestor

Nicole D. Sconiers | 1143 words

First, die.

The girl had fulfilled that initial requirement, though not willingly. And yet she found herself on the side of a block of rowhouses surrounded by five or six faces, both familiar and unfamiliar. A graffitied kingdom of the slain.

The girl had achieved a royalty she never aspired to in life.

And it was boring.

Boring to preside over a North Philadelphia courtyard, where sweaty boys played video games and girls whispered on nearby benches, twirling their braids with indifference.

Boring to feel the very wall where she was stained in remembrance vibrate with hip-hop from a passing car, knowing she could no longer dance or lip sync to the lyrics.

She remembered when she was the one riding in a passing car or at a party with her girls

(holding up the wall)

and the bass from a trap song made her chest throb so hard she had to press her hands to her bosom, fearful her heart would explode.

But one day it did explode, and her hands were helpless to stop the rupture.

• • • •

Second, die violently.

Bloodshed is not always a prerequisite for ascension. Beating, stomping and choking will suffice. Bruising is how the ancestors recognize each other and how we recognize them. The ones who have gone before and the ones who are to come.

• • • •

Sometimes it was nice being on the wall. Girls brought pink carnations and balloons in spring and summer. Candles and teddy bears in fall. Almost as if they were building an altar, not just to honor the girl, but to appease a deity higher than her, lest they find themselves ascended to the same one-dimensional kingdom.

Now that it was winter, the girls didn’t tend to her altar as much. It rained often, a cold, biting rain that pelted the empty benches and slicked the courtyard. Snow always lingered far longer in that neighborhood, shoved brutally into blackened mounds that impeded the walker, infuriated the driver and obscured a gate where carnations used to lean.

One day, long after the flowers were gone and the candles were taken away or stolen, the girl found herself detaching from the wall. It was as if that last heavy rain had dislodged her from her reluctant summit. Having spent the past nine months watching over the living, she found herself once more moving among them. Not walking, of course. She didn’t have her old body, her brown skin shredded by copper and lead. She wasn’t floating either. She seemed to be sloshing forward, as if the mural had absorbed the rain and squeezed her out in chroma rivulets.

Now that she was free, she didn’t know where to go. Her mother’s house? A church? To find the man who killed her? He wasn’t exactly hidden. Besides, what could she do to him? Get revenge? Haunt him? Her hands were useless now. Her face stretched into a perpetual smile. Who would be afraid of her—a jubilant ghost? She had never grinned so much in life. But people loved their ancestors to be radiant. Or solemn. There was no in-between.

The girl gushed down the streets of North Philadelphia, where rowhomes were wrapped with colored lights and doors adorned with wreaths. Christmas had never been her favorite holiday. She once loved her mother’s baked ham, punctured with cloves that the girl had pushed through the springy flesh herself. She loved playing spades with her cousins in her dad’s unfinished basement, damp with mildew. Winter was the advent of “cuffing” season, at least in her neighborhood, but there were never any worthy suitors to cuff.

Well, there was this one boy that she dated off and on. She’d been sitting in his car on Broad Street, arguing over a stupid text she saw on his phone, when the cruiser pulled up.

• • • •

Third, die tragically.

Ancestors should never be mistaken for angels. After all, angels are inherently good and pure.

And they can fly.

The girl was not inherently good or pure. At least that’s what they said. Or else she wouldn’t have found herself inside the tinted purgatory of a drug dealer’s car.

They always find a stain.

And she could not fly. Not at the moment of her death or even later when she was elevated eight feet above a courtyard, memorialized in acrylic and pigments.

The girl continued to slosh forward into the night. She didn’t realize how many churches there were on this street. Storefronts. Some with two stories. Others with bars on the windows or red doors.

She hadn’t gone to church much. Her mother never forced her to. Her dad was saved, but when he came to collect her for the weekend, she would pack a dirty dress or mismatched shoes. She did love gospel music. You didn’t have to be inherently good or pure to sing about God.

• • • •

Fourth, inspire those who are to come.

The girl never saw herself as a role model. She was once a daycare worker, but those little bad ass kids got on her nerves with their runny noses, always needing to be changed or fed or hugged.

Ironically, the main ones who kneeled at her altar, or paid homage with bouquets and candles, were younger than she was. The girl was twenty-seven. Much too young to be anyone’s forebear or sacrifice or guiding light.

It was starting to snow. Silvery flakes eddied in the wind, fat and hopeful, but they would soon dissolve. The girl found herself in front of a church with a red door. It looked festive year round, in spite of its lopsided steps and smeared windows. A plastic evergreen hung there, too cheap to steal. The choir within practiced their Christmas carols in front of a space heater. Nothing tepid like “O Come All Ye Faithful” or “Silent Night,” but a rollicking rendition of “Go Tell it on the Mountain.” The girl pressed herself to the door, absorbing the clapping and clacking of heels. It reminded her of those nights at the club when she thought a pulsating hip-hop beat would burst her heart.

She held up what was once her hands. They were shimmering: Reds and purples and browns.

No one saw her throbbing there in front of a fake wreath, her manmade colors pooling on the steps. When the pastor locked up for the night, he would notice the stain underfoot. He would think the neighborhood girls had been playing with sidewalk chalk but the snow had obscured their scribblings.

He would never know he had walked over the remnants of an ancestor, the latest jewel in an endless, brutal crown. To him and others, the girl would always be elevated on a wall, her permanent graffitied kingdom, softly smiling, inspiring the ones who are to come.

©2021 By Nicole D. Sconiers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicole D. Sconiers is the author of Escape from Beckyville: Tales of Race, Hair and Rage, a speculative fiction short-story collection that has been taught at colleges and universities around the country. Her short story “Kim” was published in Sycorax’s Daughters, a black woman’s horror anthology that was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. Her short story “The Stiffening” appeared on an episode of NIGHTLIGHT, the black women’s horror podcast. Ms. Sconiers was a guest columnist for Nightmare Magazine’s The H-Word. Her short story “The Eye of Heaven” appeared in the anthology Black from the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing, published by BLF Press. Ms. Sconiers currently resides in Pennsylvania, where she is working on a collection of horror stories.

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

Innocent Bird

Rachel Swirsky | 5571 words

It began with Shoko finding feathers in her bed. It was her third year of high school. She’d just turned seventeen.

She was falling in love, and her wings were coming in.

At first, there were not so many feathers, but soon there were more and more. She’d assumed they’d be white; in drawings, most people with wings had feathers like swans or doves. Hers were like a sparrow’s: tones of warm brown like her skin in summer, speckled with olive-black like her hair and eyes.

Day by day, Shoko’s feeling of incipience rose. She wanted to kiss Ichika. She wanted to hold her close. Love fluttered inside her as her wings soon would in the air.

She was desperate to stop it.

• • • •

Shoko tried to avoid Ichika by dropping out of their a capella group. She said her father needed help in the afternoons at the family restaurant. It wasn’t entirely a lie—she did their books so she knew how close they were to losing money—but the restaurant needed a lot more than a few afternoons.

Since they didn’t have practice together, Ichika started looking for Shoko at other times of day. While everyone was changing into their school slippers before the day started, Ichika would bring Shoko buns that she’d baked with her sister. At the end of lunch, when Ichika was done eating, she’d rush from her homeroom to Shoko’s so they could walk to the bathroom together.

Cheeks pinked, books clutched flat against her chest, she’d fall into step beside Shoko and say something like:

“You don’t know how much we all miss you. We need you. Yua can’t carry the alto line alone. Chizue’s drowning everyone out.”

Their a capella club meant a lot to Ichika. It was the only thing she did because she enjoyed it. Her parents had only let her join because she’d proven she could still keep up with the cooking and housework and taking care of her sister.

“You can sing as loud as Chizue,” Shoko said.

“It hurts my throat,” Ichika said. “Oh, whoops—your collar is flipped up in back.”

Shoko’s neck tingled under Ichika’s fingertips.

Ichika tapped Shoko’s nose. “Fixed it.”

Shoko hoped she wasn’t blushing.

Ichika paused. Her eyes—ice-blue, enormous—searched Shoko’s face. Despite the natural downturn of her mouth, once one knew her, it was easy to tell when Ichika was actually sad, and she was right now.

“Can’t you talk to your dad?” Ichika asked. “Unless . . . Shoko . . . Is there something really bad?”

Shoko’s skin tingled where Ichika touched her arm.

The chimes rang.

Shoko took half a step backward. “Can’t be late to class.”

Ichika’s frown deepened, but her hand withdrew. “Talk to your dad!” she called back as she left for class, her plaid uniform skirt swinging around her knees.

• • • •

Shoko didn’t blame her father for the wings. Before meeting her mother, Daishiro had been a normal, sensible man. He hadn’t believed in magic. Why would he? Of course he hadn’t guessed what her mother was.

How could he have known to search for hidden wings that sometimes couldn’t even be touched? Or to be suspicious of the “nerve disorder” that kept people from touching his wife’s back? Why should he believe that he really did feel feathers sometimes when his wife laughed any time he brought it up?

Shoko’s mother had showed Daishiro her wings eventually, after Shoko was born, when it was too late.

• • • •

Walking home, Shoko caught sight of her father from a distance. He was crouching on his heels, sipping coconut water out of a squeeze box, just outside their little restaurant where he sold fish tacos, close enough to greet passing customers if they came.

He and Shoko lived together in the cramped rooms behind the restaurant. The original owner had slept on a mat in the kitchen, but the next one had added on a pair of tiny bedrooms. The newer part of the building extended to one side of the old like an outstretched wing.

Shoko tried to sneak past, but Daishiro waved her over with the hand holding the coconut water.

“Why are you home early again?” Daishiro asked. “How long are they canceling practice for?”

Shoko turned her head and coughed. She mumbled, “I don’t know.”

“What does the teacher say?”

“I don’t know,” she repeated defensively. She didn’t like lying to him.

For a moment, she considered telling him about the wings—but no—magic was her mother’s world. She had no choice but to cope with it, but that didn’t mean she should drag her father in, too.

This was uncomfortable. Daishiro had raised her to be independent. She’d started helping with the restaurant’s books when she was ten. They didn’t have the kind of relationship where he monitored what she was doing. She didn’t know how to react.

Shoko hurried to the door before Daishiro could ask anything else. She pretended not to hear him try to call her back.

• • • •

The ocean was Shoko’s first, greatest love. She’d taught herself to swim in the surf while her father watched nearby, drinking the tamarind soda that his old surfing buddies from Baja sent over from Mexico. The best hours of her life were spent on her own in the water, cutting her way through swells with her hands, filling her lungs and diving down. She loved the ocean’s varied voices: the crashing surf, the wind stinging unsettled waves, the muttering undulation of deep currents.

She’d loved other things. A crocheted pink cat with button eyes she’d dragged around when she was a baby. A set of rhinestone ponytail holders she’d worn until the stones fell out. The tiny, worn-out bathing suit with teal ruffles that was the first piece of clothing she’d ever picked out by herself.

She loved all the little things that made up her father: the few lonely wisps on his chin that grew when he got lazy about shaving; the sound of his bare feet on sand; how grouchy he was about bad cooking.

Their home, too: the creak of the wood in high winds; the stifling warmth of sitting too close to the space heater; the smell of freshly bought fish, the stronger the better.

None of it was how she loved the ocean.

None of it was how she was falling in love with Ichika.

If only she could have the feathers of a duck, a cormorant, a pelican, a grebe, a loon—even an egret or an ibis. With sparrow’s wings, she’d never swim again, not the way she did now.

One love or another. Ichika or the sea.

• • • •

Shoko lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, holding an old candy tin in the crook of her arm. The photographs inside it made slick sounds against each other as she flicked through them.

She missed a capella, not just because of Ichika. The girls would be practicing now.

She pulled out a photograph. It was her mother and father sitting at a Western-style table. Her mother was smiling and flashing a V-sign near her chin. Daishiro looked like he was arguing with whoever had taken the picture.

Shoko’s mother sat sideways on her chair, nothing but air visible behind her. In photographs, she always sat with her back exposed; Daishiro had said her mother’s wings were on the edge of reality, but apparently, they still needed room. It was hard to notice unless you knew. Her mother’s slight swell of pregnancy was the same; Shoko could only see it in this photograph because she already knew it was there.

Shoko and her mother had always looked similar, but now that her wings were growing, the two of them seemed like twins. There were small differences—Shoko tanned in the sun and had a sturdy swimmer’s back; her mother was pale and wiry—but so much more about them was the same: small bones, sharp-but-tiny noses, deep-set eyes so dark that even the highlights were like cooling chocolate.

Depending on how Shoko looked at the picture, her mother’s face seemed to flicker between expressions. One way, she looked ready to laugh, and the smile reached her eyes. The other way, her eyes seemed bored, her smile too taut to be real.

Shoko tossed the photograph on the floor.

Another picture: Shoko’s mother standing alone, hair lank and wet from a shower or a dip in the ocean. She held a plate of candied sweet potatoes. She was mid-pregnancy; boredom was starting to bleed into her eyes.

Shoko flicked it away.

A third photograph: a tree. Her father sat cross-legged on the sturdiest limb, holding up a triumphant V-sign and looking pleased with himself. Her mother stood by the tree, turned sideways, with one hand raised to touch the trunk. Daishiro’s branch was just above her; she could have touched it just by straightening her arm. She hadn’t, though. She was looking away from him, too. It made them seem very far apart.

Her mother’s unsmiling eyes flickered between boredom and melancholia. At her feet, there was a baby basket. Shoko had probably been in it.

She tossed the photograph away.

Shoko pushed the candy tin off the bed. She listened to it thunk. She’d deal with it later.

• • • •

“Did you love my mother?” Shoko asked.

She was sitting with Daishiro at the end of the pier. She hadn’t left her room last night so Daishiro had pulled her out here this morning to sit for a while. They’d been quiet, mostly, watching the wind. There was still a little time before school.

Daishiro paused. “Hm?”

Shoko’s mouth opened slightly in surprise at herself. She hadn’t really intended to ask; it just tumbled out. “Were you in love with my mother? It’s hard to tell in the old photographs. You’re never looking at each other.”

Daishiro regarded her with confusion for a moment, then shrugged. “I thought so, but I thought a lot of things then.”

“Oh.” Shoko wasn’t sure why that answer felt so disappointing; yes or no would have been okay, but I don’t know couldn’t answer her questions about whether her mother’s smile was real or fake.

Daishiro shrugged again. “On the other hand, who am I to say I didn’t?”

• • • •

Every day, Ichika came to visit Shoko after being dismissed from her classes for the day.

Ichika’s afternoons were chaos. First, she had to pick up her little sister, Hitomi, from school and walk her home because Hitomi’s anxiety made it impossible for her to go anywhere alone, even their own house. Ichika would run back to school for a capella club, and sprint home again afterward to start dinner, help Hitomi with homework, get her own homework done, clean the house, and somehow find time to keep teaching Hitomi how to bake.

Ichika’s only advantage was that years of doing all their family’s housework had taught her to clean very efficiently. Her homeroom class always finished cleaning up the classroom before any of the others got halfway. It wasn’t all that much time, but it gave Ichika a slice of a second to go see Shoko after school.

