Category Archives: Fiction

Blackpool, by Sarah Brooks

The Dead Man

He has chapped lips and a grinning red slash at his throat. He topples over the wrought-iron railings of the pier and into the cold northern sea, where the autumn waves are hungry to swallow him up. He dies in the early morning, when the lights of Blackpool are not on. Nobody sees him fall.

The Detective

The Detective saves the chocolate flake for last. The wind flicks drops of ice cream into his beard as the Ferris wheel takes him higher and higher above the pier and the waves and the town. It reminds him of shivery afternoons with his parents, how they bribed him with an ice cream to be good for just a few hours more. He licks around and around the flake until there is almost nothing left.

The Detective tries not to look down. The sand is greyish yellow and the water greyish brown. The height gives him a funny feeling in his stomach.

He has found clues; a ticket stub from Pleasure Beach, a smear of sweet-smelling ice cream. He seals up the clues in little plastic bags. However hard he tries he cannot hear any echo of the dead man’s last words on the wind.

The Detective has brought his dog with him. The dog is called Napoleon, for no particular reason. Scruffy, indecipherable, a dog that knows its own mind.

The Detective and his dog stand beneath the Ferris wheel and look over the railings at where the dead man fell. Blood stains the wooden slats of the pier. The tide is still in, but there’s been no body pulled from the sea. The Detective tries to imagine plunging into the cold depths. He tries to picture the dead man beneath the waves, looking up at the white moon of the wheel. But all the Detective can see is himself in the water.

He rubs the scar that stretches from just below his left eye to the corner of his lip; although he grows a beard to cover it up he can’t forget it’s there. His scar is from the Assassin’s knife. It itches when he is worried.

“Come on, let’s be off,” he says to Napoleon, who looks relieved. They go back home to their tall, thin house, where the Detective cooks an elaborate meal he shares with Napoleon, who has grown into something of a gourmand. That night the Detective dreams about the sea seeping into his bedroom through the carpet, about coral rattling like bones beneath his bed. In the morning there is salt on his lips.

The Assassin

The Assassin sits at her kitchen table and cleans her knife. When she is done she throws the knife high in the air and lets it fall. She throws it ten times, and ten times the knife lands point down in the wood of the table. She fights the urge to press the point into her finger, to see the smooth red pearl well up.

She tidies her living room and remembers to call her mother, who asks if she’s found a nice man yet. She runs a bath and reads a novel, the heat curling the pages. Afterwards, she moisturises. The Assassin has skin as smooth as silk.

That night the Assassin dreams about sand dunes, stretching away as far as she can see, the Marram grass scratching her knees, whispering something she can’t quite hear. She wakes with sand crunching between her teeth and sand mites on her pillow.

Interlude with Seagulls

Herring gulls circle, their wings white against the dirty sky, their eyes hungry, watching the town below. From up here Blackpool is always quiet, the houses neat as a toy town, the sand smooth and the sea still. Only the cries of the gulls tear through the air like a warning of danger below.

The End of the World

The Detective orders half a pint of bitter in the End of the World. The barman gives him a look. Through the pub windows the Detective can see the Ferris wheel on the pier. He scratches at his scar.

“Do you know this man?” he asks, placing a photo on the bar. It’s from the CCTV camera in the pier arcade, and shows a man in a long coat, collar pulled up, face grainy and indistinct. The Detective thinks it makes the man look dead already.

The barman looks at the photo. “Seen him about,” he says.

The Detective takes out his notebook and pen. “Got a name?”

He likes to find out their names. Especially when there is no body, when a name is all that is left.

The barman shakes his head. “We don’t ask questions here.”

The Detective writes this in his notebook and underlines it twice.

He sits at the bar all afternoon, feeding pork scratchings to Napoleon. Everyone is keen to help with his inquiries. He has six different names for the dead man before he has finished his second drink. Tommy, Charlie, Stefan. A builder, a taxi-driver, a school teacher. Luca, Antonio, Oliver. A hard man; a loner; a miser.

“He was a gambler,” says the Barmaid. She cries into the Detective’s glass and tells him the dead man was kind.

The Detective seals the tears into a little plastic bag. When he examines them later he finds that they are genuine. He takes out a tear and places it on his cheek. It is cool on his skin.

