It’s true that the house walks. It’s also true that you can only find it if you don’t know about it. Once, a boy in my high-school art class drew a picture of it, but didn’t know what he’d drawn; the thing in the center of his sketchpad had ungainly, menacing chicken legs caught mid-stride and a crazed thatch roof that hung askew over brooding windows. I knew it was the house right away because his eyes had that sleepy, traumatized look that people get once they’ve seen the house. I was used to seeing this look, mostly on my mother’s face.

He didn’t come back to school the next day, and even though everyone else was puzzled I knew that he had gone to search for the house. I still look for him under bridges and on traffic islands when I go into the city.

Inside my own house, I have many pictures of the house. In the oil painting over the fireplace, it is a houseboat on the Thames, moored at night in a meadow outside Oxford. The photograph next to my desk shows it as a glass-and-stucco fortress with a flat roof, temporarily alighted in the mountains that cut Los Angeles in half. I even have a linocut that captures the house as a yurt somewhere in Mongolia.

In my kitchen, there’s a map covered in colored pushpins. It marks all the places where I think the house has been. There are so many pins now that I can’t make out the borders of most of the countries, and even the oceans are furred with bright circles of plastic.

A middle-aged woman backpacking through Vietnam found the house’s footprints in the jungle. She photographed them, and when I saw the images on her blog, immense hollows in which the crushed vegetation had only just started to grow back, I ran to the map and looked to see if there was already a pin, the kind that had started showing up on their own, on the spot. There wasn’t, so I opened my box and put one there.

My mother went into the house, before I was born. She told me that inside, there are doors that open underground and others that swing open like precipices on the cold high reaches of the air. Sometimes she wrote down things that she had seen in the house, and once I found a list in the drawer where we kept the stamps that read:

Blood-bright lipstick smears on the rims of china cups.

A crow mask dangling from a newel post, shedding feathers.

Maps tacked four deep to a wall, filmy lace curtains billowing in gusts of wind and scattering thin sunlight over the hardwood floor.

One lit candle guttering, its light mirrored in the lenses of rows on rows of spectacles laid out on dirty black velvet.

She told me that she had never met any other people in the house. But sometimes she heard them in the walls.

Though the house has many doors, it has only one true entrance and one true exit. They are the same door. (The architect of the first labyrinth must have been inside the house.)

When I was a child, I liked to picture my mother as she must have been when she found the house: younger than I am now, her thick braid a glossy brown like the wing-case of a beetle, with tiny gold pinecone earrings and wide, deep-set eyes. When she caught the house taking a step, she would have halted on the thick, spongy pine needles and wondered at its bulk, its many chimneys, its great clawed feet. It would have towered over her, and she would have been afraid yet unable to turn away. Then her hand on the door, her first steps into the interior, and me turning over within her, safe in my own house of flesh.

On the night that I set up the map, I placed two pushpins: one on my hometown, where the vanished boy from my art class drew the house without ever having seen it, and one on the Tennessee forest where my mother had walked into the house while I rode inside her. When I came downstairs the next day to make coffee, there were seven pins on the map, some of which were tacky with clear film and would not come out of the paper. After that I left the box of pins from the office-supply store mostly alone, and new ones appeared on the map every so often when I wasn’t looking.

That first morning, I drank my coffee very quickly, in huge gulps that scalded my tongue and cheeks and palate. One of the five new pins marked a location in the middle of the Atlantic, right below the medieval cartographer’s admonition I’d blocked in the night before: HIC SUNT LEONES. When I finished my coffee, I got in my car and drove to the city to see my mother.

I found another list in my mother’s recipe binder when I was looking for the proportions of the many dairy products used in chocolate mousse:

A room built, walls, floors and ceiling, out of animal skulls. Birds and raccoons and cows and elephants and cats and other animals so twisted or so enormous that I do not recognize them. My boots leave a trail of crushed eye sockets.

Dirt roof, this room barely a cavity, wired with one bare lightbulb.

Water, half-light, perhaps an inch of air at the top of the room.

So low and narrow that I must crawl nearly flat to the floor. The baby doesn’t like that.

A room laid with a banquet, but the opulence of the dishes makes me sick.

The first time I asked my mother how she had left the house, she looked blank for a moment, and then said only, “The way most people do, I think.” After that, I asked her the same question at odd intervals, when she seemed distracted, hoping to jar her into a more interesting answer. But her response never changed, and eventually I gave up.

I can’t ask my mother these things anymore. Nobody can, because the person who sits in an armchair in the living room of the apartment in the city is no longer my mother.

This woman woke up six years ago at the bottom of a flight of stairs in the house she used to live in with my father. The first words out of her mouth, and the last ones for a long time after that: “My head. I hit my head.”

I know this because I was there. I was the one who had turned and knocked her off-balance at the top of the stairs. It was my scream that had followed hers as she fell, my hand that had missed hers by half an inch.

The house changes people. That’s true, too. Some people are afraid of going in and coming out different than they were before. If only they knew that they do the same thing in their own houses, day in and day out.

I do not like visiting my mother. But I went, on the first day that the new pins showed up in the map. I got there just as the man who brought Meals on Wheels was leaving, so I didn’t have to wait for her shuffle to the door. Her chair faced the living room window, and one pale hand angling off into space told me that she was sitting there. I walked up on her right, making my footsteps louder so she would notice me coming, and sat down on the ottoman. We looked out the window together. In the glass, the faintest hint of our reflections, side by side.

“Hi, Mom.”

The voice, slower and fainter than I wanted it to be, every time.

Part of me (the same part that keeps looking for the house although I know perfectly well that the more I learn about the house the less likely it becomes that I will ever find it) still believes that one day I will find my mother here exactly as she was before she landed on the hardwood floor and lay with her body splayed wide as a starfish. I want to walk in and find her ready to pick up the fight we were having as we went up the stairs, and I want to hear whatever she was going to say after I finished asking when she was going to deal with my father’s things.

“There’s a map now, Mom. That’s all.”

She smiled at me, and because my mother had never smiled in that closed, vague way, without showing any teeth, I wanted to hit her. Instead, I turned to the window so I wouldn’t have to look at her, and took her hand. She didn’t move away.

Some things that are not true about the house:

That it is not a house at all, but an entrance to the underworld.

That it is owned by a witch who scouts the countryside in a flying kettle, and who steals the genitals of young men to string on her bloody necklace.

That it can never be found by the same person twice. In 1880, a Rhode Island man who suffered from short-term memory loss entered the house twice in one year; both visits were recorded in his pocket diary.

Under my house are innumerable tunnels, some flooded, some collapsed, and some simply empty. The ground is rich, veined with metals. Some of the mines, including the one that runs beneath my house, have been abandoned and now harbor only echoes. One hill away, though, when miners blast into the ground, I feel the vibrations through the walls and floors.

When he was alive, my father would have told you there was no such thing as the house. If you looked at all doubtful, he would have said that the real house is inside us, that we visit it when we read Bulgakov or Borges or Angela Carter. (My father should have been an academic, but he wasn’t. He never finished college.)