Shoko’s class did not clean quickly so Ichika had to waste valuable minutes waiting for her outside. So far, Ichika had always stayed, but Shoko knew that eventually her class would take too long, and Hitomi would send her sister too many anxious texts, and Ichika would run off before Shoko left the classroom. Ichika’s schedule was so tight, and she tried never to be late for anything, especially when it involved Hitomi. Ichika always said, Someone has to be reliable for her. It obviously wasn’t going to be their parents.

The last few minutes of Shoko’s school day were always both delectable and dreadful. Her hands trembled, her stomach twisted, and sometimes it was because seeing Ichika was always the best part of any day, and sometimes it was because she hoped Ichika would leave this time, and sometimes—usually—it was both. Every time, on that threshold moment when she stepped out of the classroom, she wondered: would Ichika be gone, or would she still be there? Which one was better? Which one did she want?

Finally, there came a day when Shoko’s class decided they needed to deep clean the bookshelves, and Shoko knew, just knew, that this was the day when Ichika would be gone. She tried to imagine what it would be like. Maybe her heart would feel abandoned, and break, and finally stop falling in love. She could go back to the way she’d been before, singing and laughing with the girls, having an amazing best friend who had a special place in her life, just not that place.

That would be good, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it be a relief, like letting the weight of a humid day evaporate when you walked into air conditioning? But she was afraid of it, too, even though she tried to deny it. There was already a leaden lump in her chest pulling her heart into her stomach. Her throat kept almost-aching as if she’d been crying.

It didn’t matter. Dread or hope, sadness or relief, whatever happened would happen. Just as long as this was over.

At last, all the shelves were dusted, and the books organized and straightened, and it was time to go. Shoko left last, wiping her palms on her skirt to dab off some light sweat. Her hands were too nervous to stay still; they grabbed at her hem, twisting and pulling.

She walked into the hallway.

Ichika’s eyes lit up like the blue peaks of candle flames.

She was leaning against the opposite wall, seeming entirely casual in her slightly rumpled uniform, wisps of hair falling to frame her face. She rushed to wrap Shoko in a fast, tight hug.

“What about Hitomi—” Shoko began.

“I’ll get there. I’ll sprint.”

Ichika pressed a kiss to Shoko’s cheek, right below her eye.

“Bye!” Ichika shouted, already dashing away. Her hair waved behind her as if saying goodbye.

Shoko raised her hand to her cheek.

There’s no more time, she realized with sudden certainty. Love is almost here.

• • • •

Shoko wrote an imaginary letter to her mother in her diary. Her hand was shaking with so much with anger she could barely read what she was writing.

Ichika was the first person I ever met who didn’t say “I’m sorry” after I said you abandoned us. She said, “We’re better off without people like that.”

Ichika’s mother takes off for weeks at a time when she wants to, and her father’s a drunk asshole. When Ichika was five and Hitomi got born, her mom said, “I took care of you, so this one’s your responsibility,” and gave her a bottle. Her dad said “heat it up” and went to sleep. There was no one to take care of Hitomi but Ichika. What did Ichika do? She took care of Hitomi.

Get that? Can you even fit it in your head? Ichika saw someone helpless, someone in her own family, and she stepped up to fix it.

Because that’s Ichika.

She’s passionate and she’s righteous and she stands up to protect anyone who needs help, no matter who they are, even if it gets her into trouble. And she’s brilliant. She taught herself to read English so she could watch movies with her sister. Her parents didn’t even know about it until this year. They said it’s a waste of time, but they still make her translate movies they want to watch.

People see how Ichika is with Hitomi, how Hitomi never talks, and Ichika is always telling her what to do and where to go—People see how Ichika never smiles, and her mouth is always sort of turned down like she’s mad—People complain about how Ichika always points out if something breaks the rules—And it makes people think they know her. They think she’s bitchy and stuck up and they don’t know a thing. They don’t know Hitomi starts shaking and crying when she doesn’t know what to do—They don’t know her mom takes off to Tokyo when she’s bored—they don’t know her father’s mostly blacked out on the floor. They see what they see and they think that’s all there is.

Ichika doesn’t correct them. She doesn’t care.

Let me be clear about this. Ichika is everything you’re not. She doesn’t fly off as fast as she can the first time something’s hard or boring. She cares about people. She takes care of people. She does what she thinks is right.

I hate you with all my heart for these wings. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I hope you feel that somewhere in your pathetic little soul.

• • • •

Shoko found Daishiro sitting at the counter, reading a magazine. She was still furious from writing the letter. Anger rose from her like steam.

“I need time off school,” she snapped. “I’m not going tomorrow.”

Daishiro looked at her, nonplussed. With a brush of cynicism, he said, “You’re not?”

Shoko got louder. “I never miss school. I’m never even sick. I’ve done the restaurant’s books by myself since I was fourteen.”

A shadow crossed Daishiro’s face; Shoko knew he was ashamed of having to rely on her for the business.

“If we need to talk about the restaurant—”

She cut him off again. “I need this. I do everything I’m supposed to. Everything and more! I’ve earned some slack. You owe me, and you know it.”

“Stop.” Daishiro held up his hand. “We can sit and talk politely about whether you need to take off a couple of days—”

“A couple of days? No! I can’t go back that fast—”

“A couple of days. I’m not going to let you just sit home and do nothing.”

Shoko glared. “Fine.”

“I didn’t agree,” he said. “I said we could talk about it. Politely.”

Shoko rocked on her heels. Her anger had become a drawstring, pulling every muscle taut. “You owe me.”

“Tell me what happened with a capella,” Daishiro said.

Shoko’s gaze flickered away from his face. “Nothing.”

Daishiro pressed. “Then why aren’t you going?”

Shoko’s hard gaze flickered back. “I already said.” It wasn’t a lie this time.

“I don’t believe you.”

Shoko shrugged, tightly.

“If you want me to agree, tell me,” Daishiro said.

Shoko spat her answer. “I quit.”

It got the reaction she wanted. Daishiro looked shocked.

“What?” he asked. “Why?”

Shoko barely had time to register satisfaction at his expression before it reeled toward nausea. How she felt about Ichika was private. She didn’t want her father to know. She didn’t want anyone to know. It was one thing to have it in her head, but saying it to someone else, that would grow her wings for sure.

She said, “It was taking too much time.”

“But the girls in a capella are your friends—”

Shoko shouted, “I do not need the girls in a capella!”

Daishiro stammered for a moment. “I didn’t say—”

The bedroom door slammed behind her.

• • • •

Shoko lay in bed, fuming, until emotional exhaustion put her to sleep. It was night when she woke up. Daishiro had gone to bed. She checked her back; she didn’t feel any wings.

She looked through the darkness outside her window, over the gentle slosh of black waves. The moon, along with the spill of smoky yellow lights from the pier, gave a weird light to see by.

She went out to put on her wetsuit.

Shoko had been sneaking out of the house since she was little. She’d never been caught. She was expert at making sure she was in bed, dry, and completely clean of sand and salt before Daishiro woke up.

Her wetsuit matched the black water. It was shiny and sleek like seal skin.

She took a deep, salty breath above the surface and then dove. She skimmed above the shallow ocean bottom, kicking through seaweed. In the shallow water, she could make out the shapes of sand and rocks. A silver glint marked the silhouette of a fish turning away.

She followed the ocean floor until burning in her lungs forced her to swim upward. Cold air hit her face as she broke the surface.

She flipped onto her back to float for a while. Under the almost windless darkness, the black water was faintly rippled like old glass. Saltwater drops occasionally flecked through her lips. They tasted like waves.

Eventually, she had to go back to shore. Her wetsuit made her feel like a seal, but she wasn’t.

On the pier, there was no one. A few black shapes—gulls—stood on the edge of the pier, occasionally stretching their wings.

Shoko went into the little gated area she and her father kept for privacy next to the house. She rinsed herself off, cold water shivering down her spine. She pulled her wet hair out of the way to unzip the wetsuit. The neoprene clung stubbornly to her skin, making rude, sodden noises as she tried to pull it off.

• • • •

Ichika started texting in the morning before school started.

Shoko! You’re not here! Are you OK?

Are you sick? I hope not. Sniff.

Maybe it’s good you missed today. I was too tired to help Hitomi with her baking last night. She’s so obsessed right now, it’s the only thing she likes—she was almost going to cry so I said okay, today you can practice on your own, I’m here if there’s an emergency, and so on. The buns came out . . . Well . . . Maybe it’s good you’re not here.

Soooo tired.

I will not fall asleep in math class . . . I will not fall asleep in math class . . .

I did not fall asleep during math class.

I’m just so tired. I know I already said . . . I couldn’t figure out what to cook last night, Dad didn’t buy groceries again and Hitomi won’t eat any more instant ramen. I made stew out of leftovers in the fridge. It was fine but then there was so much homework and lately I can’t sleep a lot of the time . . .

I hope you’re not too sick. Tell me how you’re doing when you can.

• • • •

Shoko glared at the photographs in the tin. She plucked a few as if she were pulling the legs off a bug. She flipped through them:

Her mother, heavily pregnant, with her face washed out so she was basically all belly.

Daishiro, holding up a grimacing dead fish and trying to make the same face.

The two of them lying face down on the beach to sunsoak, half a meter apart, not touching at all except for their hair which wound together on the sand.

Her mother, squinting at an unappealing appetizer that looked like a lumpy, reddish knot.

Her mother, making a face after biting in.

Her mother, pretending to force-feed it to Daishiro while Daishiro pretended to resist.

An accidental shot of a broom leaning against the wall.

Shoko went back to the previous photograph. There weren’t many pictures that showed her mother and Daishiro facing each other. Her mother hadn’t quite managed to get the appetizer into Daishiro’s mouth, but he was laughing with his mouth open so she was about to.

The picture was blurry. Shoko scrutinized their faces, trying to see what they were thinking about each other behind their out-of-focus eyes, but she just couldn’t tell.

• • • •

The day passed, and the night, and another day. Shoko spent as much time as she could in the ocean, which was too little time.

Ichika kept texting.

Yesterday, Yua and Niko got into a fight. I guess they’ve been telling each other about sneaking out at night to go on dates—so they decided to sneak out at the same time—turns out they’re dating the same guy. Everyone’s taken sides. It’s Yua versus Niko and no one will let you stay out of it and I can’t stand it.

I couldn’t focus on geography last night. Hitomi wasn’t feeling well so I was up until two anyway, but I couldn’t concentrate. I ended up doing housework. At least the bathrooms are clean now . . .

When you’re back, you should see the new dance Chizue worked up for a capella. Tons of leaping around. I think we all bruised our butts. It was so hilarious.

I miss you. I wish there was someone else here who wanted to talk about something other than Yua and Niko.

If you need something, I can get it for you. Hitomi needs help with her kanji, but I’ll figure it out.

I really hope you’re okay.

• • • •

There were so many feathers in Shoko’s bed the next morning. Handfuls. She scooped them up and dumped them in the ocean. They didn’t sink fast enough.

• • • •

Shoko turned off her phone so she wouldn’t have to read Ichika’s texts. She wrote to her mother.

I know we’re not your only family. Dad didn’t want to tell me, but I’m not stupid. You already had your wings when you met him.

He told me you confessed you’d done it before—and that you wouldn’t tell him anything else, not how many times, not where you left them, not even one name. He said you talked like there were dozens.

Maybe you refused to say because you lost count. Do you even remember me? I doubt it.

How many sisters do I have? How many of us did you leave all alone? To try to learn what we are without anyone to talk to? No one to talk about what’s going on? And about what happens next? You could have at least told us each other’s names, then at least we’d have someone. But I guess then you’d have to admit flying away when you didn’t want us didn’t just make us disappear.

It’s like you’re a shred of a person, you don’t care about anyone but yourself. How did you ever love anyone enough to get wings?

• • • •

Sunday morning was cold. Shoko sat on the pier in front of the restaurant, the wind vicious across her shoulders. The waves were too bad-tempered and dangerous for swimming. Two seagulls, fighting over a pastry, pecked at each other, each keeping a beady eye on the treat in case there was a chance to grab it and fly off.

Ichika’s voice blew toward her along with the whining of the wind.

Shoko!

Shoko froze, barely stopping herself from turning around without thinking. The voice got louder. Shoko told herself to pretend it was just another gull.

Shoko! Are you okay?

Slowly, Shoko tilted her head just enough for her to see Ichika in the corner of her eye. She was wearing a downy red coat and jogging toward her. Her voice got louder.

I can make rice porridge tonight if you want me to bring some!

Just gulls, Shoko told herself. Gulls crying out over the beach.

“Oh, thank goodness, Shoko.” Ichika’s voice was too close now for it to be anything else but her; it was too rhythmic and light on her breath. “I just needed to see you were okay.”

Shoko stood up. She let her hair fall over her face so she could barely see anything but where she was going. She rushed toward the restaurant, her feet making hollow noises on the planks.

“Did you hear what I said about the porridge?” Ichika asked. Her voice cracked. “I don’t understand. What did I do? Why won’t you answer my texts? Did you get hurt? Did I hurt you? I’m so sorry, Shoko.”

Shoko was shaking by the time she made it to her door. Without meaning to, she looked back. Ichika’s ice-blue eyes looked like glaciers that had suddenly cracked. The corners of her mouth weren’t just turned downward; they’d begun to sink in, as if her face might collapse into itself.

Shoko choked. She was sobbing. “You didn’t do anything!” The door banged closed behind her.

Her heart thumped. That hadn’t been enough to grow her wings, had it? She fumbled her hand along her back. She didn’t feel anything.

Daishiro, standing by the storage cabinets and frowning at his supplies, turned rapidly at the sound of her crying. “Shoko? What’s going on?”

She made helpless gestures, trying to wave him off. Her face was getting messy. She should be alone.

Instead, Daishiro was up close, holding out a tissue box. “Take one.”

She didn’t.

He pulled out a tissue. “Come on, wipe your eyes.”

She grabbed it resentfully, even though it did feel better to swipe at her face. Her cheeks stung.

Daishiro backed off. Shoko felt a little more like she could breathe. Her tears ebbed.

Shoko’s raw voice scraped her throat. “I’m not going back to school. Never, not ever, I’m not going back.”

Daishiro’s worried face wrinkled with new anxiety. He held out his hand to take her wet tissue and tried to give her the box. “No, that’s not an option.”

“I won’t go!”

“Whatever is going on has been going on long enough,” Daishiro said. “Your time off isn’t making you any better.”

“You can’t make me attend class—”

Daishiro broke in, voice raised. “Stop yelling.”

Daishiro wasn’t shouting, but he didn’t usually raise his voice at all. Shoko flinched. She hadn’t meant to yell. Guilty surprise drained quickly into resentment: so what if she’d yelled, she deserved to yell.

She set her jaw instead of apologizing.

Daishiro said, “Whether you do the books or not, you’re still a child, and you’re still my daughter.”

Shoko’s voice was quiet, but cold as stone. “You can’t make me go. You’re not going to drag me in by my ear.”

They stared at each other in a hostile stalemate.

Daishiro said, “Go to your room.”

He pushed the box of tissues toward her.

Shoko took it. “Fine.”

• • • •

Shoko had one of those dreams with her mother in it. She didn’t have them often anymore.

She’d always imagined her mother’s wings as dovelike before. Now, she saw her with sparrow wings.

“What are you planning to do?” her mother asked. There was a smug little twist to her lips. “Never fall in love?”

“Yes.”