The Barmaid

The Barmaid’s name is Anya. The men who come to the End of the World tell her their stories. She pulls them pints of dark ale and they tell her all the ways that their hearts are broken. They tell her about all the bruises and all the black eyes. There is a pain in the Barmaid’s stomach that twists and twists as she pulls down the tap handle.

Speaking softly, the dead man told her he had lost something precious, that he’d lost it at cards. He had a look in his eyes that Anya recognised. “It’s only a matter of time,” he said.

At night the Barmaid dreams about flying.

The Casino

The Assassin is playing roulette in the casino. She wins and wins, turning each chip in her fingers, trying to feel its luck.

She has been pushing her luck for a long time and she wonders when she will finish winning. When the Detective walks right past her she sighs and places another bet.

The Detective is trying to find out what the dead man lost at cards. The casino is tight-lipped.

“We are not in the habit of divulging secrets,” says the Manager, a man with many secrets. The Manager knows what precious thing the dead man lost at cards, because he keeps it in a safe in his wood-panelled office. The dead man lost his luck. He went all-in against the house and lost everything. Now his luck is wrapped in velvet in the dark of the Manager’s safe. Sometimes the Manager takes it out and holds it to his ear to hear the pulse of the dead man’s luck beating in time with his own heart.

“‘I am sincerely sorry that we cannot help you further,” says the Manager. His expression is entirely sincere. When asked the dead man’s name he says it might be Karl or Patrick or Dmitry. The Manager cannot be expected to remember.

The Detective doesn’t gamble. He doesn’t believe in luck.

The Illuminations

All along the promenade, down the Golden Mile, lights hang between street lamps and in great tableaux three storeys high. A million bulbs light the October night, outshining the autumn moon.

Tourists drive by with their car windows open. Couples walk arm in arm, shivering at the strangeness of eating ice cream at night.

The Detective looks for clues in the lights but they do not reveal the dead man’s name.

Breakfast at Sam’s Cafe

The Assassin orders kippers because she likes to see if she will choke on the bones. She thinks it strange that she has never once had a fishbone stuck in her throat.

She sits at a table by the window, where she can see the marks her elbows have made on the Formica over the years. As she finishes her coffee she runs her fingers down the handle of the knife hidden in her coat. Sometimes she thinks she can feel the shine of the blade.

She checks her watch and looks out the window. The Detective walks by, so close that she could tap on the glass and he would hear it. The Assassin reaches out a finger. She thinks that today the Detective will turn his head and look in. Today has the feel of a special day. She places her finger on the glass and waits.

The Detective does not turn. He walks by, looking out towards the sea. The Assassin leaves her finger on the glass and when she takes it away there is a fingerprint, perfectly formed.

The fingerprint is still there when she leaves.

The Pleasure Beach

Remember, the Detective found a ticket stub. He gets in free to the Pleasure Beach when he flashes his warrant card. In Blackpool the dead come to the Pleasure Beach to ride the Big Dipper and the Ghost Train, leaving ghostly screams in the air when the Rocket loops the loop. The Detective rides the Log Flume and when he raises his hands at the final plunge he feels the cold touch of ghostly hands twining with his.

When he shows the dead man’s photo at the Pleasure Beach he is told that the man is called Lars, Kevin, Simon. Recognized by everyone, the dead man is given a different name each time.

The Detective looks through hours of CCTV footage, watching the dead man move through the park, sometimes looking straight into the camera. The Detective begins to think that the dead man is watching him back.

Just as the Detective is about to give up he sees a face he knows. He leans closer to the screen and scratches at his beard, feels the raised skin of his scar beneath his fingers. Remembers.

Something twists in his stomach. Fear, he thinks. Then he thinks; relief. It has been a long time but the Detective knows where he has to go.

The Fortune-Teller

On the promenade, in the Fortune-Teller’s caravan, the Assassin turns over the last card on the flowery tablecloth. The Fortune-Teller sees the card and goes pale. She shuffles the cards and makes the Assassin pick another one. The cheap gold bangles on her wrists shake. The Fortune-Teller is adept at lying but today her face betrays her.

The Assassin laughs. She pays twice what is asked even though the Fortune-Teller tries to press the money back into her hand. Outside the caravan the Assassin leans on the railings and looks out to sea. She breathes in deeply. She buys fish and chips and shares her chips with the seagulls and when it begins to rain she turns up her collar and sits in a bus shelter.