My parents’ opinions differed on many subjects. My mother wrote, in the very first note I ever found, that she gave birth to me the way animals do, alone in the dark in a distant part of the house. My father told me, when I asked him, that I was born in a private mental hospital.

I decided after a while that they were both right. I pictured my mother, her distended belly rising and falling, asleep in her room, unaware of the house or anything else. Something enormous treaded softly on the wet grass, walked up to her window, which suddenly gaped wide. (The house changes objects as well as people. The world is mutable.) The house reached through the window, lifted my mother out as she slept, took her inside itself to give birth.

The house cannot walk on water, but it can walk under it.

The only true records are those that are never kept.

I was born in the house, and one day I will find it. I will be a true record, after I have forgotten everything I know, and no map will chart my course. Maybe I will find my mother, too, in the place on the map where there are only lions.

Until then, I will lie in my bed at night, listen to the explosions in the far-off mine, and feel the trembling of the earth, my house set on the earth, my body set inside this house. And I will smile in the darkness, and think how much that trembling feels like footsteps.

 L.M. Davenport works as a magazine intern at the same Southern university from which she received a B.A. in English in 2016.  She has read Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness a ridiculous number of times, and once knitted a five-and-a-half-foot-long giant squid.  Her work has previously appeared at Hobart.

Other Houses:

The Fifth Gable, by Kay Chronister – The first woman to live in the four-gabled house fermented her unborn children in the wine cellar. When they came to term, she broke them open on the floorboards. Her heartiest son weighed half an ounce at birth. His face, curved to the shape of the Mason jar womb where he developed, stayed pink for an hour before he died in a puddle of formaldehyde and afterbirth.

A July Story, by K.L. Owens – Iron red, linseed-cured, and caked in salt, in a place where the mercury never crept much above fifty Fahrenheit, the two-room house chose to keep its back to the sea. A wise choice, given the facing of the windows and the predilections of the wind. Still, in other Julys, Kitten had stood naked between ancient trees or buried his toes in sun-warm sand. In this new July, he donned the buckskin jacket from the peg by the door and used wool socks for gloves, swaddled his head in a gaily-patterned scarf given to him by a gray-haired marm in some other July on some other island. Shivering on a shore made of black cobblestones—waves did not break, but clattered and rumbled—Kitten watched a bazaar of common murres bob on the wind and wondered which side of what ocean the house had selected this time.

Spirit Tasting List for Ridley House, April 2016, by Rachel Acks Welcome, honored guest, to Ridley House; the acquisition of this charming 18th-century Palladian Revival villa has been something of a coup for our club and we are beyond pleased to present a wide array of tastes for your pleasure, if for a limited time. Take a moment to enjoy the grounds, particularly the stately elms with their attendant garlands of Spanish moss, and the mist rising from the ponds and nearby irrigation canals.

Editor’s Note: In light of current events, our timing is strange with this release. A warning for content involving suicide (and metaphorical Hitlers).

Dr. Francis Waxmann invented time travel in the summer of 2075. It broke the universe some sixty years earlier.

…rubber bands tied to rubber bands tied to rubber bands tied to rubber bands tied to…

Sitting in my room, at my desk, a fortress of textbooks in a semicircle around me, depleted paper coffee cups scattered like dead soldiers. I think it was nighttime. Jake’s stuff was in piles across the floor, but only on his side of the room. His was a methodical sort of disorganization; he always knew where everything was. My side of the room was fastidiously neat, but I could never find a damned thing. Yin and yang. I don’t think these things are accidental.

The portal opened behind me with a little gasp and I turned, nerves honed lancet-sharp by caffeine. The portal floated there, a sucking lamprey-mouth in reality, swirls of color licking the edges. Waxmann stood on the other side, a squat little man with interestingly parted hair. One hand held a smartphone-sized square of electronics, the other a gleaming silver pistol.

That hole in the universe in the foreground, the black O of a gun muzzle in the midground, Waxmann’s flat gray eyes in the distance. Portals nested in portals.

The third edition of Principles of Piezoelectrics was sailing through the air before I even knew I’d snatched it up and flung it, and Waxmann stumbled towards the portal, through it, hand first. An alligator snap of noise and there was a severed hand on the floor, still clutching the smartphone.

From somewhere in the house, Jake shouted: Hey, is everything cool back there?

When you discover time travel, the first thing you do is kill Hitler.

Hitler isn’t a person, though. Hitler is an idea. Hitler is the worst thing that ever existed, the evilest of all evils. In the first century, Hitler was the Roman emperor Nero. Four hundred years later, Hitler was Attila the Hun. Another millennium down the road and Hitler was Tomás de Torquemada.

In the year 2075, Hitler was a man named Clancy Rosemont. I don’t know what he did, exactly how many lives he destroyed; the doctor’s notes were vague and it’s hard to Google someone who won’t be born for seven years. What I know is that Rosemont was, at one point, the evilest of all evils. Right before a portal opened up in his bathroom and Waxmann put a bullet in his skull.

And then what? Hitler is dead, what do you do next?

You go down the list of history’s greatest monsters. Man by man, execution by execution.

Actual Hitler was number five on the list. I was number four.

The bullet slammed through the portal, shimmering as it passed, wisps of another reality leaching through in its wake. It struck the belt this time. Bullseye. Jake dropped to the floor, gasping, clutching at his throat. The hole in space collapsed, but I thought I saw him look up for one moment. Maybe he saw me. Maybe he understood. Or maybe he just chalked it up as a near-death hallucination.

Imagine you draw a dot on a top, then set it spinning. Put it on carousel. Put the top and the carousel on a bigger carousel. Now fire the whole mess out of cannon and try to map the motion of that original dot. What you have is a simplified version of what you’re doing right now as you fly through space, whizzing about the Earth, around the sun, around the galaxy, cutting through a space that’s been expanding at near the speed of light for fourteen billion years. Now try mapping it through time, down to the nanometer, down to the picosecond. You’ll need a computer more powerful than anything on modern-day Earth by a couple orders of magnitudes.

Or you can make do with Doc Waxmann’s smartphone.

It also plays Tetris.

My own personal Hitler was Jake’s suicide. We were inseparable growing up, sharing a room even when Mom’s financial situation improved enough that we could’ve each had our own. We spent long summers blasting cans with our BB guns, learning to read lips so we could hold silent conversations during church. Wrestling in the living room until Mom told us to knock it off already, then waiting until she left so we could do it some more, only quiet and sneaky-like.

I followed Jake to college, but something had happened after he left. In those two years between his high-school graduation and mine, we never really saw one another. We talked on the phone less and less frequently. He went from darkly sarcastic and coolly cynical to just dark, and just cynical, never laughing anymore, never smiling. After I arrived at the university, I lived with him for another eighteen months, sharing a room again. I thought he’d just lost his sense of humor, as though laughter was something you outgrew, like afternoon cartoons, or accidental erections during homeroom.

I came home one day and found him hanging by his neck in the doorway of our shared walk-in closet, my tidy piles on his left, his clutter on the right, and the exclamation mark of his body driving right between the two. He’d used a belt. The body was still warm.