Her mother waved off Shoko’s answer. “Don’t be silly. Won’t you miss Ichika?”

“I don’t care.”

Her mother gave a full-hearted laugh. “If it’s not Ichika, it’ll be someone else.”

Shoko braced herself. She could feel her mother’s condescension closing in on her like a humid cloud, draining her resolve. “I shouldn’t have to give up the sea because I fall in love.”

Shoko’s mother ruffled her wings. Her feathers were beautiful, black striating shades of warm brown.

Her mother said, “All women lose things when they fall in love. Most of them don’t get the sky in exchange.”

Shoko scoffed. “What did you lose?”

“Ah.” The essence of her mother’s expression didn’t change, but she made a small, resigned noise. “I lost my freedom like most women.”

“Freedom?” Shoko repeated. “How did you lose your freedom? You leave everything.”

A shrug rippled through her mother’s shoulders and into her wings. “Home and family call me when I’m in the sky, and the sky calls me when I land.”

She leaned forward to touch Shoko on the nose. It was almost intimate.

“You shouldn’t have to choose,” her mother said, “but you do.”

• • • •

When she woke just after midnight, Shoko turned on her phone. There was a message from Ichika. Part of it was visible on the front screen.

Shoko . . . If you want me to leave you alone, please tell—

To read the rest, she’d have to unlock it.

A lump thickened in her throat. She put the phone on her nightstand, face down.

She went out to swim in the moonlight. The cold was welcome, the darkness companionable. The sloshing in her ears made everything seem distant.

Was the sea so much? Shoko turned her face upward, evaporation chilling her cheeks. Chin just above the water, she watched both the moon and its reflection which rippled in the black, breaking now and again with the wind’s exhalations. In the night, with the waters stretching dark and peaceful to the horizon, the sea was so, so much.

One way or another, something was over.

Time breathed in and out.

The night hung like the stars.

Waves answered the wind with murmurs and sighs.

Salt clung to the scents of seaweed and chill air.

The moon tipped westward.

Shoko knew her answer, and she hated it.

In the morning, she’d write to Ichika. She’d tell the girls at a capella that the scheduling conflict was over. If Ichika forgave her, they’d sit in practice holding hands. If Ichika didn’t forgive her, well—Shoko’s mother was right. Eventually, it would be someone else.

She could live her life without the sea better than she could always running from love.

Shoko pressed her hands together, like a blade, like a prayer, and dived to break the moon.

All that was for morning. For now, she swam.

—Thanks to Akemi Marshall for her advice and expertise.

©2021 by Rachel Swirsky.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Swirsky graduated from the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2005, and holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her short stories have been nominated for the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award among others. She’s also twice won the Nebula Award, once for her novella “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window,” and again for her short story “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” Her first collection, Through the Drowsy Dark, is available from Aqueduct Press; her second, How the World Became Quiet, came out from Subterranean Press in 2010. Visit her website, chat with her on Twitter, or support her on Patreon where she posts one new piece of fiction or poetry each month.

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

Shock of Birth

Cadwell Turnbull | 3660 words

“They didn’t believe me,” I said. “They didn’t believe that I wasn’t supposed to be here—that I woke up wrong.”

I lost track of time again. My attention shifted toward the floor, drawn to a crack in the tile. It was causing quite a ruckus in my mind. The cup of tea I was holding had long gone cold, the light in the room growing dim.

Sometime, a long time ago, someone dropped something heavy on the tile, and it was never the same.

“What does it mean to wake up wrong?” Sarah pressed. I could feel her breath on me, circling me, touching my skin. I could feel my fingers against the porcelain of the mug. The sun was setting, and I could feel my eyes adjust to the changing light. Only this skin, these fingers, these eyes—they weren’t mine. No one ever understood when I told them. They always gave me the same look, wide eyes, open mouth.

“I woke up in the wrong place,” I said. “I was somewhere else, some other life somewhere and then I was here, in this life. The bed I woke up in was wrong. My room. My age. My parents. They didn’t like being told that they were wrong. My teacher didn’t like it. The kids at school.”

Wide eyes. Open mouth.

“They want me to lie. And I won’t.”

The lights in the room came on. I wondered how long it took shuffling through dark rooms before people started putting suns in their houses, before they stopped depending on the one outside.

“Australia is gone,” Sarah said. “Now there’s only ocean there. No one believes me.”

I got up; I did it so fast my head felt light and for a minute I was wobbly. I held onto the back of the chair to get my bearings. “I’m going to my room,” I said.

Sarah watched me. I had hurt her somehow. I felt a pang of guilt, but didn’t act on it. As I walked out the room I remembered that I had left my mug on the table. I was supposed to put it in the kitchen, but my pride stopped me from going back.

There weren’t many cars on the freeway. Orange and yellow painted the early morning horizon, edging against the black. The eyes of the world were opening: yellow and orange twisting around dark colored clouds along the horizon, slowly claiming the still black sky above, the sleeping people below in their houses, just starting to wake to their busy days, their lives waiting just a few hours ahead of coffee and toast.

Michael slept in the back, huddled up in his usual position. Every once in a while, his whole body would twitch, and then he’d turn in the opposite direction. He did this dance for the last four hours, facing away from me, and then toward me again. Right now I could see his face, underneath his mass of curls. He seemed peaceful; a few hours ago he was yelling obscenities at me and trying to hit me with his clenched fist. I had to tie his hands behind his back.

Michael had a nervous habit of playing with the sleeves of his shirt or working the tail of his watch in and out of its loop as he talked, head lowered only when he was saying something that he felt was too aggressive. Even when he cursed he would only look at me for a second before whipping his head away.

His choice of clothing was similar to what I remembered. He wore his pants baggy, but his shirts were tight around his bony frame and wide chest; his sleeves were loose around his wiry arms. His pants were ripped at the bottom from dragging; they were too big for him, and he often stopped mid-step to fold them up one or two times so the denim wouldn’t catch under his shoe.

He was twenty now, a college student. Half what I was when I’d been pulled out of my body, half what I was now. In the morning half-light, his dark skin appeared darker. This skin that wasn’t mine appeared very pale in comparison. “What do you want?” he asked.

• • • •

“No,” I said.

Dr. Stevens seemed genuinely surprised by my response. His face was usually stolid when he talked and asked questions. But every once in a while, for a moment, I could see a reaction find its way from his brain to his face muscles and reveal genuine emotion.

“I never said I didn’t know them,” I said.

“Yes, but you did say they were wrong. Did you mean that you felt that they weren’t your parents?”

“No. I never said they weren’t my parents. You don’t listen.”

“Elaborate,” he said. “Explain it to me now.”

“I said they were the wrong parents.”

“Yes?” His face was blank this time. It would be a while before another emotion was clever enough to escape, a while before another one would be shot and dragged to the back of his mind where he left the bodies. I looked at his wall of books. Thick books with leather spines. Hardcover books with golden type on the sides of them. They were all related to psychology, except for one, hiding in the corner, thin and worn. A paperback. Anne Rice. The Vampire Lestat.

He was watching me and playing with his white beard streaked with black. I tried to picture him at a time when his hair still had his color, but no matter how many wrinkles I took away from his face, I could not change his hair. It was always white with black streaks, wild and bushy.

“They were wrong because I was wrong. They’re Daniel’s parents, but I am not Daniel. I am supposed to be someone else.”

“Who are you supposed to be?” he asked. He was staring at me, a blank canvas to be painted on.

“You won’t believe me.”

“Just tell me what you believe.”

“I’m Michael. I was stitched into this life.”

“That is a very interesting word: ‘stitched.’ Please continue.”

“I went to sleep. I had a nightmare. And when I woke up, I was in the wrong place. It was the wrong year, the wrong city, the wrong house, the wrong bedroom. I came back to the wrong body. And now I am trapped here with you, answering your questions, watching you scribble in your pad. I am here, wondering what combination of words would make a sane man believe me. And I am here, knowing that even if you did, even if you abandoned your sanity and believed every single word, you still couldn’t help me get back. And it would be a waste. It would all be a waste.”

For a moment I thought I could see Dr. Stevens’ hands shake. “You are quite a precocious child.”

“I am not a child.”

“You know what we do at this institute?”

“I do.”

“We study people that think the world has been edited. There’s someone here that believes there’s more than fifty states in the U.S. and one of them got erased. There’s a girl that swears there’s an entire continent missing, and an adult man that believes his sister didn’t exist before this year.”

“I’m not like them.”

“Really? If you’re here, who is in Michael’s body?”

“I don’t know yet. He hasn’t been born.”

“And you don’t find that convenient? Where will he be born?”

I looked up at his eyes and saw the truth written plainly there. I could tell him the future I knew, but what if that future didn’t come? I glanced back over at his bookshelf and looked at the little book in the corner again, pressed hard against the shelf wall, sandwiched in by books and wood, kept in place by the laws of matter. As incongruous as it was, it was still a book. Still binding and paper.

“Where?” he asked again.

• • • •

When I didn’t answer right away, Michael huffed and kicked the back of the passenger’s seat. It was midafternoon now, which meant winding backroads with only two lanes to avoid being seen. This particular stretch of road was empty, long periods with no cars, the bare hills merging with blue sky.

“Northern California,” I said.

“Why are we going to North California?”

I’d watched Michael long enough to know he was different. It was little things. Like how he chose to wear his hair. I always kept mine cut. His teeth weren’t as healthy as mine. He seemed to worry less about what he wore than I did.

His grades were lower but not much lower than mine when I was his age. His friends were the same for the most part, with a few exceptions. He had grown into a subtly different person, and he had conversations with people I never did and liked people I never liked. But it was the eyes that really separated us. If I stared at them long enough, I could see that he wasn’t me, that some other person was living behind them. Same face, different insides.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I have no intention of harming you.”

He said nothing, and I wondered if he could see into me the same way, sense my insides. It should go both ways, a thing like that.

• • • •

“Shock of birth,” I said.

The building was colder than usual. Dr. Stevens rubbed his hands together to warm them, and it sounded like sand paper against wood. The furrows in his brow told me that he was actually interested.

I said, “In Nepal the elders tell the children that the soft spot in a baby’s head is from God’s hammer, to make the baby forget its past life. For Plato, it was the act of entering the body that made a person forget. The shock of birth.”

Dr. Stevens was rubbing his hands together again, and this time it reminded me of a childhood memory. My mother bent over, sweeping the floor with a broom with a broken handle. Dried sorghum bristles against ceramic tile. As I listened it occurred to me that there were so many things that sounded similar. The thought unnerved me.

“I didn’t enter this body from birth. I was thrust into it in its adolescence. And so I retained all my memories.”

Dr. Stevens rubbed his hands together. Sandpaper. Bristles. Folders in filing cabinets. “So how do you explain that?”

“Pythagoras had another theory about reincarnation. He believed that there was a river. The souls would bathe in that river before entering another body. The ‘river of forgetfulness’ it was called. This was an agreement, a law among spirits.”

“Okay,” Dr. Stevens said. “Seems like a complicated explanation, when a simple one would do.” He let the implication hang between us. You’re delusional, he was saying, but didn’t have the courage to say out loud. He looked up at the clock. “That’s time for today. I should go see what’s going on with the heating system.”

As I was walking back to my room, I saw Sarah standing by my door. “I talked to Jacob from down the hall, and he said that he was the one that told Dr. Stevens that a state was missing.”

“Oh,” I said, but I was distracted.

“Yeah,” she continued. “Only he said that in his timeline—that’s how he said it, his ‘timeline’—there were also only fifty states, but one of them was Alaska.”

“Alaska,” I said, repeating the word. It sounded made up.

I opened my door and went inside. Sarah followed me in. “He said that it was actually two edits, not one. Alaska and the Californias.”

I picked up the quilt from the bed and wrapped it around myself. “Aren’t you cold?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Not really. But I know what’s wrong.”

“What’s wrong?”

She walked over and sat on the bed. “October’s missing this year, and the heating system hasn’t caught up yet.”

I sat next to her on the bed. “There is a question somewhere in the back of my head that I want to ask you, but I don’t know what it is.”

“I wish I could find it for you,” she said with a half-smile. “It is strange that there is a whole world behind people’s eyes that you don’t get to see.”

“It is. But I wonder if you would be able to find it in the back of my head. I am having trouble myself.”

“Have you seen your parents lately?”

“Yesterday.”

“What did they talk to you about?”

“The same thing they always talk to me about. Have I given up on this ridiculous story? Am I ready to come home? So on. So on.”

Sarah had a habit of biting her bottom lip. It was a completely asexual process, like the way some people crack their knuckles. “What were you just thinking?” she asked.

“I think they’re right. I should have kept quiet.”

“You know, I believe you.” She was silent for a moment, biting her bottom lip. “If you find the other Michael what will you do?”

“He isn’t Michael.”

“I was thinking, wouldn’t it be better to just live this life. If he is born in your body, that wouldn’t be his fault. The rest of us have to live with what’s missing. You should try living as who you are now.”

“Of course you’d think that,” I said. “You’re insane.” I regretted the comment as soon as I said it. Over the months I had made it my personal mission to upset Sarah. I didn’t want to, but I felt a pull toward hostility.

The hurt on her face twisted my stomach. “There’s a whole continent missing, Michael. People, animals, plants. You’re not so special that you can step on everyone.” Then she left and we didn’t talk again for twenty-five years.

• • • •

Time is sneaky. When you are not looking, it runs away from you. When you find it again, you are so far from where you were.

Storm clouds had settled over the desert landscape. It wasn’t raining, but the promise was there. Michael was quiet in the back seat, but I could hear his breathing over the engine of the car, the sound of the wheels gliding against the tar beneath it, over the sound of the wind that continued to hit against the windows. It was making quite a ruckus in my mind.

When the car started to slow, he noticed. “What’s happening?”

I didn’t answer. Instead I turned the steering wheel toward the desert, toward the stretching nothingness, toward the man I used to be. The brakes screeched, the wheels spitting up gravel. The turn had pushed him up against the window, and he let out a grunt before he took in a sharp breath, a harsh thing that whistled through his teeth. I could hear him clearly; I was so tuned to his every response, like the volume was turned up on him alone.

I continued to drive until I hit a rock or a lump of dirt and the car stopped. I pulled up the handbrake and opened the door. My own breath was wild and hard, and I could feel my chest swell and sink like the belly of a giant. When I opened the backseat door, and I reached in to pull at the boy’s collar, he let out a noise of comprehension. He screamed out but it was not my voice. It was the voice of a stranger.

I threw him into the dirt. I was surprised by my own calm, how the rage bubbled deep in me. He looked up at me, delirious and confused. His hands were still behind his back, so he pulled himself along, backward, his legs kicking up dust and gravel.

“Who are you?” I stepped forward toward him as he tried to scurry across the parched earth. The setting sun and the storm clouds cast everything in shadow, but I could still see his eyes, sparkling with a sheen of tears.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I don’t know what this is.” His mouth opened to say something more, but then he just shook his head. “Please,” he begged, “I just want to go home.”

“You’re lying.” The mouth I was using was dry, the bubble in me coming to a boil. “You took my body. You took my life. I’m going to take it back.”

“What?”

“Do you know what it is like to have everything stolen from you without knowing why? I’ve been trapped here, in this body. Do you know I had someone I loved?”