The Assassin waits for the sun to go down.

Confrontation on a Rooftop

The Detective and the Assassin face each other on the rooftop of a multi-storey car park. Rain whips at their faces. The lights of the Illuminations glow beneath them, making the night sky a murky orange.

A flash of lightning picks out the Assassin’s knife.

“I’ve called for back-up,” says the Detective, raising his voice above the rain.

The Assassin laughs. “You never call for back-up,” she says. In the lightning flash, her smooth skin is white as bone. She takes a step toward the Detective. The Detective takes a step back. His scar itches. He is so tired.

“Who was he?” he says.

The Assassin says, “He was just a man who lost his luck. He was nothing special. They never are. Some people win, some people lose, and that’s how it is.”

Thunder rolls.

The Detective shakes his head. “I don’t believe in luck.”

“Really?” says the Assassin.

A bolt of lightning strikes Blackpool Tower.

All the lights in Blackpool go out.

Interlude with Full Moon

There is a different darkness when the sea reflects nothing but the moon. The seagulls lift their heads from beneath their wings and look up, their eyes full of silver.

In the End of the World the drinkers lift their glasses to a man whose name they can’t remember.

In the casino, the house loses at last.

At the Pleasure Beach the ghosts watch their reflections in fun house mirrors.

The Illuminations, unilluminated, reveal bone and wire behind the lights.

The dead man lies beneath the waves looking up at the watery moon.

The End

Watch. The Detective and the Assassin are outlined against the sky. There is blood on their clothes and a knife lying between them in a pool of moonlight. But for the ragged sound of their breathing, there is no sound. The Detective and the Assassin watch the other’s every movement.

One steps away from the knife.

The other steps toward the knife.

They do not take their eyes off each other.

A last flash of lightning, and one figure picks up the knife, sending ripples through the moon. The one who picks up the knife must be the Assassin, because the Assassin must always have a knife. In the moonlight the Assassin’s beard is tinged silver-grey and his scar is a dark raised line. He looks older than he is. He tucks the knife into his belt.

The other, knife-less, buttons her coat. The Detective always has her hands in her pockets and a thoughtful look on her face. In the moonlight her skin is smooth as pearl.

They nod to each other. Then they walk in different directions, into the Blackpool night. This is the ending, the final scene. Moonlight, and a rooftop. And beyond the rooftop, the sea. But it is also a beginning. Another story is starting.

The Detective looks for clues, for chance and lost luck. When she loses at roulette she touches the soft skin of her cheek and smiles when she feels it is wet.

The Assassin looks for a barmaid who weeps real tears. He sits at the bar with his half of bitter and his dog curled up on the floor. He listens to the Barmaid’s stories and offers to buy her a pint. He tells her a story about a man falling from a Ferris wheel, a man with many names and no name, a man who lies beneath the sea and keeps his secrets to himself.
march-endof

sarahbrooks

Sarah Brooks grew up just down the road from Blackpool, then ran away to China, Japan and Italy. She wrote her PhD on Chinese ghost stories, and now lives in Leeds, where she teaches East Asian Studies. She is a graduate of the 2012 Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, and has had work published in Interzone, Strange Horizons, and Unlikely Story.

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Fiction, Issue 30

Red Mask, by Jessica May Lin

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Before she jumped, Feng Guniang used to tell me about her suicide, during our cigarette breaks when we danced at the Green Dream, her white-lacquered nails trailing against the web of her fishnet tights. We smoked in the shadowy corners behind the opium dens on Jiameng Street, where the lights from the neon advertising boards couldn’t touch us. The new opium dens are all styled like the old red mansions of the Ming Dynasty, complete with heavy doors twice as tall as we were.

“You come back, you know, if you wear a red dress.”

There were lengths of time when Feng Guniang would walk on the crumbling remnants of the Old City Wall at night wearing a short red qipao embroidered with golden phoenixes, balancing on the parapet barefoot, her arms spread out, teetering like a puppet. I used to beg her to come down. Sometimes there would be other people—strangers, noodle vendors, foreign rich men with fur-lined coats—and we would shout at her together, but she would always go on, laughing like she couldn’t hear us.