I don’t know what my Number Two Hitler would’ve been. You can really only fathom one Hitler at a time. Maybe Dad walking out on us when we were still little. Maybe Queensrÿche breaking up.

Time travel wasn’t so much time travel as alternate-reality generation. Think Back to the Future. Think Biff Tannen and sports almanacs. Making new timelines spontaneously, everything a copy of a copy of a copy. Hitler’s there one moment, and then he never existed, and suddenly the universe has to patch the hole.

There was something about wormholes, too, something about quantum, something about Many Worlds. Doc Waxmann’s digital logbook wasn’t annotated, but I doubt I could have deciphered the references even if it had been.

The smartphone actually was a smartphone. A modified one, little patches of electronics soldered to it, a few custom apps in its inventory. The app for generating a stable, localized wormhole connecting our universe to a spontaneously-generated alternate universe was called Timehole v2.71. I thought it was a pretty good name.

The logbook started with technobabble about how the whole thing worked. Musings on the schematics of the room-sized machine that would generate the portals, musings on how the construction was proceeding.

Eventually, Waxmann ran his first trial. It involved a sandwich. The sandwich did not fare well. There would be many more trials.

I opened the first portal accidentally. Flopped in the chair in my room, the side Jake had once occupied still empty. The fourth edition of Introduction to Kinematics that I’d hurled at Waxmann was still splayed on the floor. I poked at the icons on the touchscreen just to see what they did; the classic arcade games were largely intact, but most buttons did nothing but flash dejected Network Not Found messages.

A tap on the Timehole icon, though, a few half-read screens of text and a hiss of air—and I was staring at the back of my head through a fist-sized hole in reality.

A portal can stay open for a maximum of twelve seconds. A portal collapses if an object of excessive momentum passes through it. There were rules—of course there were rules, there are always rules. Some made sense, others were arcane declarations like MAXDIAM_100 and MINDIST_25 and PORTFIX_3 that I understood somewhere between very little and not at all.

When Waxmann successfully murdered his Number One Hitler, he took a lot of notes and drank a lot of alcohol. The first secret, he wrote, was finding that perfect point in spacetime and placing a portal right there, right at some pivotal moment in history. Say, in a certain bathroom in a certain hotel. Say, three months and two days and five hours and seventeen minutes and 53.1823 seconds before your target is going to initiate a sequence of events that kills twenty million people. The smartphone did most of the heavy lifting as far as that went; the magic box in Waxmann’s lab did the rest.

The second secret was probably very important, but it had been typed by someone very drunk. I refuse to judge, though. I got drunk, too, the first time I killed my own Number One personal Hitler. And the second time, and the third time.

Some Hitlers just won’t stay dead.

On my inaugural mission, I opened a portal six inches away from Jake’s face, three seconds after he’d kicked out the chair. Bulging eyes, fat tongue swelling in his mouth, yellow snot bubbling from his nostril. He saw me, but I don’t know if he saw me. I don’t know if anyone in that position sees much of anything.

Twelve seconds later, the portal snapped shut, and I didn’t touch the smartphone for a few hours. I just sat there in the pre-dawn light in my half-cluttered room, a bunch of books and some leftover pizza on my desk, a bottle of Smirnoff in one sweaty fist, Waxmann’s severed hand rotting in the corner.

My next attempt landed the portal two minutes pre-death, a few feet off to the side, and I screamed the full twelve seconds before realizing that sound didn’t travel through the portal. After the portal closed I screamed at the room, screamed at Jake, screamed at Waxmann’s stupid, rancid fist.

That didn’t accomplish much, either.

Doc Waxmann’s second assassination went down more easily, and he was ostensibly sober during the post-game. A major change in the timeline, the untimely death of a genocidal mass murderer—it slams into you pretty hard. Black-out hard. When he woke up, he had new memories. He had all the old ones too, but the old ones were like a movie you’d watched a million times. You can recite all the lines and visualize all the plot points, but it’s just this story you heard. It’s just make-believe.

Once upon a time, a very bad man killed a lot of people, and everyone lived unhappily ever after. Roll credits.

Jake’s gun was stashed in our closet, three feet away from where he killed himself. I was a pretty good shot; I split the belt just as he kicked out the chair. As the bullet sucked the portal closed behind it, I could see him tumble to the floor, and I knew past-me would get to him in time, no way could he rig up the belt again before past-me showed up.

I waited for the sledgehammer crash of my reality being overwritten, but it was really more of a flyswatter.

Once upon a time, a very sad man tried to hang himself with a belt. It didn’t work out very well. So he used his gun.

How bad do things have to get before non-existence is the best possible solution?

After you’ve sat in a room for couple of days, not eating, not bathing, trying to reverse a suicide that happened six months ago, you ask yourself all kinds of questions.

How long is the battery life on this smart-phone thing, anyway?

How does this gadget still work when the actual time machine doesn’t even occupy the same universe?

Is that really Jake I hear talking in the next room, or is it a phantom, or a memory, or something else entirely?

Eventually it came down to timing. Wait until he’s already hanging-dangling-strangling and then BLAM, sever the belt, and now he’s stunned. Can’t get to the gun, can’t get to the pills, just enough time for past-me to arrive and call 911, get Jake to a hospital where they can patch him up, good as new.

And they all lived happily ever after, roll credits.

For certain definitions of ever.

For certain definitions of after.

By the time he knocked off Hitler Number Three, Waxmann was a pro. One trip back, bang, wait for the shockwave of alternate history, off to the pub for a rum-and-Rogers, whatever that was.

He’d been wrong about the true nature of spacetime, he wrote. It wasn’t copies of copies of copies, there was no spontaneous generation of alternate realities, and how monstrously silly of him to suppose otherwise.

Everything was already there, see, every possible timeline weaving through the multiverse in an infinity of infinitely-long strands. The magic box just created a link from one possible universe to another. Shoelaces tied to shoelaces tied to shoelaces.

Also, he wrote: Very important! Utmost and paramount! The links are permanent. The wormholes close, but they never close-close. They persist, like scars. Too close together and they get tangled. They choke the life out of reality, making kinks, tears. Travel back to the same time twice, and who knows what might happen?

I didn’t know this at the outset. I didn’t read this bit until after.

For certain definitions of after.

Never gaze into the abyss, for the abyss might also gaze into you. And it might be wearing your face. And it might be aiming a pistol.

Again.

And again.

The hardest part was visualizing how the smartphone had come into my hands. When Waxmann will/would/had Rube-Goldberged his device into my lap, what would that look like, from the outside? A remote control stretching back through the hole it had just opened in the cosmos, connected to the magic box across space and time, reality twining around itself. Like someone trying to pull themselves through their own belly button.

Waxmann never realized that the portals were less like shoelaces and more like rubber bands.

I only know this because I heard it from future-me, but then future-me told me a lot of things. Things I couldn’t hear, but I could read on future-me’s lips. I could see future-me pleading with me from some other when.

Future-me was the one who suggested one final portal, right in the temporal center of the whole mess. Throw up one last portal right in the middle of when-where and watch it snap all the other portals, make it like it had never happened, and everything springs back to normal. Put it up right in between Jake kicking out the chair and Jake’s heart pumping out its final beat.