There were many names for it. The hammer of God. The shock of birth. Drinking from the river of forgetting. It all meant the same thing. When a soul reentered a body, it could not keep all the memories of where and who it was before. You had to give up something. You had to give up everything you once were.

He was shaking his head again. “If you let me go, I won’t tell anyone. I swear.”

I couldn’t see his face then. It was obscured by his hair, the storm clouds, and the coming dark. But the fork was there in front of me just the same, the potential to walk this all back or take it to the bitter end.

“Please,” he said. “I swear.”

He seemed to be holding his breath as I decided. There was no sound but the wind. “Okay,” I said and took a step forward. “Let me help you up.”

Moments later the storm clouds departed, so suddenly that the setting sun that replaced it collected on the surface of the world like a light from heaven, painting everything with the vibrant orange of stoked embers. It was beautiful to see it as it happened, to see the world change.

• • • •

After many years I finally tracked down Sarah. She was on the top floor of an old apartment building on York Island. She recognized me right away. Her apartment was small, her dining table only inches from her stove. She moved on her small feet the way I remembered and went to the fridge and pulled out a pitcher of water. She grabbed two cups from her cabinet, returned to the table, and sat across from me.

“It’s been so long,” she said. “You’ve changed a lot since I last saw you. But you also haven’t changed at all.” She was smiling. She was still so beautiful.

“How have you been?”

“I got better, if that’s what you’re asking. It was really bad for a while, when I was in college, but I’ve been taking medicine. Dr. Stevens died a few years back, you know? He was always wondering where you went off to.”

“You still notice edits?” I asked, looking into her almond eyes.

“Don’t keep track anymore.” She eased back in her chair, sighed. “Most of the time I forget what I’ve noticed.” She poured me a cup of water and slid it over to me. Then she poured herself a cup. She put her hair back into a ponytail and took a sip of her water. “People take for granted that the world works the way it does. No one walks and questions the steps they take. They never think: ‘this floor might not be solid; I could take this step and fall to the center of the Earth.’ No one worries that one day gravity will be reversed and everyone will helplessly fall into outer space. I’ve been trying to learn from them. Trust everything, even if my memory tells me differently. When people tell me there’s always been only ten months in the year, I don’t even blink.”

I nodded. “Smart.”

“And you?” she asked. “Did you ever go find yourself?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“A couple years ago the town I lived in disappeared. The people are gone.” It was the truth, however convenient.

“I suppose all our stories end that way,” she said, true sympathy on her face.

“I was terrible back then.”

“You were,” she said. “I forgave you a long time ago. For my sake.”

I nodded. “I’m still sorry,” I said. “And I’m grateful to be forgiven, no matter the why.” We drank our water in a companionable silence. We were both so much older now, but the years had been kinder to her. I hadn’t been able to settle down anywhere, and it showed in all the small ways a body and soul deteriorate without roots. I considered the possibility of settling now, and for the first time in a long time, I liked the thought of it. “You know,” I said, “I’ve been looking at the edits a different way lately. And it has helped me.”

She asked me to explain and so I did. I said it wasn’t the world that was changing: it was us. We were moving, leap-frogging from universe to universe, each one different than the one before, with less stuff in it, or different stuff. We remember what we can of those other worlds, and we forget, too. But here’s the important part, the part that has been helping me lately. Every new world we enter gives us an opportunity to be different, to leave parts of ourselves behind, to be better. It is okay to want that, to let some things go. A body is just a body, a world is just a world, but who we are now, on the inside, is what matters. It matters. We can let go to make space for who we can become.

“That’s beautiful,” she said, and I could see in her eyes that she meant it.

©2020 by Cadwell Turnbull. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cadwell Turnbull is the author of The Lesson and the upcoming No Gods, No Monsters. His short fiction has appeared in The Verge, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Asimov’s Science Fiction and several anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019. His novel The Lesson was the winner of the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Award in the debut category. The novel was also shortlisted for the VCU Cabell Award and longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award. Turnbull lives in Raleigh and teaches at North Carolina State University.

Amber Dark and Sickly Sweet

Lulu Kadhim | 2998 words

Talia sat at the edge of Eliza’s bed, her hands clasped. She was new—so was I, but she was newer. I went to her, and stroked her head, careful to avoid the honeycomb on her brow.

“Daughters.” Mother Anam’s face was twisted when she came back from searching the rest of our rooms, her shoes clicking on the hard, pocked floor. It always seemed to us that she was disappointed that we hadn’t broken a rule, that she couldn’t punish us. “Strip down.”

Our clothes were taken to be shaken out. Mother Nala and Mother Bahjat checked our bodies, slipping their fingers into our honeycomb. Their calloused hands jabbed and poked, sending stabs of pain rushing through my abdomen. My honeycomb lay to the left of my bellybutton, spreading out across my stomach. Shallow in some places, where I could feel their fingers wriggling inside me, nails brushing against my flesh, trying to hold back my winces so I wouldn’t be punished. We all had to stand still and straight as it was done, our honeys tainting each other. We may have formed a small colony of hive-eaten girls, but our honey was sacred and not to be mixed like that. They only wiped their hands after they were finished searching each and every one of us.

No contraband was found, no razors like the one Haneen had used to kill herself the night before.

“Very well Daughters, get yourselves ready.”

We had to scrub all over until our skin was pink and our hands wrinkled as old women or newborns. We had sponges, long and thin as pipe cleaners, to clean out our nests. That would stop the hives from growing too large, kept the bees from staking new claim across our bodies.

Then it was out into the enclosed gardens, for our colonies to repopulate us, fill us back up with honey. They came in slowly, lethargic from a day spent without resting at their hive, but they worked quickly once inside, depositing their nectar in us. It tickled, always, and their buzzing reverberated into my spine. As close as we girls felt to each other, there was no intimacy like that between us and our colonies. Some crawled down into my pubic hair, got lost in it. Some came up as far as my collarbone and onto my neck, exploring and dancing their tiny limbs over my skin.

We laid out all night, sleeping close, hands and fingers touching through the cool grass. We shivered awake together, finding ourselves entwined with each other, and we moved to the east of the gardens, to warm ourselves in the sun. We stood until the sun began to set again, talking quietly between ourselves. None of us spoke of Haneen. We joked, as always, that the Mothers hid skin speckled with hives underneath their long dresses, and Eliza suggested that they inflicted pain on us because they were not beautiful enough to be wanted. We were quiet for a while, thinking of that. I think we all wished we were ugly.

We were allowed back into the house by Mother Yunn.

We hurried up the stairways, our voices echoing back at us. In the hall, we pulled apart the tapestries to get back into our rooms, hidden if you didn’t know to look. The tapestries were woven by a man in Alam, showing scenes of battle and triumph. Any time the building was searched, they would be distracted by these glorious images, and would not look behind them. We had to stay quiet when we had visitors, in our own rooms, or the Mothers might deliver on their threats. The Mothers may not have wanted to lose us, but more likely, as we whispered out in the garden, they didn’t want to be put on trial if they were caught holding us. It was precaution, really; everyone must have known what went on upstairs from the Temple, maybe they’d seen us darting around the garden, but nobody said anything. Or, if they did, they were silenced quickly. I preferred to believe the latter.

As night came, the blinds were drawn over the high windows, and the chandeliers’ light bounced off the jewelled ceiling. Below us, we could hear the sounds of the Temple. Men and women from our town, most of whom we would never meet, praying and feasting. Some of them would go home afterwards. Some of them would come upstairs, excusing themselves from their families.

We prepared the Ceremony Room. It was large, and the candles glittered and whirled above our heads as we placed tables in rows of three. The tables were laid heavy with dates and nuts and mint leaves and bottles of whiskey. Small spoons coated in hard sugar by each stikan, the tall glasses painted with golden flowers and falling rain. The water was boiled on the fireplace in one of the backrooms downstairs. Mother Nala watched it, for we couldn’t go into the Temple.

Once the room was set up, we went to stand in front of one of the tapestries, the one depicting a man almost being eaten by a ghoul. At the last minute, the man had jammed his steel sword through its mouth. Only steel could skewer ghouls. It was our favourite scene. We jostled each other, some of us linking elbows, while we waited to hear who would be the first out in the night. We all wanted to be—spending half the night trapped in our rooms, listening to the sounds of men drinking tea and whiskey and laughing loudly, not knowing who would be left by the end of the night. Not knowing if our regular lovers would have gotten bored waiting and taken off with some other girl. At least our regulars had familiar hands and mouths, and were not rough from too much liquor.

Talia and I were some of the first. I smiled at her weakly, but she stared straight ahead. It was only her second Ceremony. She hadn’t been picked by anyone on the first night.

The other girls told me that it was rare for anyone to be removed from the farms that had theirs showing—occasionally, there would be those like Haneen, who had died last night, with the hives running up the insides of her arms, but she could still cover them with long sleeves. Not even a headscarf could conceal Talia’s. It extended from her left eyelid up to her forehead, and then ran down past the temples onto her cheek. It was a shallow nest, not like mine. We all envied that, even though we knew what it might be like to have the bees so close to our eyes, wings and stings fluttering just in view.

The girls suspected that Talia’s father was a rich man, who had paid for her to move here. Most of the women at the farms did not live past twenty-five, their bodies eventually gutted out by the hives, internal organs failing as the bees moved further and deeper into their bodies. The Ceremonies were considered a better life.

The first men entered as half the girls were sent to their rooms, to stew and wait.

My regular was among them. He was a young man, not much older than me, with stumbling, thin hands. He never looked me in the eye once our clothes came off. In the six Ceremonies since he’d been with me the first time, he hadn’t missed one. Tomas. Sometimes they told us their names. We talked about it sometimes, about the type of intimacy some of them tried to foster. It was all an attempt to rid themselves of the guilt of fucking us. He smiled at me when he entered, but sat down to talk with his two friends.

I served tea to the first table, careful to not splash any water on their expensive suits. They were businessmen, clearly, or rich local merchants. I smiled at them, but only one of them met my eyes. He was older, his hair greased back, and the suit he wore was loose around the shoulders.

The night wore on. The first hour was the slowest, as all the men took part in the charade that they weren’t here for sex. They didn’t acknowledge us, they didn’t speak to us. But as they finished their second or third cup of mint tea, and therefore their second or third glass of whiskey, they became louder, and watched us openly, their tea glasses abandoned for the sake of more liquor. Their eyes travelled up and down our bodies, watching us as we leaned over the tables to pour more whiskey or bring more plates filled with dates. The older gentleman caught my arm as I went to turn from his table.

“Where’s yours?” he said.

“Mine?”

He nodded. My face was hot. I knew what he meant, but we weren’t supposed to talk about it unless we took them into our rooms.

My hand went to my stomach, as my eyes checked that none of the Mothers were watching. I froze as I felt his hand meet mine, and he rolled up my thin shirt. He drew me closer to him, but I still couldn’t look at him, my eyes fixed on Mother Anam, who was busy talking to one of the men, a rare smile broken out across her face.

I looked down only as I felt his hot mouth around one of the holes in my hive. His tongue was thick and dry from whiskey, and my teeth clenched. I pulled away, gasping for air. Mother Anam’s eyes were now on me now, across the room, her mouth twisted. She moved towards me.

“Please, I’ll get in trouble,” I said to him, as he tried to draw me close again.

I stumbled back and moved onto the next table, where my regular sat.

“Are you okay?” Tomas said. I nodded. There was a softness to his voice that shook some of the grime out of me.

I took his hand. “Are you ready?”

In the second or two he took to answer, I gritted my teeth, waiting for him to refuse me. We hated them, we needed them.

He got up and I led him to my room. Not before he laid a few coins on the table; his payment for me. I breezed past Mother Anam, not looking her in the eyes, knowing she wouldn’t admonish me in front of a client. My punishment would come later.

Once I had him in my room, I could breathe again. It was dark; I had lit candles, like the Mothers made us. He drew me close, kissed me. He always did before we had sex, the only time he would kiss me.

His hands were clumsy getting my clothes off. My hands were better at removing his, though shaking still from the earlier encounter. He laid me on the bed and huffed away.

Fatima told me once of one of her clients, who had used her own honey as lube. Tomas didn’t do that, at least, his hands dancing across my hive for a second here and there, but always careful to pull it back. Two Ceremonies ago, he had forgotten, and plunged two long fingers inside, carelessly crushing one of the walls of my comb. He’d licked the honey dripping down his hand. After he’d finished inside me, he sat on the bed for a long time, his back to me, his face down. I could see him shaking. It wasn’t as if the men before him hadn’t done it, hadn’t relished in it. That’s what they were here for after all; the forbidden girls, the forbidden sweet.

When he finished this time, he lay next to me for longer than usual. Minutes passed, and I stared at the ceiling, watching the jewels studded in the crumbling moulding flicker in the candlelight. His hand was close to mine, and I wondered if I should hold it. Not because I wanted to, but to see what he would do. I smiled.

He sat up and started to fuss with his trousers, searching for something in the pocket. “I got you this,” he said quietly.

I waited for him to say more. He didn’t, and I almost cut my hand as I reached for it.

A razorblade.

“Why?” I asked, hearing the hardness of my own voice. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever spoken to him when we were alone before.

His eyes widened, flush on his cheek, as if he hadn’t expected me to ask questions. “I—some of the—someone told me that I should.”

“Did they get one for the other girls?”

He nodded, slowly, as if only just waking up from a long dream. “One of them, one of them asked him for it. Said you weren’t allowed. Said she wanted to stop—stop doing this. I’m sorry, I can take it.”

“No, it’s okay.”

I closed my hand around it, felt it sharp and cold against my palm.

“Do you want me to, you know, do it?” I asked. I didn’t know if I wanted to know, I only knew I wanted to make him answer.

His hands shook too badly for him to button his shirt properly. “No—no, that’s not what I meant. I just—I know, I know . . .”

He trailed off. I felt power bloom under my breasts. It was good to see him stumble.

“You know that this is wrong, what you do to us.”

He didn’t say anything. He managed the last few buttons on his shirt and left, closing the door behind him softly, as if I were sleeping and he didn’t want to disturb me.

Mother Anam would come to me soon, to punish me for letting that man peel my clothes back, for letting him sup from me out in front of all the other clients. I got up, and, quietly as possible, I slipped out of my door and behind the tapestries. I had to shuffle through them, hoping anyone who saw would think the skylights were bringing in a sudden breeze. I knew the way down to the Temple, down the staircase we never took. I risked a look into the dining room before I went, saw the older man, his hand clasped around Talia’s, shoving her towards a room. Bile swam in my saliva.

I was careful on the stairs, the cold marble stinging my bare feet. I hadn’t been down here since I arrived at the Ceremonies. Since the old man who smoked filterless cigarettes and smelt like curdled milk had picked me up from my father’s house and handed me over to the Mothers.

It was cold in the hall. The floor was strewn with rugs, with pews at the back for those who could not stand or kneel. The heavy wooden doors were closed. I was glad of that. I might have run into the night, otherwise, with no plan and no food and no shoes.

On the right was an old wooden door, and I peeked through. It was empty, quiet, but the smell of woodsmoke from the fireplace was pungent still. This must have been where the water for tea was heated, with an old bench covered in pillows for the Mother to sit as she waited. The window was too fogged with condensation for me to see out of.

I crept across to the door opposite that. It was ajar, and I froze as I heard a voice. I hadn’t expected anyone to be here, not this late, not this far into the Ceremonies. But I couldn’t resist, and pulled the door far enough that the sound streamed through like a draft and I could see inside.

It smelt of spiced apples and cardamom. There were three women dressed in normal clothes—dressed how my mother used to.

They were cleaning dishes, and taking a rag over the long wooden table in the centre of the room where the feasting must have happened. They were laughing about something, but I had missed the joke.

How would it be, if I walked in and smiled and began speaking? Would they welcome me? Would one of them take me home as if I were their daughter, and care and cook for me? They laughed again. More likely they would call for one of the Mothers to fetch me and try not to think about the punishment I might receive.

I moved away from the door and out of the hall. It took a few tries, but I found my way through the maze of corridors behind the hall, and finally out into the garden. There were birds muttering softly in their sleep and crickets trying to wake them. How long did I have before Mother Anam sent someone to find me?

I didn’t have long to think about what I wanted to do. The blade was still clenched in my hand, and the cold edge had already pierced my skin.

We sometimes talked about it, the other girls and I. We talked of escape, but we knew what escape meant for us. Sometimes we spoke of other tea rooms, of other girls, and what their lives might be like. I trembled with excitement at the possibilities in my hand.

I wondered if I could slip over the wall and out into the forest beyond. But I would find nothing there. The bees would find me, fill me morning to night, no time for my body to heal or rebel against the hive growth, and they would gut me like a farm girl.

And besides, as I looked down, I saw that my hand was already drawing the blade close to my stomach to cut out my hives, as if my body had already made up its mind.

©2021 by Lulu Kadhim.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lulu Kadhim is a British writer living in Vancouver. Her game credits include Industries of Titan and Phantom Brigade, and her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine, khoreo, and Translunar Travelers Lounge. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XXI and  Odyssey 2019.

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

EXCERPT: She Who Became the Sun (Tor Books)

Shelley Parker-Chan | 5494 words

Mulan meets The Song of Achilles in Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun, a bold, queer, and lyrical reimagining of the rise of the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty from an amazing new voice in literary fantasy.

To possess the Mandate of Heaven, the female monk Zhu will do anything.

“I refuse to be nothing . . . ”

In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness . . .

In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family’s clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected.

When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother’s identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate.

After her sanctuary is destroyed for supporting the rebellion against Mongol rule, Zhu takes the chance to claim another future altogether: her brother’s abandoned greatness.

Coming July 20, 2021 from Tor Books.

She was lighting the fire when her father came by. She observed him from inside the lean-to. He was one of those people who has eyes that look like eyes, and a nose like a nose. Non-descript. Starvation had pulled the skin tight over his face until it was one plane from cheekbone to chin, and another from one corner of his chin to the other. Now and then the girl wondered if her father was actually a young man, or at least not a very old one. It was hard to tell.

Her father was carrying a winter melon under his arm. It was small, the size of a newborn baby, and its powdery white skin was dusty from having been buried underground for nearly two years. The tender look on her father’s face surprised the girl. She had never seen that expression on him before, but she knew what it meant. That was their last melon.

Her father squatted next to the flat-topped stump where they had killed chickens and placed the melon on it like an offering to the ancestors. He hesitated, cleaver in hand. The girl knew what he was thinking. A cut melon didn’t keep. She felt a rush of mixed emotions. For a few glorious days they would have food. A memory boiled up: soup made with pork bones and salt, the surface swimming with droplets of golden oil. The almost gelatinous flesh of the melon, as translucent as the eye of a fish, yielding sweetly between her teeth. But once the melon was done, there would be nothing except the yellow beans. And after the yellow beans, there would be nothing.

The cleaver smacked down, and after a moment the girl’s father came in. When he handed her the chunk of melon, his tender look was gone. “Cook it,” he said shortly, and left.

The girl peeled the melon and cut the hard white flesh into pieces. She had forgotten melon smell: candle wax, and an elm-blossom greenness. For a moment she was gripped by the desire to shove it in her mouth. Flesh, seeds, even the sharp peel, all of it stimulating every inch of her tongue with the glorious ecstasy of eating. She swallowed hard. She knew her worth in her father’s eyes, and the risk that a theft would bring. Not all the girls who died had starved. Regretfully, she put the melon into the pot with a scatter of yellow beans. She cooked it for as long as the wood lasted, then took the folded pieces of bark she used as pot holders and carried the food into the house.

Chongba looked up from where he was sitting on the bare floor next to their father. Unlike his father, his face provoked comment. He had a pugnacious jaw and a brow as lumpy as a walnut. These features made him so strikingly ugly that the onlooker’s eye found itself caught in unwitting fascination. Now Chongba took the spoon from the girl and served their father. “Ba, please eat.” Then he served himself, and finally the girl.

The girl examined her bowl and found only beans and water. She returned her silent stare to her brother. He was already eating and didn’t notice. She watched him spoon a chunk of melon into his mouth. There was no cruelty in his face, only blind, blissful satisfaction: that of someone perfectly concerned with himself. The girl knew that fathers and sons made the pattern of the family, as the family made the pattern of the universe, and for all her wishful thinking she had never really expected to be allowed to taste the melon. It still rankled. She took a spoonful of soup. Its path into her body felt as hot as a coal.

Chongba said with his mouth full, “Ba, we nearly got a rat today, but it got away.”

Remembering the boys beating on the stump, the girl thought scornfully: Nearly.

Chongba’s attention shifted to her. But if he was waiting for her to volunteer something, he could wait. After a moment he said directly, “I know you caught something. Give it to me.”

Keeping her gaze fixed on her bowl, the girl found the twitching packet of crickets in her pocket. She handed it over. The hot coal grew.

“That’s all, you useless girl?”

She looked up so sharply that he flinched. He’d started calling her that recently, imitating their father. Her stomach was as tight as a clenched fist. She let herself think of the lizard hidden in the kitchen. She would dry it and eat it in secret all by herself. And that would be enough. It had to be.

They finished in silence. As the girl licked her bowl clean, her father laid out two melon seeds on their crude family shrine: one to feed their ancestors, and the other to appease the wandering hungry ghosts who lacked their own descendants to remember them.

After a moment the girl’s father rose from his stiff reverence before the shrine. He turned back to the children and said with quiet ferocity, “One day soon our ancestors will intervene to end this suffering. They will.”

The girl knew he was right. He was older than her and knew more. But when she tried to imagine the future, she couldn’t. There was nothing in her imagination to replace the formless, unchanging days of starvation. She clung to life because it seemed to have value, even if only to her. But when she thought about it, she had no idea why.

• • • •

The girl and Chongba sat listlessly in their doorway, looking out. One meal a day wasn’t enough to fill anyone’s time. The heat was most unbearable in the late afternoon, when the sun slashed backhanded across the village, as red as the last native emperors’ Mandate of Heaven. After sunset the evenings were merely breathless. In the Zhu family’s part of the village the houses sat apart from one another, with a wide dirt road between. There was no activity on the road or anywhere else in the falling dusk. Chongba fiddled with the Buddhist amulet he wore, and kicked at the dirt, and the girl gazed at the crescent moon where it edged above the shadow of the far hills.

Both children were surprised when their father came around the side of the house. There was a chunk of melon in his hand.

The girl could smell the edge of spoil in it, though it had only been cut that morning.

“Do you know what day it is?” he asked Chongba.

It had been years since the peasants had celebrated any of the festivals that marked the various points of the calendar. After a while Chongba hazarded, “Mid-Autumn Festival?”

The girl scoffed privately: Did he not have eyes to see the moon?

“The second day of the ninth month,” her father said. “This is the day you were born, Zhu Chongba, in the year of the Pig.” He turned and started walking. “Come.”

Chongba scrambled after him. After a moment the girl followed. The houses along the road made darker shapes against the sky. She used to be scared of walking this road at night because of all the feral dogs. But now the night was empty. Full of ghosts, the remaining villagers said, although since ghosts were as invisible as breath or qi, there was no telling if they were there or not. In the girl’s opinion, that made them of less concern: she was only scared of things she could actually see.

They turned from the main road and saw a pinprick of light ahead, no brighter than a random flash behind one’s eyelids. It was the fortune-teller’s house. As they went inside, the girl realized why her father had cut the melon.

The first thing she saw was the candle. They were so rare in Zhongli that its radiance seemed magical. Its flame stood a hand high, swaying at the tip like an eel’s tail. Beautiful, but disturbing. In the girl’s own unlit house she had never had a sense of the dark outside. Here they were in a bubble surrounded by the dark, and the candle had stolen her ability to see what lay outside the light.

The girl had only ever seen the fortune-teller at a distance before. Now, up close, she knew at once that her father was not old. The fortune-teller was perhaps even old enough to remember the time before the barbarian emperors. A mole on his wrinkled cheek sprouted a long black hair, twice as long as the wispy white hairs on his chin. The girl stared.

“Most worthy uncle.” Her father bowed and handed the melon to the fortune-teller. “I bring you the eighth son of the Zhu family, Zhu Chongba, under the stars of his birth. Can you tell us his fate?” He pushed Chongba forwards. The boy went eagerly.

The fortune-teller took Chongba’s face between his old hands and turned it this way and that. He pressed his thumbs into the boy’s brow and cheeks, measured his eye sockets and nose, and felt the shape of his skull. Then he took the boy’s wrist and felt his pulse. His eyelids drooped and his expression became severe and internal, as if interpreting some distant message. A sweat broke out on his forehead.

The moment stretched. The candle flared and the blackness outside seemed to press closer. The girl’s skin crawled, even as her anticipation grew.

They all jumped when the fortune-teller dropped Chongba’s arm. “Tell us, esteemed uncle,” the girl’s father urged.

The fortune-teller looked up, startled. Trembling, he said, “This child has greatness in him. Oh, how clearly did I see it! His deeds will bring a hundred generations of pride to your family name.” To the girl’s astonishment he rose and hurried to kneel at her father’s feet. “To be rewarded with a son with a fate like this, you must have been virtuous indeed in your past lives. Sir, I am honored to know you.”

The girl’s father looked down at the old man, stunned. After a moment he said, “I remember the day that child was born. He was too weak to suck, so I walked all the way to Wuhuang Monastery to make an offering for his survival. A twenty-jin sack of yellow beans and three pumpkins. I even promised the monks that I would dedicate him to the monastery when he turned twelve, if he survived.” His voice cracked: desperate and joyous at the same time. “Everyone told me I was a fool.”

Greatness. It was the kind of word that didn’t belong in Zhongli. The girl had only ever heard it in her father’s stories of the past. Stories of that golden, tragic time before the barbarians came. A time of emperors and kings and generals; of war and betrayal and triumph. And now her ordinary brother, Zhu Chongba, was to be great. When she looked at Chongba, his ugly face was radiant. The wooden Buddhist amulet around his neck caught the candlelight and glowed gold, and made him a king.

As they left, the girl lingered on the threshold of the dark. Some impulse prompted her to glance back at the old man in his pool of candlelight. Then she went creeping back and folded herself down very small before him until her head was touching the dirt and her nostrils were full of the dead chalk smell of it. “Esteemed uncle. Will you tell me my fate?”

She was afraid to look up. The impulse that had driven her here, that hot coal in her stomach, had abandoned her. Her pulse rabbited. The pulse that contained the pattern of her fate. She thought of Chongba holding that great fate within him. What did it feel like, to carry that seed of potential? For a moment she wondered if she had a seed of potential within herself too, and it was only that she had never known what to look for; she had never had a name for it.

The fortune-teller was silent. The girl felt a chill drift over her. Her body broke out in chicken-skin and she huddled lower, trying to get away from that dark touch of fear. The candle flame lashed.

Then, as if from a distance, she heard the fortune-teller say: “Nothing.”

The girl felt a dull, deep pain. That was the seed within her, her fate, and she realized she had known it all along.

The days ground on. The Zhu family’s yellow beans were running low, the water was increasingly undrinkable, and the girl’s traps were catching less and less. Many of the remaining villagers set out on the hill road that led to the monastery and beyond, even though everyone knew it was just exchanging death by starvation for death by bandits. The girl’s father alone seemed to have found new strength. Every morning he stood outside under the rosy dome of that unblemished sky and said like a prayer, “The rains will come. All we need is patience, and faith in Heaven to deliver Zhu Chongba’s great fate.”

One morning the girl, sleeping in the depression she and Chongba had made for themselves next to the house, woke to a noise. It was startling: they had almost forgotten what life sounded like. When they went to the road they saw something even more surprising. Movement. Before they could think, it was already rushing past in a thunderous press of noise: men on filthy horses that flung up the dust with the violence of their passage.

When they were gone Chongba said, small and scared, “The army?”

The girl was silent. She wouldn’t have thought those men could have come from that dark flowing river, beautiful but always distant.

Behind them, their father said, “Bandits.”

• • • •

That afternoon three of the bandits came stooping under the Zhu family’s sagging lintel. To the girl, crouched on the bed with her brother, they seemed to fill the room with their size and rank smell. Their tattered clothes gaped and their untied hair was matted. They were the first people the girl had ever seen wearing boots.

The girl’s father had prepared for this event. Now he rose and approached the bandits, holding a clay jar. Whatever he felt, he kept it hidden. “Honored guests. This is only of the poorest quality, and we have but little, but please take what we have.”

One of the bandits took the jar and looked inside. He scoffed. “Uncle, why so stingy? This can’t be all you have.”

Their father stiffened. “I swear to you, it is. See for yourself how my children have no more flesh on them than a sick dog! We’ve been eating stones for a long time, my friend.”

The bandit laughed. “Ah, don’t bullshit me. How can it be stones if you’re all still alive?” With a cat’s lazy cruelty, he shoved the girl’s father and sent him stumbling. “You peasants are all the same. Offering us a chicken, expecting us not to see the fatted pig in the pantry! Go get the rest of it, you cunt.”

The girl’s father caught himself. Something changed in his face. In a surprising burst of speed he lunged at the children and caught the girl by the arm. She cried out in surprise as he dragged her off the bed. His grip was hard; he was hurting her.

Above her head, her father said, “Take this girl.”

For a moment the words didn’t make sense. Then they did. For all her family had called her useless, her father had finally found her best use: as something that could be spent to benefit those who mattered. The girl looked at the bandits in terror. What possible use could she have to them?

Echoing her thoughts, the bandit said scornfully, “That little black cricket? Better to give us one five years older, and prettier—” Then, as realization dawned, he broke off and started laughing. “Oh, uncle! So it’s true what you peasants will do when you’re really desperate.”

Dizzy with disbelief, the girl remembered what the village children had taken pleasure in whispering to one another. That in other, worse-off villages, neighbors would swap their youngest children to eat. The children had thrilled with fear, but none of them had actually believed it. It was only a story.

But now, seeing her father avoiding her gaze, the girl realized it wasn’t just a story. In a panic she began struggling, and felt her father’s hands clench tighter into her flesh, and then she was crying too hard to breathe. In that one terrible moment, she knew what her fate of nothing meant. She had thought it was only insignificance, that she would never be anything or do anything that mattered. But it wasn’t.

It was death.

As she writhed and cried and screamed, the bandit strode over and snatched her from her father. She screamed louder, and then thumped onto the bed hard enough that all her breath came out. The bandit had thrown her there.