Jake was sitting across the room when future-me mouthed this plan to me from inside the portal. Jake in his chair, cramming for some final. Or Jake wasn’t there and never had been. There and not there, done and undone, everything shimmery and feather-edged.

The Jake who survived sometimes smiled, sometimes joked. We sometimes had fun. And sometimes he told me I should never have saved him at all, that he wished it had all stopped fast at the end of a leather belt. Maybe these were all the same Jake, but maybe some were different. With an infinity of Jakes, at least some of them must be happy.

Do this, future-me had said, or it all falls apart. The multiverse collapses on itself. Reality will not just cease to exist, it will never have been at all.

Somewhere, somewhen, there will still be a Jake, and we will be together, and we will be happy. We’ll get married, have families, have barbecues and family get-togethers, laughing over beers or wine coolers or rums-and-Rogers.

Even if I never see any of that, it doesn’t mean it’s not out there.

The bullet tore through my jaw. If I look closely, I can see a tooth embedded in the sheetrock on the far wall, a fleck of white in a mess of strawberry jam.

This final-me appeared just as I was about to key in one last portal, fingers hovering over a screen that was dimmer than it had been three/five/seventy days ago. Waxmann’s hand was black with ants.

I stared at future-me through the portal, barely visible in some preternatural dimness. I stared at the gun future-me was pointing, black or maybe chrome or maybe slate gray.

You can’t do this, he mouthed from across time.

I have to, I mouthed back. Just this one last portal. If I don’t, everything ends. Everything ceases to exist. If I don’t do this, there won’t be anything left.

I know, he said.

As he spoke, I noticed that something was very wrong on his side of the hole. Angles were off. Things seeped and shifted. I could see both his face and the back of his head at the same time, like a Mercator projection.

He fired, and half my face disappeared in a crimson spray.

My finger still floats above an Enter key specked with dots of gore.

How bad do things have to get before non-existence becomes the best possible solution?

I guess I’ll find out.

By day, Jeff Hemenway analyzes data for the state of California. By night, he still analyzes data, but he doesn’t get paid for it and people ask him to please stop. Somewhere in there, he finds the time to write. His work has appeared previously in such venues as Daily Science Fiction and in the award-nominated horror anthology, Dark Visions.

Browse the Personals:

The One They Took Before, by Kelly Sandoval – Rift opened in my backyard. About six feet tall and one foot wide. Appears to open onto a world of endless twilight and impossible beauty. Makes a ringing noise like a thousand tiny bells. Call (206) 555-9780 to identify.

Ellie and Jim vs. Tony “The Nose,” by Eden Robins – The afterlife resembles nothing so much as an old-fashioned automat. Just this long, narrow, possibly endless room. One wall is lined with shining chrome drawers and those tiny, cloudy windows where you can catch glimpses of sandwiches with wilted lettuce and sometimes more grotesque things, like gall bladders. A big oaf dressed like a 1920s mobster looms over the cash register and is forever giving you the stink-eye, like you might try to jimmy your way into the drawers and steal his gall bladders. The automat only takes quarters and wouldn’t you know it, I forgot my purse.

Methods of Divination, by Tara Isabella Burton – But visions are not prophecies, he told me. Prophecies come true. I sat him down and told him to tell me everything, and promised I would tell him what it meant. “There is a place,” I told him, “where time runs back on itself, where parallel lines converge, and where visions become prophecies. Where you will be not alone. There is a place where everything is reconciled, and the great mountains that cover you in shadow will be made flat before you. The valleys that make you dizzy when you teeter on their edges will be brought to your feet when you walk. There, you will understand your visions.”

He first learned to speak sitting outside their windows at night. A veil of kitchen or living room light above, watching the shadows of suburban rose bushes and apple trees drift in the yard as he listened. Family dinner. A TV. A radio. Two lovers screaming at each other. An old man talking to a brightly colored bird. The words were too soft for his mouth, and his mandibles ached as he whispered a garbled, carapaced version of human speech to himself and to the washed-out sky. In the direction of his lost home.

Bath. Cracker. Day. Shooter. Grace.

He ate dogs and cats those first few weeks. He slithered through bushes and sewers in a rush of dark limbs and shining black exoskeleton. He stole clothes, and learned to stand in a way that hid the shape of his body. But nights, he would return to the windows. These square lives were his churches of humanity.

I feel lethargic. Let me see your phone. I believe you. Are the children sleeping?

He mimicked sounds. The scent of faraway rain and wet grass was wildly exotic. And his eyes always on the invisible stars. Meaning would come later.

When he could speak, he spoke with an accent no one could quite identify. They always assumed he was from some form of wasteland. The unpopulated plains of Siberia. The crumbling stone battlefields of the Middle East. The blood-soaked sands of African apartheid. Their ignorance astounded him. The way they wanted him to be tragic in some way, to bare something for them. He wanted to please them, so he tried.

“I am from far away. Very sad place,” he said in his exoskeletoned English. It did make him sad to think of it, but not for the reasons people assumed. He was interviewing for a job sorting mail for a small delivery company. He had taken the name Asunder because it sounded foreign and hard in English, and people reacted to it almost with a kind of pity. His many limbs were wrapped around his long body in a kind of lonely hug. One set of limbs extended through the arms of his trench coat, and he walked on another two sets in a wobbly facsimile of a human gait. He looked very tall and thin, with bony, strong arms.

“Don’t matter to me if you’re from the damn moon,” the company man said. He was dressed in red plaid, and was greasy and distended, like a balloon. And the sight of him made Asunder giddy. The man was beautiful and bizarre. Asunder wanted to shiver in delight, but the clicking sound would have disturbed the man. “Can you work nights? By yourself?”

Asunder could.

Work was a blessing. He shed his coat and hat and scarf and baggy pants and stretched his many sets of limbs and rolled the many joints along his body. The satisfying scraping of his armor. The scent of ink and paper. He hissed with pleasure. Then he dragged the large sacks of mail and sorted them into smaller sacks and bins in a blinding flurry of dark limbs. In that time, he felt free and high, like the tireless circumlunar runners or the Aurora canyon divers of his home. There was a kind of high that could only be achieved in exhaustion or in free fall. He would finish his work in an hour, sometimes less, then would pick through the envelopes and read the addresses and names, especially of the red-and-blue-bordered international envelopes.

Bian, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Ada, Dresden, Germany. Ammon, Alexandria, Egypt. Carlos, Mexico City, Mexico.

Asunder imagined he was from these places. These letters were to him. Sometimes he would carefully unseal and read them. He was sitting on a terrace in Egypt, watching the red sun disintegrate the horizon, and an old lover in America was thinking of him. Or his daughter was sending him money for his medication and for masa and oil. Or it was snowing outside, and the lights of Dresden were illusory and cold. The barrier between himself and his home shrank to the thickness of a single sheet of paper, through which he could see the lights of his city, deep red and white.