Now he said, disgusted, “I want to eat, but I’m not going to touch that garbage,” and punched their father in the stomach. He doubled over with a wet squelch. The girl’s mouth opened silently. Beside her, Chongba cried out.

“There’s more here!” One of the other bandits was calling from the kitchen. “He buried it.”

Their father crumpled to the floor. The bandit kicked him under the ribs. “You think you can fool us, you lying son of a turtle? I bet you have even more, hidden all over the place.” He kicked him again, then again. “Where is it?”

The girl realized her breath had come back: she and Chongba were both shrieking for the bandit to stop. Each thud of boots on flesh pierced her with anguish, the pain as intense as if it were her own body. For all her father had shown her how little she meant to him, he was still her father. The debt children owed their parents was incalculable; it could never be repaid. She screamed, “There isn’t any more! Please stop. There isn’t. There isn’t—”

The bandit kicked their father a few more times, then stopped. Somehow the girl knew it hadn’t had anything to do with their pleading. Their father lay motionless on the ground. The bandit crouched and lifted his head by the topknot, revealing the bloodied froth on the lips and the pallor of the face. He made a sound of disgust and let it drop.

The other two bandits came back with the second jar of beans. “Boss, looks like this is it.”

“Fuck, two jars? I guess they really were going to starve.” After a moment the leader shrugged and went out. The other two followed.

The girl and Chongba, clinging to each other in terror and exhaustion, stared at their father where he lay on the churned dirt. His bloodied body was curled up as tightly as a child in the womb: he had left the world already prepared for his reincarnation.

• • • •

That night was long and filled with nightmares. Waking up was worse. The girl lay on the bed looking at her father’s body. Her fate was nothing, and it was her father who would have made it happen, but now it was he who was nothing. Even as she shuddered with guilt, she knew it hadn’t changed anything. Without their father, without food, the nothing fate still awaited.

She looked over at Chongba and startled. His eyes were open, but fixed unseeing on the thatched roof. He barely seemed to breathe. For a horrible instant the girl thought he might be dead as well, but when she shook him he gave a small gasp and blinked. The girl belatedly remembered that he couldn’t die, since he could hardly become great if he did. Even with that knowledge, being in that room with the shells of two people, one alive and one dead, was the most frighteningly lonely thing the girl had ever experienced. She had been surrounded by people her whole life. She had never imagined what it would be like to be alone.

It should have been Chongba to perform their last filial duty. Instead, the girl took her father’s dead hands and dragged the body outside. He had withered so much that she could just manage. She laid him flat on the yellow earth behind the house, took up his hoe, and dug.

The sun rose and baked the land and the girl and everything else under it. The girl’s digging was only the slow, scraping erosion of layers of dust, like the action of a river over the centuries. The shadows shortened and lengthened again; the grave deepened with its infinitesimal slowness. The girl gradually became aware of being hungry and thirsty. Leaving the grave, she found some muddy water in the bucket. She scooped it with her hands and drank. She ate the meat for rubbing the pot, recoiling at its dark taste, then went into the house and looked for a long time at the two dried melon seeds on the ancestral shrine. She remembered what people had said would happen if you ate a ghost offering: the ghosts would come for you, and their anger would make you sicken and die. But was that true? The girl had never heard of it happening to anyone in the village—and if no one could see ghosts, how could they be sure what ghosts did? She stood there in an agony of indecision. Finally she left the seeds where they were and went outside, where she grubbed around in last year’s peanut patch and found a few woody shoots.

After she had eaten half the shoots, the girl looked at the other half and deliberated on whether to give them to Chongba, or to trust in Heaven to provide for him. Eventually guilt prodded her to go wave the peanut shoots over his face. Something in him flared at the sight. For a moment she saw him struggling back to life, fueled by that king-like indignation that she should have given him everything. Then the spark died. The girl watched his eyes drift out of focus. She didn’t know what it meant, that he would lie there without eating and drinking. She went back outside and kept digging.

When the sun set the grave was only knee deep, the same clear yellow color at the top as it was at the bottom. The girl could believe it was like that all the way down to the spirits’ home in the Yellow Springs. She climbed into bed next to Chongba’s rigid form and slept. In the morning, his eyes were still open. She wasn’t sure if he had slept and woken early, or if he had been like that all night. When she shook him this time, he breathed more quickly. But even that seemed reflexive.

She dug again all that day, stopping only for water and peanut sprouts. And still Chongba lay there, and showed no interest when she brought him water.

She awoke before dawn on the morning of the third day. A sense of aloneness gripped her, vaster than anything she had ever felt. Beside her, the bed was empty: Chongba had gone.

She found him outside. In the moonlight he was a pale blur next to the mass that had been their father. At first she thought he was asleep. Even when she knelt and touched him it took her a long time to realize what had happened, because it didn’t make any sense. Chongba was to have been great; he was to have brought pride to their family name. But he was dead.

The girl was startled by her own anger. Heaven had promised Chongba life enough to achieve greatness, and he had given up that life as easily as breathing. He had chosen to become nothing. The girl wanted to scream at him. Her fate had always been nothing. She had never had a choice.

She had been kneeling there for a long time before she noticed the glimmer at Chongba’s neck. The Buddhist amulet. The girl remembered the story of how her father had gone to Wuhuang Monastery to pray for Chongba’s survival, and the promise he had made: that if Chongba survived, he would return to the monastery to be made a monk.

A monastery—where there would be food and shelter and protection.

She felt a stirring at the thought. An awareness of her own life, inside her: that fragile, mysteriously valuable thing that she had clung to so stubbornly throughout everything. She couldn’t imagine giving it up, or how Chongba could have found that option more bearable than continuing. Becoming nothing was the most terrifying thing she could think of— worse even than the fear of hunger, or pain, or any other suffering that could possibly arise from life.

She reached out and touched the amulet. Chongba had become nothing. If he took my fate and died . . . then perhaps I can take his, and live.

Her worst fear might be of becoming nothing, but that didn’t stop her from being afraid of what might lie ahead. Her hands shook so badly that it took her a long time to undress the corpse. She took off her skirt and put on Chongba’s knee-length robe and trousers; untied her hair buns so her hair fell loose like a boy’s; and finally took the amulet from his throat and fastened it around her own.

When she finished she rose and pushed the two bodies into the grave. The father embracing the son to the last. It was hard to cover them; the yellow earth floated out of the grave and made shining clouds under the moon. The girl laid her hoe down. She straightened—then recoiled with horror as her eyes fell upon the two motionless figures on the other side of the filled grave.

It could have been them, alive again. Her father and brother standing in the moonlight. But as instinctively as a new-hatched bird knows a fox, she recognized the terrible presence of something that didn’t—couldn’t—belong to the ordinary human world. Her body shrank and flooded with fear as she saw the dead.

The ghosts of her father and brother were different from how they had been when alive. Their brown skin had grown pale and powdery, as if brushed with ashes, and they wore rags of bleached-bone white. Instead of being bound in its usual top-knot, her father’s hair hung tangled over his shoulders. The ghosts didn’t move; their feet didn’t quite touch the ground. Their empty eyes gazed at nothing. A wordless, incomprehensible murmur issued from between their fixed lips.

The girl stared, paralyzed with terror. It had been a hot day, but all the warmth and life in her seemed to drain away in response to the ghosts’ emanating chill. She was reminded of the dark, cold touch of nothingness she had felt when she had heard her fate. Her teeth clicked as she shivered. What did it mean, to suddenly see the dead? Was it a Heavenly reminder of the nothingness that was all she should be?

She trembled as she wrenched her eyes from the ghosts to where the road lay hidden in the shadow of the hills. She had never imagined leaving Zhongli. But it was Zhu Chongba’s fate to leave. It was his fate to survive.

The chill in the air increased. The girl startled at the touch of something cold, but real. A gentle, pliant strike against her skin—a sensation she had forgotten long ago, and recognized now with the haziness of a dream.

Leaving the blank-eyed ghosts murmuring in the rain, she walked.

• • • •

The girl came to Wuhuang Monastery on a rainy morning. She found a stone city floating in the clouds, the glazed curves of its green-tiled roofs catching the light far above. Its gates were shut. It was then that the girl learned a peasant’s long-ago promise meant nothing. She was just one of a flood of desperate boys massed before the monastery gate, pleading and crying for admittance. That afternoon, monks in cloud-gray robes emerged and screamed at them to leave. The boys who had been there overnight, and those who had already realized the futility of waiting, staggered away. The monks retreated, taking the bodies of those who had died, and the gates shut behind them.

The girl alone stayed, her forehead bent to the cold monastery stone. One night, then two and then three, through the rain and the increasing cold. She drifted. Now and then, when she wasn’t sure whether she was awake or dreaming, she thought she saw chalky bare feet passing through the edges of her vision. In more lucid moments, when the suffering was at its worst, she thought of her brother. Had he lived, Chongba would have come to Wuhuang; he would have waited as she was waiting. And if this was a trial Chongba could have survived— weak, pampered Chongba, who had given up on life at its first terror—then so could she.

The monks, noticing the child who persisted, doubled their campaign against her. When their screaming failed, they cursed her; when their cursing failed, they beat her. She bore it all. Her body had become a barnacle’s shell, anchoring her to the stone, to life. She stayed. It was all she had left in her to do.

On the fourth afternoon a new monk emerged and stood over the girl. This monk wore a red robe with gold embroidery on the seams and hem, and an air of authority. Though not an old man, his jowls drooped. There was no benevolence in his sharp gaze, but something else the girl distantly recognized: interest.

“Damn, little brother, you’re stubborn,” the monk said in a tone of grudging admiration. “Who are you?”

She had kneeled there for four days, eating nothing, drinking only rainwater. Now she reached for her very last strength. And the boy who had been the Zhu family’s second daughter said, clearly enough for Heaven to hear, “My name is Zhu Chongba.”

Copyright © 2021 by Shelley Parker-Chan. Excerpted from She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. Published by permission of Shelley Parker-Chan 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

Shelley Parker-Chan is an Australian by way of Malaysia and New Zealand. A 2017 Tiptree Fellow, she is the author of the historical fantasy novel She Who Became the Sun. Parker-Chan spent nearly a decade working as a diplomat and international development adviser in Southeast Asia, where she became addicted to epic East Asian historical TV dramas. After a failed search to find English-language book versions of these stories, she decided to write her own. Parker-Chan currently lives in Melbourne, Australia, where she is very grateful to never have to travel by leaky boat ever again.

Book Review: For the Wolf, by Hannah Whitten

LaShawn M. Wanak | 648 words

For the Wolf
Hannah Whitten
Paper / Ebook / Audio
ISBN: 978-0316592789
Orbit Books, June 2021, 448 pages

I’ve been on a real romance kick as of late. Maybe it’s because I’ve been craving more stories where people don’t like each other at first, but then feelings start to emerge and suddenly they can’t look at each other without their hearts pounding and their mouths going dry. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been reading fanfic through the Archive of our Own website, where the stories there tagged with intriguing names such as slow burn, fluff, and hurt/comfort.

Those tags perfectly describe Hannah Whitten’s book For the Wolf, which has loose echoes of fairy tales—Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast in particular—where a girl goes into the woods to stay with a dangerous beast and ends up falling in love with him. However, this story also mixes in gothic elements that drew my attention. Arms marked by magic. White-robed priestesses walking in the dark. So much blood used as payment. Whispers of dark dimensions with horrific beasts slavering to break from their prison and take over the world.

My kind of story.

Red is a second-born daughter. Her twin sister Neve had been born first, so she is destined to take her mother’s throne. But Red, according to tradition, is destined for the Wilderwood, an enchanted forest north of their kingdom, as a sacrifice. Before Red, three other Second Daughters had been offered to the forest, and none of them returned. Legend has it that they were killed by the Wolf, a beast who demands the sacrifice to keep monsters from the Shadowlands from spilling out of the wood and destroying the kingdom.

Unable to change her fate, Red goes into the forest. To her surprise, instead of death, she meets the Wolf, a human who goes by the name of Eammon, the son of the original Wolf who went into the forest 300 centuries ago. Red quickly learns that Eammon’s true purpose is to act as Warden for the Sentinels: white, smooth-barked trees who act as barriers against the Shadowlands. Eammon is gruff, but under his surly exterior is a guy who is still dealing with the death of his parents, and who is giving too much of himself to protect the Wilderwood. The trees work by drawing on Eammon’s magic and blood, but one man isn’t enough. Hence the trees have chosen Red, wishing to drain her of her blood and the seed of magic that is sleeping inside her.

Whitten does an excellent job of making the Wilderwood gorgeous and creepy in turns. Red quickly learns that all she has learned about the forest and its dreadful guardian is false, particularly when she also meets Fife and Lyra, who have made their own blood bargains with Wilderwood and fight alongside Eammon to protect the forest.

Meanwhile Neve, left with the guilt of her sister being sacrificed to Wilderwood, finds herself drawn to a priestess named Kiri who claims she can bring Red back, but through rites that are clearly heretical to what Neve has been brought up to believe. I did like how Whitten shows how fine the line could be between breaking traditions that need to be broken versus going too far in the push to do so.

But at the heart of this is still a romance, which I enjoyed. The romantic tension between Eammon and Red built up well. Also, Eammon blushes. I do have a weakness for gruff, surly guys who get flustered enough to blush.

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: Capture the Crown, by Jennifer Estep

Chris Kluwe | 816 words

Capture the Crown
Jennifer Estep
Trade Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-0063023031
Harper Voyager, July 2021, 464 pages

Hello everyone, it’s time for another book review! For this month’s selection, I’m taking a look at Capture the Crown, the first book in a new series by Jennifer Estep in her Crown of Shards universe. It features a fairy tale dress-up princess who also happens to be a pretty competent spy, her hatecrush prince from a rival kingdom, and an entertaining mix of intrigue and pathos.

First off, I haven’t read any of the previous Crown of Shards books (Estep has an earlier trilogy that establishes the universe), but I didn’t feel like I was out of my depth by jumping straight in with Capture the Crown. Prior important events are referred to with plenty of context, and their relation to Gemma, the main character, is removed enough that Capture the Crown feels like the start of its own unique story that just so happens to also take place in this world, which is good. I’m sure those who have read the previous trilogy will find plenty of references and Easter eggs to keep them happy, but Capture the Crown stands perfectly fine on its own.

Speaking of Gemma, the protagonist – while the “pampered princess who is secretly a spy” might be slightly tropey, Estep does an excellent job of infusing her with intelligence and wit, along with her own personal demons she has to constantly battle. Gemma, as a mind-magier (think Professor X but with more gowns), can feel the thoughts and emotions of those around her, as well as telekinetically manipulate various objects, but due to traumatic incidents in her past, her power isn’t always totally under her control. The way Estep writes Gemma’s struggle against herself is very well done, and leads to some well-earned catharsis by the time the final showdown of the book rolls around.

Gemma’s conflicts aren’t just internal, however, as she’s also secretly investigating the theft of valuable minerals from her kingdom of Andvari by the neighboring kingdom of Morta – a despised rival responsible for significant amounts of the pain Gemma has endured. Things get complicated, however, when one of Morta’s two princes, Leonidas, appears in the middle of Gemma’s investigation and dredges up old wounds and fresh troubles. The relationship between Gemma and Leonidas is initially hostile, but as Gemma learns more about Leonidas and Morta, she starts thinking that hate and love might just be two sides of the same coin, and what the heart wants isn’t always what the mind is comfortable with.