When he ran out of interesting letters and got bored he would leave. Wrap himself in his human guise and wander around holding himself. It was cold, and the delicate streetlights made him want to shiver and click his mandibles in appreciation. The 24-hour markets, brilliant on their corners. The threads of cigarette smoke drifting from the bars made him dizzy. The knock of his almost-empty shoes, two sets of thin, strong limbs jammed into the ankles of each, on the pavement was solid, and reassuring. Sometimes he sat in a diner and ordered coffee, which he drank with a straw pushed up through the folds of his scarf.

“Good night,” he said to the waitress. She smiled, but said nothing, and he set down his coffee. She was older and had loose skin and a lisp, which he guessed embarrassed her, though he thought there was a kind of beauty in the way words slid out of her mouth like the way far-off taillights would sometimes slide and twinkle and smear against the night.

The coffee was bitter, but he soaked it in sugar. The radiating heat from the cup excited him, and he touched it, then moved his limb away, like a child. He tried to get the waitress to talk with him.

“I am from far away,” he said.

“Isn’t everybody?” she said, and her sliding words made him hiss softly.

At dawn he walked to the butcher’s shop and bought three pounds of raw meat. It was so available here. On his home, they farmed fleshy, tuber-like animals for the protein and ate worms and other small, burrowing creatures with fur like crinkled steel. He tried not to think about it, because it made him nostalgic and melancholy, but he could not control his dreams.

His planet was iron-red and covered in good soil. Loam and clay, made warm by a very close star. The soil was thick and very good for digging and sleeping in. The smell was rich, and not unlike the scent of bad diner coffee. He was a scientist there, and a rocket pilot, and a cartographer of the stars. He had many dozens of children and lovers, all of whom had seen him off many years ago. Sometimes, when he felt very lonely waiting for a bus or reading undeliverable mail, he imagined descending from the yellow clouds of his home world, in his repaired saucer, and the red land glowing in the light. The many-legged shadows of his family still waiting for him. Rushing across the plains to greet him.

During the day, when thick clothing was less acceptable, he retired to a rented storage shed where his saucer was stashed. He did his best to work on it with human tools and parts that were fragile and that sometimes bent between his limbs in frustration. He would like to go home, but knew this was likely impossible. His saucer had malfunctioned in-warp, and it had taken all he had as an engineer and pilot to control-crash it into the shallows of a warm sea on a livable planet. The Earth’s moon was high that night, terrifyingly white and pitted. He dragged his ship ashore on a fine beach in a place they called Florida, spitting salt water and gnashing his mandibles. His species could lift many times their own weight, and he dragged the saucer with his bare limbs, random growths of red coral cracking beneath him as he half swam toward the shore. The air was thick and sweet with sand and beach grass, and he lay out on a strange and beautiful beach and shook and thought he was dying.

There was no way home now. The tools and materials he could acquire were strikingly primitive. He was lonely and strange, as outsiders always are, especially in foreign lands, but that was all right, because he was also alive.

“Alive,” he said in his battered language, drawing out the fine edges of the word. That should have been his name.

He chewed meat in one pair of his limbs, and tried to weld a steel composite sheet to the nano-carbyne hull of the saucer with another. With a third pair, he carefully examined a map in the almost-dark—he had very good vision—and circled electronics and computer stores he knew were open late where he might speak with someone and order a new set of computer processors, which he would try to reverse-engineer and connect to the saucer’s nav systems. With a final pair of limbs he held himself, which was becoming a habit. It was very dark in the storage shed, but the sparks from the welding torch changed the place into something wild and alive. The sparks pumped veins of shadow and light across the walls like a kind of imaginary heart, which madly refused to stop beating.

Ryan Row lives in Oakland California with a beautiful and mysterious woman. His work has been previously published, or is forthcoming, in Bayou Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, The Sierra Nevada Review, and elsewhere. He is a winner of The Writers of the Future Award and holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. You can find him online at ryanrow.com.

Other Alien Excursions:

Black Planet, by Stephen Case – Em did not dream the world. When the lights went out and the absence of her brother in the room across the hall became palpable, it was simply there, hanging in the space above her bed. She would stare at its invisible form, spinning silent and unseen, until she slept.

Monsters in Space, by Angela Ambroz – When I think oil rig, I think big metal Viking onslaught in the night. I think tower of the gods, fucking Valhalla, and a screeching guitar solo. My eyeballs of imagination are compelled to perceive beautifully inky black skies, inky black seas, inky black oil. It is, in short, inky black badassery.

We Take the Long View, by Erica L. Satifka – The snow crunches under our boots as us-in-Devora and us-in-Mel trace our way through the Forest-That-Thinks. We pause, waiting for directions. That way. Sunlight pierces through the low-slung clouds. The Forest speaks again and there’s a picture in our minds of the Very-Big-Wrong and the image of a landing site appears in our head. We have not thought of landing sites for a very long time

Save

Cloud Forest

On her second day studying in the Monteverde, Arminae Ganit stared at damp sky framed by beech leaves and fiddleheads and wished she could photosynthesize. She touched fingertips to the thick loam at her feet. Moist air slicked her cheeks and dampened her t-shirt so her pack’s straps rubbed at the skin beneath. The forest’s shifting clouds dappled Arminae’s hands dark and light. She imagined her fingers exuding roots; her hair, fruit and leaves.

“Very unscientific,” she scolded under her breath. Her father, a poet, might have appreciated the thought, but Arminae aspired to science, was already training her mind away from myth, toward analysis and exacting data. Still, she smiled to think of this particular transformation’s direct benefits: To not need to crouch to pee while most other students on this research trip stood and marked the leaves; to become impervious to the damp; to not hear colleagues chewing their dinner, grinding meat with their molars. To acquire skin that abraded her classmate’s touch—a hand on a shoulder, nothing meant by it, an accident—or that trapped his fingers in unyielding wood.

Laughter nearby broke her reverie. “I’m serious,” a young man said, punching the arm of his friend. “Gray warts all over his skin, looked like an Ent or something. Gross. Like an allergic reaction.”

The sound of a thin waterfall struck the undergrowth.

“That’s not what I heard.” The other laughed. “I heard he got it from a girl.”

When they were gone, Arminae rose, brushing dirt from her fingers as if they’d never be clean. She placed a palm against the beech beside her. Skin like bark; got it from a girl. Rumors and myth, not data.

Arminae pulled a notebook and pencil from her bag and began sketching. She ignored the boys; traced the structure of bark and leaf, the web of connections. She wrote oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen below then sketched the tree’s three elements, the chemical makeup—not elements like sun and rain and wind. She committed the beech to line and memory instead of rumor and myth.

Once back at her midwestern college, she dropped her mud-stained bag on her apartment floor and video-chatted her parents in London. Learned so much. Very beautiful. Everyone was nice. Her hands sketched carbon structures in the air instead of leaves. Far away, her father nodded, her mother listened. The distance between them contracted, and Arminae felt their happiness through the screen; was warmed.

Palisander

In a Northeastern university physics lab, enormous roots tore up the linoleum. A canopy of Dalbergia nigra blooms pressed against the ceiling, broke windows.