I felt that Estep did a very good job of setting up Morta as the antagonists without going full mustache-twirling villain—in keeping with the theme of past traumas influencing current events, we as the reader learn along with Gemma that the villain of your story is the hero of their own, and that kingdoms are made up of complicated people, no matter how much one might want them to be filled with monsters.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t villains to root against in Capture the Crown, as Estep gives us plenty of fiendish plotters and rapacious royalty who would like nothing more than to see Gemma at the bottom of an endless chasm. Navigating their treachery is where Gemma truly proves her abilities as a spy, and while she doesn’t always emerge victorious from all her fights, she uses her head and her heart to make sure what she learns advances her goals.

Overall, Capture the Crown was a fun read with enough depth and intrigue that I always looked forward to what Gemma was going to discover next, but not so much that I felt overwhelmed by dates or names, and while there were a couple of people who I felt had a bit too much plot armor (looking at you, Captain Jerkface of the Royal Jerkface Guards [not his real name]), that just makes the anticipation of them getting their just deserts all the sweeter. If you’re looking for a fantasy novel to flip through at the beach or on vacation this summer, you can’t go wrong with Capture the Crown, and I’ll be looking forward to Gemma’s further adventures.

Read if: You like some romance and royalty in your fantasy; you like alliterative names; you’ve ever wondered what your chances would really be like going against a telekinetic warrior capable of flaying the very skin from your bones.

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: Far Out, edited by Paula Guran

Arley Sorg | 1712 words

Far Out: Recent Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy
edited by Paula Guran
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1949102550
Night Shade, July 2021, 432 pgs

One of my favorite things about anthologies is discovering new and upcoming authors; or, being introduced to authors I didn’t really know about before. There are a number of recent books which do this well, such as Glitter + Ashes, edited by dave ring (bit.ly/3uL7o4D). Many anthologies, however, don’t necessarily aim to bring newer voices to the fore.

Paula Guran’s latest anthology, Far Out: Recent Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy, falls into the latter category. Folks who read a fair amount of genre short fiction will be familiar with the authors in this book. In fact, to some degree, the table of contents reads like the glitterati of queer fiction. Nalo Hopkinson was recently named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Seanan McGuire publishes so much that she has to use multiple pen names. (Kidding—kind of. Mainly in that she doesn’t have to; people would publish her work even if she didn’t use pen names.) Sam J. Miller is probably the most well-known openly gay author here, with award wins and nominations to his name, as well as popular books out in both adult and young adult markets, published by major houses. Even the authors with whom some readers may be less familiar are seen as notable within genre circles. This isn’t a book of newbies or of authors just breaking in; this is a gathering of pros. And they’re all decked out, hanging out in the ballroom together.

Far Out is a reprint anthology with twenty-four stories on the menu. While the line-up of authors might not be surprising, what is a bit more interesting is the sources of some of the stories. Most readers probably know of multi-award-winning author Charlie Jane Anders, for example, but they may not have read “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” from 2017 anthology Global Dystopias. Award winning author Ellen Kushner made her mark with debut novel Swordspoint, and has remained a genre favorite ever since, but fans may have missed “The Duke of Riverside” in 2011 anthology Naked City. Darcie Little Badger’s “Né łe” is pulled from 2016 anthology Love Beyond Body, Space and time: An Indigenous LGBT and Two-Spirit Sice-Fi Anthology, and aforementioned legend Nalo Hopkinson’s “Ours is the Prettiest” is pulled from 2011 anthology Welcome to Bordertown. Some of the expected sources are here, of course: Lightspeed Magazine, Strange Horizons, and so on. And some picks are, in a way, what we might think of as cheap shots: “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer won a Locus award and a Hugo award, was nominated for a Nebula Award, was the title story for Kritzer’s collection, and ended up inspiring a novel—yeah, people probably know about this one (plus, it’s free to read at Clarkesworld, where it was originally published!) But, ultimately, Guran has done something else which I love to see anthologies do: she has flexed her prodigious genre knowledge to curate a batch of stories which, in many cases, readers might have missed, and might otherwise not know about. A number of the pieces are from popular online magazines, and anyone can look them up; but she’s also tapped places like Expanded Horizons, which perhaps deserves more attention as a venue; as well as print magazines, the contents of which only their subscribers will have read. In this way, Guran performs a service I believe anthologists should, and she does it with grace and style. She’s telling readers, sure, you might know who these folks are, but did you read this.

Believe me, dear readers, the stories here are well worth your time.

Sticking with my “glitterati at the ball” metaphor: you could throw a glass slipper at this table of contents and any story you hit is going to be good. Frankly, some of these pieces don’t really need my help. They don’t need me to tell readers about them; they are already quite well regarded. Kritzer’s aforementioned story is a stand-out example. Tamsyn Muir’s “The Deepwater Bride” can be included in this list, as a finalist for Nebula, World Fantasy, Eugie, and Shirley Jackson awards. “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar was a finalist for more awards than you can count on one hand, and won Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. But there are a few stories I’ll highlight, because readers may have missed them, and they really excited me.

Nino Cipri’s “The Shape of My Name” is a cool, underrated story with an interesting structure. It’s a time-travel tale, and it’s disorienting at first. But really, it’s about a boy’s attempt to come to terms with a mother who wanted to keep the boy from transitioning. Heartfelt, captivating, and very effective.

Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “The Sea Troll’s Daughter” is a story I love so much that I’ve read it at least twice before, but felt it deserved a reread. This is the type of tale so many fantasy authors attempt: “old-timey” language which is actually effective and beautiful, a narrative which surprises at each scene but still feels organic, and moments of humor which entertain but don’t belabor their punchlines. So much is remarkable about this story, beyond the basic value of entertainment. Who the protagonist is subtly shifts. The tale feels like an adventure, but almost everything happens in one place. It feels like it’s sweepingly heroic, yet the “hero” is a drunkard and in the course of the primary narrative doesn’t actually accomplish much. In other words, it’s taking the expectations of heroic sword and sorcery and upending them, and it’s doing it in such a slick, engaging way that readers don’t even notice. There’s this layer going on of commentary regarding truth, perspective, and narratives, which is also meta, but without waving a flag and shouting about being meta. Brilliant.

A.C. Wise, for me, has become one of those authors I find in anthologies quite often, and in cases where it’s an anthology I’m reviewing, inevitably has a story which I feel is worth noting. “And If the Body Were Not the Soul” opens with quiet tension and suspense. Ro is a bicycle courier who doesn’t like to be touched, and Xal is an alien who, like all the recently arrived aliens, is confined to a specific neighborhood. Both characters are thoughtfully portrayed, and their situations cleverly describe degrees and variations on both otherness and othering. When Xal brushes Ro’s hand, the impact is complex with a dash of existential. Prejudice and blame are explored, growth, change, isolation, and human interaction, all through a narrative which has a brilliant intensity. There is, importantly, this very relatable sense of exploring something unfamiliar but intimate, and it feels scary in the most honest of ways.

We need to talk about Tristan Alice Nieto’s “Imago.” This is one of the most deliciously macabre pieces I’ve read in a long time. It’s both completely absorbing and super creative. On the one hand, it’s a treatise on the nature of life, a discussion of relationships, and especially our relationship with identity and memory. It’s about what we meant to each other. But, strictly from a craft perspective, it’s a stunning example of the way a skilled writer can absolutely floor you with a narrative which has very little “plot” or “action.” A good third of it is primarily introspection, where, really, pretty much nothing happens. And yet it is absolutely engrossing.

So, why is it important to have a queer book?

Nino Cipri’s story comes to mind. I read reviews of this story by two notable reviewers and they both seem to be oblivious to what the heart of the story is. For some of us, it’s right there in the title: “The Shape of My Name.” Most queer people will get a signal from this group of words, one which non-queer people are likely to miss. And sure, the reviews talk about other stuff. Just not, you know, the most important stuff.

The fact is, many people who aren’t queer just won’t get the concerns of queer people. If you explain it, they still might not get it. If they get it, they might not understand why it’s important, why it matters. Many queer kids still grow up in isolation, surrounded by people who mean them harm, and without access to basic conversations or ideas which can help them navigate their own feelings. Besides all this, hate is still a thing: in the US we see legislation trying to limit or delete the rights of queer people, hate crimes are a constant possibility, and what’s really messed up? Relatively speaking, we are the lucky ones, since plenty of countries imprison or murder queer people.

Yes, darling. Visibility is important.

But you know what? You don’t need to be queer to enjoy these stories. I told you that you could throw a glass slipper at anything in this book and you’d hit a good story. It’s fine if you don’t have a glass slipper. Use a boot, or a loafer; throw a flip-flop. This book could just as easily be a “Best Of.” If you’re not queer, maybe you won’t get some story elements or nuance, but you’ll still be in for a damn good ride.

So go ahead, let Paula Guran show you around. Let her take you Far Out.

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: Everdeen Mason

Laurel Amberdine | 428 words

At the start of “Miss the Zen, but Miss You More” it’s clear that something unexpected is going to happen. Bei Bei continuing on her self-indulgent way would not be much of a story. But you surprised me with the direction this took! How did the story come together? Did you know the ending when you started?

I hope the ending is surprising in a good way! I didn’t quite know the ending but it became very clear where it should be fairly quickly. I wanted to really play up the tension between a sort of helpless self-indulgence and an intense desire to be better, and somehow it metastasized into something really scary (I hope).

Oh yes, it was a perfect ending. I’ve been thinking about it for days. Is there anything you want readers to know about this story that they might not have noticed?

I think Bei Bei is someone who would be easy to judge, but I really want readers to think very deeply about whether they are really any different.

What is your usual process for writing a short story? Did this one give you any surprises?

Oh man. I’m sort of a psycho. I’m a pretty fast writer, but I just mull it around in my mind for so long. I need to know a lot of a story before I really start writing—although that may be my own self-indulgence come to play here. But this story came out more complete than most stories, I think it was because I was in a really similar place to Bei Bei in my life. That sort of diagnosis that something isn’t right, but unable to really grapple with why something is wrong and what to do to change it, and a knowledge that you have to do something, even if it’s terribly silly.

What have you been working on lately? Anything forthcoming that our readers should know about?

I’m editing a short story right now that is almost there but not quite. I tend to write stories about women who are so sad and loathe themselves but really can’t stop trying, and I think this is . . . a fairly unique take. And I’m in the very long mulling stage of a novel I want to try, though I think it may be out of my skill level right now as a writer. Isn’t that the worst feeling?

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Nicole D. Sconiers

Audrey T. Williams | 798 words

In “How to Become an Ancestor” the second criteria is “die violently.” I’m curious why no other options are provided to allow for elders who pass peacefully into ancestor-dom while they sleep. Can you say more about this?

When the idea came to me for “How to Become an Ancestor,” I didn’t envision the story as a how-to manual for all people of color. Not everyone who passes into ancestor-dom is an elder or dies peacefully in their sleep. I wanted to specifically focus on victims of police brutality.

Around the time Breonna Taylor was murdered, someone tweeted, “She has gone to join the ancestors.” I know that person probably meant she had ascended to this peaceful, almost Wakanda-esque plane where our elders reside, but in the months after her death, I’d heard that phrase used most often when people of color were killed by the police. Those victims were shot, choked to death, or otherwise brutalized. Violence seemed to be the passport to the ancestor realm.

That the main character has a “perpetual smile” is ironic given her demise. Also, the line, “But people loved their ancestors to be radiant. Or solemn. There was no in-between” makes me ponder a real mural artists’ choice. How they choose to represent a new ancestor, and how much the family of the ancestor is (or is not) consulted in that choice. Do the artist and family want the ancestor’s likeness to reflect them at their happiest, even if they died violently? Or do some prefer a somber image to show the gravity of a prematurely filled grave? Would love to hear your process on how you settled on the main character’s happy visage.

It’s interesting that you mentioned if families of the slain are consulted in the community’s memorials of them. Breonna Taylor’s sister Ju’Niyah Palmer said all the images floating around of a smiling Breonna in her EMT uniform didn’t tell the whole story. In the photo that Ju’Niyah shared of her sister, we see a cute little girl with braids who looks slightly impatient, like she can’t wait for Mom or whomever to take the picture so she can run outside and play.

A mural captures one moment in time. I understand that murals are a way to honor a person’s memory or to say we still need justice for him or her, but they don’t tell the whole story of the person who was slain. I wanted to reflect that incongruity by having the main character walk around with a “perpetual smile,” even though she never smiled that much when she was alive and she’s on the wall because she was gunned down.

“The girl was twenty-seven. Much too young to be anyone’s forebearer or sacrifice or guiding light.” Being too young to be a forebearer or a guiding light makes sense to me, however, the idea of being too young to be a sacrifice at twenty-seven is a new idea, since there are so many tales about young, virgin sacrifices. I’d love to know the thought behind twenty-seven being too young to sacrifice.

The main character in “How to Become an Ancestor” has reluctantly awakened to this new world of being a murdered woman memorialized on a wall. I think part of her reluctance is because she died at such a young age. She was living her life, clubbing with her girls, trying to find a decent guy. I was thinking “sacrifice” in terms of people who say, “Hey, I know you died violently and tragically, but your death has helped us move closer to police reform,” or “Your murder has helped us understand that black lives matter.”

I love the imagery of the girl’s “chroma rivulet” constitution finding rest on the church stairs as the gospel choir vibrates through her essence! There are so many possible interpretations of this moment, can you tell us a bit about your thoughts and writing process that led to this eventuality?

The main character in “How to Become an Ancestor” loved music. When she went to clubs, she always feared the bass from a hip-hop song would cause her heart to burst. The bass didn’t. A bullet did. She is drawn to the church because she hears the choir practicing. I think the music helps heal the heart that was punctured. These are her ancestors, not in some far off realm, but in the land of the living. This experience frees her from the confines of her manmade realm on the wall. I like to imagine her essence returning to some vibrant, nurturing place.

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: Rachel Swirsky

Jude Griffin | 1827 words

How did this story come about?

By the grace of Vylar Kaftan!

I’m a member of the Codex message board (it’s a group for writers who are just pre-SFWA-qualifying, up through professionals), and one of the best parts of it is that every year Vylar Kaftan runs a contest called Weekend Warrior. For five weeks, people get together and write a flash story every weekend, based on Vylar’s excellent prompts. The original version of “Innocent Bird” was 750 words. It grew in the rewriting.

I wrote this one in 2020. I actually don’t remember the original prompt, but somehow it got me thinking about the idea of a “reverse selkie”—someone who would be transforming in such a way so that they lose the sea by becoming their “true shape.” Likewise, in this story, love transforms Shoko into her “true shape”—whereas in a traditional selkie story, “love” (usually kidnapping) means being forced out of your real skin. Shoko’s mother still abandons her, as in a true selkie story, but she doesn’t have to in the same way that selkie mothers do. Selkie mothers are forbidden the sea; she still has access to the sky; she just wants to leave.

The other generative influence is a phone game about an anime show called Love Live!. During hard periods in my life, I have often connected deeply with gentle media about friendships. That’s what Love Live! is—a very gentle franchise about nine girls who are in a musical performance group together. Conflicts are minimal and easily resolved. Plus, they have pretty costumes.

Shoko, Ichika and Hitomi are very loosely associated with three of the characters from Love Live! Sunshine!!. One character (Kanan) scuba dives, and another character has bossy traits (Dia) and an anxious sister (Ruby). I kept the setting in rural Japan. Otherwise, there aren’t too many overlaps. In the anime, the girls do these glamorous musical performances—I gave them a low-key a capella club instead, and my characters definitely aren’t celebrities. The anime doesn’t usually have parents around which became absentee parents for Ichika and Hitomi. Love Live! is a mostly realistic world that presents a fantasy of emotional safety and low conflict—so, in a way I reversed it with a world that has high magic, along with emotional risk and dramatic conflict.

I considered moving the story into the United States—I live here, after all—but it felt in a way disrespectful to the inspirational core, even if the actual story is very different. It felt also . . . like a cop-out to just make that choice because it would be easier for me to not to have to think outside myself. So, I did my research instead and afterward went to a consultant for some double-checking. Thanks to Akemi Marshall for her advice and expertise, such as very kindly telling me (among other things) that the “shoe box of photographs” should be a “candy tin of photographs.” Also, that eel roe is not a culinary thing, partially because eel reproduction is shrouded in mystery, which is terribly interesting! We’re learning, though: bit.ly/34CQWc5.

Is this a world you might return to?

It is.

I have a couple of other drafted stories about girls in their a capella group falling in and out of love. Each of them has her own odd, minor magical power. I don’t know how the stories fit into a whole yet, though—other than “girls in a club, loosely connected with an anime about singing.” I greatly admire Isabel Yap’s series “Hurricane Heels,” which is inspired by magical girl anime, and follows a group of magical girls . This isn’t quite the same enterprise, but I think the solution may fall on a parallel line. I think there has to be some kind of arching theme about love that I haven’t grasped yet. Either that, or I’m overthinking it. Also possible.

I haven’t written a story about Hitomi yet, but I’m looking forward to trying it. I think she may be able to perceive the souls of ghosts in beach pebbles.

How would 2006-You have written this story?

So, I sold my first story in 2005, but I think it came out in 2006. It’s also the year I started graduate school at the University of Iowa, and it may be the year I first sold something to Fantasy Magazine (that may have been 2007).

I would have been working primarily at night, which I don’t anymore, as I struggle to be diurnal these days with my husband who gets up at 5:30am. When we lived at my parents’ house, I wrote a lot at the desk in my room while he was sleeping next to me; when we visited other people, I wrote a lot at other people’s kitchen tables; in graduate school, I wrote at my desk, or on the couch, or in a cafe, or wherever I could get up the concentration. I used to listen to music when I wrote, so I probably would have listened to music from the anime. These days, my audio processing isn’t great for multiple channels, so I either write in silence or to the noises of rain or a fake coffee shop. I ended up doing most of the rewrites on this story on the couch of my friend, P H Lee, whose fairy tales have appeared several times in Lightspeed.

As I mentioned before, this first version of this was a 750-word flash piece. I expect that 2006-Me would have left the story closer to that length; I’m guessing something like 1,500 words (the 750 was really too much of a squeeze). I didn’t have as much inclination then to probe into relationships. I think I would have been happier with Ichika—and especially Daishiro—being painted impressionistically into the background. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but these days, I find myself pressed more with questions like “why does she love Ichika?” Not just love as an abstraction, but love as a specific. Why Ichika? I wanted to see them in motion together. And then I wanted to see Daishiro in motion—or lack of motion—with Shoko’s mother. Once I had started to probe into those things, I found that they interrelated. Shoko’s images of romantic love are based on this strange, broken relationship of which she only has impressions. Of course that’s going to influence what it looks like for her to fall in love.

I actually initially went into submission with a version of this that was 1,000 words shorter. After getting a couple of very kind rejections, I let it lie for a while, and the next time I looked at it, I felt like the story had a reserved quality to it that didn’t seem appropriate. My graduate training—along with a lot of other aspects of contemporary aesthetics—strongly veers toward keeping emotions subtextual in this very discreet fashion. I went back into the story to let the heartbreak go straight onto the page. Shoko is a teenager; she’s full of these big emotions. She doesn’t express them to other people which only means she’s constantly inflated with love and distress and confusion and uncertainty about her future that she has no escape valve from. I think she tries to distance herself from that internally to some extent—there are moments when she underplays what she’s feeling—but she shouldn’t be written like a middle-aged literary professor wrestling with a midlife crisis. She’s a lovesick teen, literally transforming into something she doesn’t understand. I think the story really needed that last rewrite, to breathe through the moments when her emotions are raw and clear and accessible.

2006-Me would probably have left the story short, but I imagine the emotional viscerality would have been present anyway. The emotions in my stories were usually very accessible then, sometimes too much so. I’m glad to have learned some restraint for those moments when restraint is called for, but sometimes I need to get that rawness on the page.

What is the best fan feedback you’ve ever gotten on your writing?

Whenever people tell you that you’ve moved them, that’s important. It’s—groundbreaking, really. It justifies the writing; it makes it feel like there’s purpose in what I do.

Specifically, I’ve been told by people that a story was important to them, or that it helped them process something intense in their lives, or that it made them cry. Someone told me once that they shared a story of mine with their new wife on their honeymoon. That was very cool.

To be honest, people reading my stories at all is an honor. I’m grateful for all the support I get.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

I’ve sold several stories this year and I’m very excited about that!

For the past—gosh, maybe ten years?—I’ve been working intensely on novels. I did finish one (nine years ago!), but alas, it was not ready for prime time—it was, in fact, ready for the trunk. I’d love to take it out sometime and make it better, but it needs substantial reconception.

Anyway, this means that I’ve produced a huge number of words that I haven’t been able to put out into the world, which understandably puts a crimp on my published word count. It feels really good to have stories coming out with Uncanny, Lightspeed, Tor’s novella line, and Apex Magazine.

While I’ve been working on novels, I’ve still been drafting short stories, I just haven’t been giving them the love and care they need to become polished. I counted recently and have something like thirty drafted and/or partially complete stories in my “desk drawers.” I’ve managed to get several of them out the door this year, so hopefully I’ll be able to keep up speed. The one I’m working on right now is about the ghosts of three grumpy, elderly sisters who are stuck in the same house after death that they were stuck in together when they were alive.

Mostly, I hope I can get one of my three in-process novels ready for my poor agent! They keep accreting, but they haven’t hit that ultimate moment where they come together. If my history is any indication, I’ll probably end up finishing all three at once, ha.

I’m excited to share them . . . once they’re ready to share!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Andrew Dana Hudson

Benjamin C. Kinney | 1216 words

“A Smell of Jet Fuel” centers around the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. Do you have any personal connection or reaction to the original attacks that you’re comfortable talking about?

I was a teenager in the midwest in 2001. Later, in 2005, I lived in NYC for several years. But for the most part, no, I don’t have a personal connection. My connection is all public: experiencing, along with everyone else, how those events were used to reshape so much of American life, mostly for the worse. And they were used, very deliberately, to reshape life outside of America, definitely for the worse. Millions of Iraqis and Afghanis were killed, and millions more displaced and ruined by the strife American wars set in motion—wars that we are still perpetrating, two decades later. 9/11 didn’t cause those wars—choices by our leaders did. In a way, it’s a horrible twist of history that we can’t think about the World Trade Center attacks without thinking about all the violence and damage of the Iraq War and the War on Terror, because the attacks themselves were truly horrendous, and the pain of the victims, their families, and New Yorkers was and is very real. I hope my story can, in some small way, capture that dichotomy: the awfulness of the day, in tension with the compounding awfulness of the decades to come.

Time travel stories are an old standard in science fiction, and this one feels very much like a part of that long (but hopefully not looping) conversation. Are there any particular past stories that inspired you to write this, whether out of love or dissatisfaction or a more complex response?

This story is an homage to Ray Bradbury’s masterpiece “A Sound of Thunder.” In that story, as I’m sure many readers will remember, time travel is used to send big game hunters back millions of years to kill a tyrannosaurus rex. They have to be very careful not to step off the path, not to disturb anything (the T-rex was about to die, anyhow), lest they change millions of years of evolution. But of course they do, and when they return they find their intervention in history manifest not in biological ways, as one might expect, but in social ones: an ominous flipped election result and surreal changes to how words were spelled. In my opinion, this is one of the greatest twist endings in science fiction.

When I got the idea to riff on Bradbury with a story about time tourism to 9/11, I wanted to do two things: one, send up crass American tourist culture, and two, explore Bradbury’s butterfly effect on a different scale, rippling through the volatile and contingent history of the 21st century. But as I dug into “A Sound of Thunder,” it was so rich that it felt very doable to not just allude to Bradbury but to play by some of the same rules he set up. The idea of “Escapes” is even mentioned in Bradbury’s story, though not explored. So that became a thread I spun out further—and hopefully did justice to.

If you had access to a Machine, where in history would you take it? What catastrophe, triumph, or everyday beauty from the past would you like to witness?

Well, the rules always matter with this sort of question, don’t they? Will language be a barrier? Can I eavesdrop on secret meetings of presidents and spies? Assuming no to both, I think I’d like to visit a few of the great revolutionary upheavals: the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, for instance. Events when, as Lenin put it, there were “weeks where decades happen.” Of course, we had quite a few of those weeks ourselves in the last year, and they were largely miserable to live through. But in revolutionary upheavals I think many also experience a potent sense of possibility, a feeling that maybe everyday, historically-anonymous humans can seize and shape their future, rather than having history handed to them by a ruling class. Even though revolutions often go sour, that’s an atmosphere I’d like to soak in.

This story could come across as resolutely hopeless, with a ruined climate and persistent symbols of intolerance. Yet, there was a future that Sita came from—and the two looked pretty similar in the decades after 9/11. Can you tell us about something going on today that gives you hope about our Future?

To be clear, I think this story is more pessimistic about our own time than about the broken future Brad is from. After all, Brad gets it when Sitra says she’d rather go home than live through the early twenty-first century. I wrote the story in May of 2020, which was quite a grim time in the American consciousness. (Now of course we feel like there is light at the end of the tunnel, even though the daily body count of global COVID deaths is still, when I write this in May of ’21, much higher than it was in those early months.)

Anyhow, hope! Well, the vaccine certainly gives me hope. It’s a scientific marvel, and getting vaxxed made me feel like a huge emotional burden was finally lifted—highly recommended! I’m also always encouraged by the ever-dropping costs of renewable energy deployment. Switching to solar and wind isn’t necessarily going to be easy, but in many ways it will be cheaper than simply keeping up the current system, and will come with lots of opportunities to disrupt existing inequalities. In fact, most of what we need to do to save the planet from climate change are things we need to do to save ourselves from capitalism. I find hope in energized movements to rebuild the American labor movement, like the push to unionize Amazon and pass the PRO Act. In many ways working people are at a nadir of class power—the world’s billionaires looted trillions of dollars from us during 2020—but there is a definite sense of an upswing there. And I find hope in the mass movements for racial justice that arose a year ago, when the organizing terrain couldn’t have been worse. Truly history is something that happens whether we feel like it or not, that’s bigger than any one of us, and even when we find ourselves beaten down and demoralized, that may be the very moment that others find the right conditions and impetus to rise up.

How does the future look for your own fiction? Do you have any upcoming projects you’d like people to watch for?

I just signed a contract to have a cli-fi fix-up novel I originally wrote as my master’s thesis published by Fordham University Press, and I’m very stoked about that. It’s a set of five novelettes, each one exploring the future of the UN climate negotiations and each set in a different socio-economic-climate scenario. So if you like this story’s tone, and its climate politics take on the branching possibilities of future history, I very much hope you keep an eye out for that book, likely early next year.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Benjamin C. Kinney is a neuroscientist, SFF writer, and assistant editor of the science fiction podcast Escape Pod. He’s created cyborg monkeys, magnetically altered the activity of the human brain, and generally done his part to make the world as science fictional as possible. His short stories have appeared in Analog, Fireside, Strange Horizons, and many other excellent places, and you can find them all at benjaminckinney.com.

Author Spotlight: Lulu Kadhim

Laurel Amberdine | 625 words

This was such an interesting and sad premise. Can you explain how it came about?

It’s kind of funny, but this started as an idea for a half-sleeve tattoo (that I still intend to get some time!) of a girl with honeycomb growing over parts of her face. It didn’t take long for me to realize I wanted to use it as a story idea too, but I couldn’t figure out the wider world she belonged to.

Then I took part in a contest over on Codex Writers’ Group, where someone sent me a description of setting and I needed to write a story with at least one scene set there. The description included a hallway with doors covered by tapestries—which still features in the story today—and things clicked into place.

What part of writing this story did you find hardest? Did anything come easily?

I definitely struggled over whether I was making the right choices. This has a lot of dark themes, it doesn’t have a traditional western story structure, and it handles characters who have very little agency. Any one of those, handled badly, could’ve sunk the story. I just didn’t know if any of it was going to come together and actually work in the end.

The descriptions of the honeycomb came most easily. I really enjoy writing body horror, so it was nice to indulge in that. I was definitely the kid who used to pick at scabs and wanted to see people’s gnarly scrapes. Actually, I’m definitely still the adult who wants to peek beneath the bandage and who pokes and prods all her cuts and bruises with fascination.

There’s a whole range of different classes here. Obviously the girls and their bees, the mothers who both hide them and protect/abuse them, the men who pay for self-indulgence (with an occasional twinge of conscience), the religious organization that apparently legitimizes all this and takes the profit? And the ordinary folks, going about without much attention to the cruelty playing out in their midst. Where do you see yourself in this story? Sadly, I’m probably one of the oblivious ordinary folks for many such oppressions.

This is a difficult question! Is it too pat to say I can see myself in all those parts?

I can see myself in the girls themselves the clearest, though I have never felt anything close to the oppression they have. But losing agency of your body, being told it’s wrong and having it exploited is something most of us have felt in some way, no matter how small, at some point in our lives. I think that’s especially noticeable when in adolescence, as these girls are, your body changes and you suddenly and violently lose control of the way you are perceived.

What have you been working on lately? Where can readers look for more of your work?

I have a story out in Fantasy Magazine this month, called “A Softness of the Heart.” It’s very tonally different from this one, though—a cheerful queer ghost story! In the pipeline, my main project right now is a novella set in the same world as “Amber Dark & Sickly Sweet” that I’m really excited about. It explores the Farms in greater detail, and what happens to the girls sent there.

The two games I write, Industries of Titan and Phantom Brigade, are both in Early Access at the moment too. It’s been so fun to see what players think of the content and to be able to iterate on that.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 232 words

Coming up in August, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Andrea Chapela (translated by Emma Törzs) (“Now You Feel It”) and David Anaxagoras (“The Shatter”). We also have a flash piece (“Before the Haze Devours You”) from Nelly G. García Rosas, along with an SF reprint by Maurice Broaddus (“City of Refuge”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Justin C. Key (“Now You See Me”) and Tobi Ogundiran (“The Tale of Jaja and Canti”). We also have a flash piece (“My Sister Is a Scorpion”) from Isabel Cañas. Our fantasy reprints by Sheree Renée Thomas (“Ancestries”).

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: Anya Ow, Lizz Huerta, Adam R. Shannon, P H Lee, Coral Alejandra Moore, and Gene Doucette.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

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Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (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.