“I don’t know whether to call an arborist or the police,” the dean said. The janitor who’d found the tree shrugged and didn’t respond. The dean kept talking. “Graduate students sometimes work very late, did no one see anything? This is an outlandish prank.”

Rumors spread that it was more than a prank: a student worked so hard, they’d rooted to the spot; someone’s experiment had gone gravely wrong; a seed, planted years ago, had sprouted in another dimension and grown into this one. Everyone would get an A for the semester.

Over the course of a week, most of the lab’s students came to the doorway to see the extent of the foliage. Their professor filed a damage report and finally told the dean, “I caught a graduate student dozing here last week. He hasn’t shown up for work since. He abandoned his notebooks. His research. He was … sensitive. But I do not see him behind this.” The professor gestured at the tree, and at the workmen cutting it from the floor.

The rosewood was valuable, even so.

Our woods were transformed into shelter and fuel.

Trees became houses and furnishings and the cardboard boxes that bore the furnishings to fill the houses, all stacked neatly where trees had once rooted. We began lopping trees at odd angles, splitting their crowns to give cables and networks safe passage.

Wires, streets, and intersections seamed the once wild hills. The valleys divided in neat grids filled with brown and gray boxes and colonial blue trim. The cardboard containers were delivered by 5:00 p.m. or earlier. It was orderly, tight. The very air could barely breathe.

The dreams started then. The tree-dreams, the vine dreams.

Laurel

What it took for Sam to turn into a laurel tree was a river dream.

Curled up on his futon, he’d been mulling differential equations and next week’s midterm when his eyelids drooped. He pulled his duvet over his head while his roommates Benjor and David watched a fishing show at peak volume in the next room.

In Sam’s dream, numbers glittered blue-white starlight over rushing water. Fish leapt and a river chuckled and echoed across the dream and Sam leaned into the beauty of it. His dream fingers reached up to the number-stars and his toes stretched rough and knobby until they rooted through the duvet with soft ripping sounds and crumbled the apartment’s old plaster down to the slats and chicken wire.

He woke thirsty and stiff. Panic ran his limbs like a cold breeze.

There’d been years of rumors on the Internet, mostly debunked, then a few brief news clips from faraway places. Those came mostly on weekends, when no one paid attention. And once the photos of bark-skin men and that woman whose hair turned to vines got out? Proliferation: Garish images from safely distant rural locations accumulated beneath Sam’s computer’s placid screen.

But no one Sam knew had ever woken up as a tree.

He shivered when his bark sloughed in patches. At the memory of late-night dissection videos from those distant places; ones he’d viewed surreptitiously online, some nights. Last night too, for a moment.

Sam didn’t want to be dissected.

To hide a laurel tree in a fourth-floor Boston walkup was nearly impossible. Sam’s two roommates made jokes and threatened to use him for a gaming table, but they watered him. They told his teachers Sam had flu and they patched the wall with dirt.

Dreams used to spread like myth and rumor. Tendrils and smoke.

Now they rolled like streets moving out into the country. Long tongues of influence, leading permanence, like city lights seen from space, reaching in neat blocks for the dark.

A child dreamt of petals while his parents dreamt of roots. A pilot remembered where a mother planted rosemary. A whispered word became a month-long corridor of trunks, of soft bark, and starlit rivers.

“I dreamed that too,” your lover said the morning after you mentioned the gnarled roots of your dream, which were all you could recall.

Rosewood

Arminae, after two years and a hundred calls home, delivered a thesis on flavonoids in cloud forests: Ruellia Macrophylla from South America, Nothofagus Fusca from New Zealand. Her parents knew Ovid and finance, myths and money, but still, she tried to sketch the structure, drawing a ladder in the air: Twenty-one carbons, twenty-four hydrogens, ten oxygens! She told them everything.

In the lab, she modeled carbon spines and cellular signaling. She kept her gaze on her faraway trees and the messages they hid in their cells. Still felt her skin prickle when her mentor passed by.

“I can recommend you,” Dr. Vini said more than once, age-spotted palms flat on his old, rosewood desk. Then he turned his hands up, an invitation. Pink, lined skin, soft with paperwork. “But you must focus on our research.” His focus, not hers: Inosculation: when plants grafted to one another, veins and roots signaling and tangling until they were one. More recently, if plants and other organisms might graft to humans.

Philemon old and poor / Saw Baucis flourish green with leaves, and Baucis saw likewise. Arminae remembered her father reciting Ovid at the dinner table, the wrath of gods denied turned on unkind villagers; the rewards for being kind. She wavered. Tried to break her choices into data. But her professor pressed. “What kind of scientist will you be?”

Her skin was not bark. Blood rushed anger and confusion to her cheeks. Her parents’ pride fell away like petals onto water. She knew she could not pass this last test, but refused Vini’s upturned palms anyway.

“I would rather,” she began.

“I thought,” she started again.

Already, he’d passed her their paper on paired trees and transplant research, where he was first author, Dr. Vini, and she, second, Dr. Ganit.

She set nothofagins and phenols aside, kept out of arm’s reach, a constant state of flight. Her smile grew impervious. She published and wrote weekly notes to her parents to tell them of her studies, or her travels, ink spines of linked letters on pressed white leaves: I am fine, I am doing well for myself. I am busy. She rarely called.

She ignored the pale trees whispering beyond her lab window: birch, not beech. Touching the glass with gnarled fingers.

Myth passed from one generation to the next, shaping memory, uprooting knowledge. On a hillside, by an ancient temple, a linden and an oak intertwined their branches, but did not embrace; they inosculated.

A movie of trees with faces, with moss-hung beards. An army of trees rising up on the stage, in music. Our poets always knew these trunks and roots for more than furnishings.

Magnolia

Even Dr. Ganit’s letters grew sparse—a few a year. She’d published more, become an expert, gained tenure far away; her small apartment at the end of the world filled up with papers and clippings. A clearing on her bedside table held their photo: the two who’d joined their cells to make her, holding hands. One night she dreamed them planted in the dirt of a cloud forest.

Her first call went unanswered. She left a message and, distracted, she let time pass before she tried again. Marked revisions on her first phenols paper since moving to the end of the world, replied to reviewer’s questions. Called again. No response.

In a café near her Dunedin classroom, a wall-hung television blared, “An entire Melbourne neighborhood overrun by Panicum effusum—a tumbleweed—residents missing.” The screen showed explorers in headlamps, plowing through a weed-filled house. Dr. Ganit sketched four carbon molecules on a napkin, the base structure of the weed. If carbon dioxide can be transformed to organic material, can organic material be transformed too?

“A house in Wales filled with nettles, owners disappeared,” the television replied. A headline ticker flashed news of trees growing from apartment windows in London.

Ganit booked flights from Dunedin to Auckland, then home to London. I am fine. It is cold here, and gray, but the plants are wonderful, she’d written once.

Tired and gritty from the transit, she pushed the door of her parents’ flat open, pressing hard. The apartment windows had been shut tight, and the steaming air was thick with the sweet scent of blooms. Of plants gone weeks without water, without a phone call—

—until she’d finally found the time

—and the call had never connected

—and she’d flown.

Her parents’ weight, spun together into a double-trunked magnolia, blocked her entry.

She begged them wake, squeezing through the gap, hands pleading, pressing, like a fault-filled god in a myth, until the ambulance came.

“Can’t fit trees.” The attendants shook their heads. Removed their gloves. One touched her shoulder. “They’re beautiful like that, at least. Egg magnolia. Rare in this climate. There are worse ways to go.”

Broad petals of cream-colored flowers had darkened and fallen long before she arrived. Curled now, yellowed like wood shavings, collapsing to sawdust.

Tears streaked her face, the top of her collared shirt, soaking the cotton dark blue in patches.

She yelled until the attendants left and the landlord came with an axe.

/What kind of tree would you be?/ one friend asked another in a chat window. Glowing square on a lit screen. The real sunset pressed its face against the glass in reverse.

/A Baobab/ typed the other in darkness. It was midnight, there.

/A Maple/ typed the first.

They traded emoji that didn’t look like either kind of tree. They smiled together, across the night’s distances.

Rose

When Eleni slept as a child, she’d dreamt of flying, or sailing, until one time she dreamt a blackberry bush fruited with eyes, picked at by birds.

After that, she ran every day until she fell, exhausted, into bed, and slept dreamlessly. An adult now, she ran ten miles daily with her spouse.

She ran from her shadow. She ran right out of her skin sometimes.

“I am tired,” she said, “I don’t want to fear my heartbeat, my dreaming cells, my bones.” She rubbed her skin soft and braided her shower-damp hair down her back, then turned to find her spouse snoring.

Months later, in the maternity ward, she fell asleep nursing. Her new baby, unfamiliar and squalling like a gull.

They dreamed the same milk-dreams, Eleni knew, because she saw the baby in them, blooming. When Eleni woke, she was a rose-strung hedge, and filled the room. The doctors had to cut the thorns away to get the baby out.

Before the dreams began, there was art and myth, Arminae’s father said. Nymphs turned to laurel and poplar in exquisite refusals. Kind Baucis and Philemon became twined oak and linden.

Now, not one dreamer ever turned back. Hair hardened into knots and whorls. A few kept their mouths, their eyes.

/It doesn’t hurt/ Sam blinked in Morse while Benjor carved their initials in his trunk. /I can hear others. There’s a network between sky and ground. They whisper yes. They say come./

Swamp Maple

When Sam’s roommates left for Thanksgiving, they turned the humidifier full blast. They’d been dreaming for days about streams and the smell of loam. Couldn’t wait to get away from the crawling roots, the quiet rustling. Their grades had suffered.

Benjor headed south, to his grandparents, eleven hours on the interstate. He slept on the bus, a rolling dream of networks and circuits, exams and summer jobs in Silicon Valley or DC. When sunrise broke over the Blue Ridge, gilding the black hillsides, swamp maple roots ran the length of the coach and pushed greedily into the water tank.

David drove north all night, a 64-ounce Big Gulp sweating caffeine between his knees as he peered into the darkness. He reached the border awake and shaky as hell.

Hypotheses? A call went out. Dr. Ganit had plenty of research and data. She sent messages flying, sketched theories. From the end of the world, she caught her mentor’s notice again. She pictured inorganic carbons transforming like myths, like nymphs.

“I extrapolate from the evidence that pheromones may be triggering some commonality long dormant in our DNA,” she told an emergency committee broken into squares on her laptop screen. “We’re not too distant relatives from plants. Our cells signal, too. Bananas, for instance—though no one’s turned into one of those yet, have they?”

Dr. Vini, who led the call, ground his teeth. “It only seems like they’re turning. It could be fungal.”

She heard him ramping up an argument for drawing her back into the lab. Didn’t wait for it. “We’ll need to do tests. Set protocols. There’s a rational explanation. I’ll work with you.”

Saw him smile.

Sara and Bell

They’d run away one night while Bell’s parents watched a show, the screen glowing blue like a storm in a box. They’d run across the lawn and into the thin stretch of woods across the street and deliberately curled up below the last of the oak trees. They’d uncapped the Thermos of chamomile. They’d pulled Bell’s old wool blanket up around them and slipped from their clothes. The air had touched their skin and puckered it. The tea was warm on their lips. They’d whispered the things they’d said a thousand times to each other in their minds, always and never and forever. They’d slept in one another’s arms and when Bell woke to sunrise, Sara wound over Bell’s limbs and covered Bell’s mouth in creeper and Bell couldn’t fight for long. Sara hadn’t meant to grow so fast, bind so tight. She hadn’t meant it.

A Bee-Loud Glade

Dr. Ganit, in her lab at midnight, pushed “record,” retreated beyond the video screen and lay down on the Army cot.

No blanket.

Her mentor scowled remotely. “I’ll keep watch too,” he’d said. He liked to watch.

The timer ran as the scientist slept, a blinking red dot, two white colons, six digits in constant change. Sun filled Dr. Ganit’s small room after seven hours, five minutes, thirty-two seconds.

Her clock radio began to spell the news, each word in the perfect flesh of her ears an announcement that she’d failed to dream. Failed to change.

She felt the pull of her parents like longing; deep roots, or the spaces where roots had once been. She feared the dreams, but wanted to dream of them. She couldn’t remember their voices.

Her mentor, overnight, had grafted with the frame of his chair: mahogany over birch frame. Arminae did not want to guess at his dreams.

The news sounded panic; in a capital city, a vice president had become a stand of cornstalks, harvest-ready. An Italian soprano, a glade trapped beneath the deciduous tenor she’d lately been screwing, buzzing with bees.

Dr. Ganit flew to Bethesda, to the military’s best hospital, egg magnolia cuttings in her carry-on. She would help find a cure for dreaming if she couldn’t find one for trees.

Everywhere, dreamers turned, if they were lucky, to plants that fit their containers: the houses, apartments, and parked cars where they’d slept; to trees that broke hulls in motion if they were not.

People drank gallons of coffee in a bid to outrun sleep. Strained to keep moving. Collapsed and died from exhaustion, or slept and dreamed and changed.

One in a million, the scientists said. One in a thousand. Desperate parents pinched children awake. There was no cause. Drinking wine could stave it off. Drinking wine sped the process. One in a hundred.

Not one dreamer turned back; they stayed tree and vine, rock and hill.

Cuttings

Dr. Ganit moved Eleni and Sam and others like them to the NIH facility near Fort Meade. All concrete, with long windowed rooms edged with grow-lights, ringed with barbed wire.

A fleet of landscaping trucks threaded the highway. Homes and apartments receded. Some reached for their families with rustling leaves, saw segments of themselves put on slides, lit up on screens, pressed between pages of medical dictionaries.

She worked around the clock—no time for interviews. No dreams of photosynthesis permitted, transformation merely a structure, a dataset. The world depended on science. On Ganit finding the right question, and then the answer.

A dream of smoke. A dream of sun’s rays breaking through cloud to touch skin. A dream of snakes. Of a birthday. Of running and roots.

The news gave over to readings: children’s stories, poems, mythology, the Bible. The news played recordings from the London Symphony, the Beijing Philharmonic. Nothing live. The woodwinds echoed.

The Forest

A crowd waited outside Fort Meade’s boundary. They’d come, crazed with sleep-deprivation, hyped up on sugar, caffeine, and what amphetamines they could steal from the branch-tunneled hospitals. They came for answers, for a word with a scientist.

Dr. Ganit begged them to go away. She couldn’t think amidst their screams at night, however distant. At the thought of so many awake, for so long.

She tried distilling stronger pheromones. Injecting RNA drawn from her samples. She could remember the edges of dreams pulling at her, once, but nothing came for her now.

After a week of restless, dreamless sleep amidst the noise, Dr. Ganit woke to silence. Outside, a new forest, pressed against the barbed wire, reached for the concrete.

A few stragglers wandered among the trees, but Dr. Ganit didn’t go to them. She watched from the windows, until the stragglers, too, lay down.

She watched them dream, but couldn’t follow.

Grapevine

Dr. Ganit looked through her computer to other labs as her peers fell one by one. Their skin pulsed taut, then rough; trails of moss ran green veins from fingertip to neck; hair twisted with vines. She watched them turn to sedum; to rhododendron; to a willow beautifully gripping a cot.

She took more samples from the gardens that accumulated. Oak. Grapevine. She turned down the water to drive her living plants into stasis. Hoped that would buy time; hold the changes at bay.

Some days, careful listeners could hear whispers in the trees. A chuckle as a house uprooted and the branches within rose to the sky.

Creeper

After months, Dr. Ganit began speaking to the plants surrounding her like patients. None but the rose hedge listened much; they’d long since ceased answering her.

She only talked theories, cures. Never the right questions.

Dr. Ganit tried playing music. Classical. Rock. What remained of the news. In distant places chants of food riots.

She tried ignoring the plants, too. Not very scientific. They ignored her right back.

The plants waved tendrils, sent out slow shoots, to no notice. One—a still-fast creeper vine, despite the water shortage—tore angry holes in the speakers late one night. The music—classical, by Benjamin Britten—stopped.

In the silence, Dr. Ganit sometimes imagined her father’s voice, almost taunting: Apollo clasped the branches as if they were parts of human arms, and kissed the wood. But even the wood shrank from his kisses.

Her skin grayed, but didn’t patch over with bark. No vines grew in her hair. She replayed bad movies and ate strange food—the ration tins left open, the stale water—and slept like a beggar before the magnolia cuttings on her desk as dreams avoided her.

The cameras, left on, captured changes before the vines took their lenses. Anyone could view the live shots, direct-to-web. Anyone with eyes to see. Ears to hear.

Until there was nothing to cure.

Root and Carpel

After six months, Dr. Ganit forgot and left the grow lights on around the clock, let the fertilizer spill on the floor. Science had no answers and the elusive dreams were their own cure. The world was verdant and getting more so and that was that.

She wrapped herself in blankets and laid her cheek on the cuttings from London. She whispered “Where did you go?”

Her parents’ whispers echoed in her ears. So proud. So kind. She remembered their faces, finally, their encouragements. She remembered their dreams for her, her dreams for herself. Arminae closed her eyes.

She dreamed of magnolia carpels, ancient and sleeping; she dreamed of magnolia roots, rolling over floors and doorways. Through the lab window, smoke. The skylights turned dark, the grow-lights stayed on.

Breakthrough

Outside, vines tapped at the facility windows, pressed through foundation walls. Inside, tendrils spread across the form in the lab coat, a trunk, sprouting leaves and, from one pocket, a cluster of daylilies, tubers digging at the cold cement floor.

The lab’s watering system dripped and broke. Indoors, it rained.

The trees awoke and Eleni stretched her branches to the lab’s edges. Memories leached from her as she grew again, dreaming awake this time—a kiss became new buds; the soft spot on her baby’s skull and the smell of it, a cluster of rosebuds. Everything beyond the walls pulled at her, drawing her out. The hedge reached a window pane, tapping, then scraping at it. Pried the sill and stretched. Beyond the grate, seeds caught breeze and lifted, scattered.

The creeper pushed past and through rose thorns and was gone. Rude as ever, angrier too.

The laurel waited for the birds to come and pick its drupes clean. Magnolia pollen and petals clouded the breeze.

They were a river of roots, a star-dream, a rose hedge, magnolia blooms, grown beyond fear. A myth told to no one; vines wove through emerging orchards where fruit trees embraced sturdy ornamentals. Bushes sprouted from cardboard boxes, trees from furniture, and whole forests crowned over houses and factories. Roots and vines ungirded the hillsides and fell through the cracks in bare roadways, and everything escaped, until there was green, everywhere, green.

Fran Wilde’s work includes the Andre Norton and Compton Crook Award-winning, and Nebula Award-nominated, novel Updraft (Tor, 2015), the upcoming novel Cloudbound (Tor, 2016), and the novella “The Jewel and Her Lapidary,” (Tor.com publishing). Her short stories also appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny, and Nature. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, iO9.com, and GeekMom.com. You can find her on twitter @fran_wilde, and at franwilde.net.

Other Stories to Transform Your Day:

Palingenesis, by Megan Arkenberg – Every city has an explanation. A strike of coal or silver that brought the miners running, or a hot spring that holds the frost at bay. A railroad or a shift in the current. Most people say this city started with the river. The water is everywhere you look, sluggish and brown most seasons, bearing the whiskey-smell of peat out from the forest, and carrying nothing downstream except mats of skeletal leaves. Seven bridges straddle the river between First and Barton Road as it winds through a downtown of antique stores, the crepe-streamered American Legion, the purple house advertising tarot and palm readings. One of the bridges goes nowhere, ending four feet above the ground behind a solitary Chinese restaurant, and no one has ever been able to tell me what it used to reach. On the east bank, sitting mostly by itself between the paved river walk and the ties of an abandoned stretch of railroad, you’ll find the county art museum, a sliver of white concrete and glass.

In The Rustle of Pages, by Cassandra Khaw – Li Jing looks to where her husband lies snoring, already more monument than man, a pleasing arrangement of dark oak and book titles, elegant calligraphy travelling his skin like a road map. Li Jing allows herself a melancholy smile. The ache of loss-to-come is immutable, enormous. But there is pride, too. In the armoire beside the marital bed sleeps a chronology of her husband’s metamorphosis: scans inventorizing the tiling on the walls of his heart, the stairwells budding in his arteries. For all of the hurt it conjures, Li Jing thinks his metamorphosis beautiful, too.

Be Not Unequally Yoked, by Alexis A. Hunter – Things used to be pure inside me. Separated. When I was a boy, I was wholly a boy. When I was a horse, I was wholly a horse. Things used to be simple inside me. I was all one thing or I was all another. And the two only got close when the change was happening. But things aren’t so simple anymore. The lines inside me feel blurry, more and more every day. And as I sit here across from that pretty Beiler girl, all I can think about is how she smells like dew-damp clover. She’s got eyes as bright as bluebells, a smile like sunshine and I know that should make me feel something, but all I can think of is that smell.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save