Most of the time there would be no one—not even me, on the days I couldn’t bring myself to see her. I danced the last shift alone when she disappeared at midnight, and long after I had wiped the rouge from my face and soaked my tired feet in warm water, I would see her dirty footprints on the white tiles leading into the back room, and hear her sobbing.

She had been the mistress of a German businessman who pulled her out of the river once. He never came to see her while she flirted with death, on the wall, but I saw him sometimes in the Green Dream. He sat at a table in the front right corner with a large group of foreign men, always facing the stage, his opium pipe meditative at the corner of his mouth, watching Feng Guniang. He bought her a mink coat that she would wrap around herself while she sang English lullabies.

When I knew her, Feng Guniang was the Marilyn Monroe of the new opium dens—the one that everybody wanted but nobody could have, and everybody was always trying to save. She had a beauty mark in the center of her forehead and bright green eyes—a gift from a Russian patron—that contained more life than was fair in our part of smog-ridden, overcrowded Shanghai. Her real name was Feng Jinling, but few remember that.

Her pussy opened like a peony, some of the customers tell me, when I sit at one corner of the stage alone and talk to them, long after she has died. They loved her more than me, and I was partially jealous, partially in awe. But I could never hate her, because she always needed us to save her. From the first day I met Feng Guniang, I could sense an empty space in her, filled with some silent wronging, that only expanded until she drowned in it.

I still see Feng Guniang’s ghost, in the old gardens and sponge rockeries on Jiameng Street, wearing her red qipao. She wanders through the bamboo groves of Yuyuan Garden, and cries through the weeping willows by the large goldfish pond. These garden elements are only an illusion, cast by a hidden projector in a rock, and sometimes I am afraid she is an illusion too, but I know those bright green eyes too well. She has kept her gift, even in death.

“Xiao You,” she says as she tries to clasp my shoulders, but her hands sink through my living skin like ice. There is despair in her voice. “Did they look for me after I was gone?”

Ghosts don’t cast shadows in the pond. When I look down at the water, I only see myself, talking to the ripples and the silver fins that flash by.

“You didn’t have to go,” I tell her. “They didn’t care.”

Feng Guniang came back to haunt the man she loved, who never left his tall, curly-haired German wife for her. Or at least, that’s what I choose to believe. She could’ve died and come back for many reasons, but more than she wanted to die, I believe she wanted to come back. Even as a ghost, she kept that stifled pain inside her—when I brought her steamed dumplings in a bamboo cage and sat with her by the pond with my knees drawn into my chest, drawing in the mud with sticks. I never talked to her, but sometimes she would sing.

There is no way to grow up in New China without feeling angry at something. Sometimes you are angry at what you cannot have, like Feng Guniang, who could not have her married German lover. Sometimes you are angry at things that are unfair, like how the Triads have taken over the water pumps in the capsule slums that crawl hundreds of stories into the air—so that half my month’s salary is spent on a single bucket of water. Sometimes you are angry because you don’t know better than to not be.

Anger in New China was a silent, bruised loneliness that nobody ever talked about. It bristled like the hairs along the spine of a cat, but it was invisible. People pretended not to notice.

Instead, there were opium dens, stuffed with maroon velvet cushions and curtains made from crimson gauze, staffed by porcelain-skinned women with red lips and qipao with high slits in the sides. There was a sex-and-drug euphoria to lose yourself in, so you could ignore how your sons and daughters were dying in overflowing hospital lines, or how the police would easily turn a blind eye as long as you had enough to pay for it. Those days in Shanghai, you were grateful for an excuse to drink your anger down with whiskey shots and exotic cocktails. I know because I served those drinks, in between the hours I spent on the stage.

“Come see the de-ribbed dancers at the Green Dream,” the Boss says to the crowds that pass by outside, the advertisement board drilled into his forehead flashing with my silhouette. “They have their eleventh and twelfth ribs removed, so that they can perform feats of flexibility so outrageous you won’t believe it until you see it. See how tiny their waists are in a corset.”

I wonder where my ribs are—what the Boss did with them after I gave them up as part of my contract. I wonder what happened to Feng Guniang’s ribs after she died, if they became immaterial and pale like her ghost body, or if they rotted slowly like fruit. I like to imagine my ribs are buried in a box somewhere, nestled in soft dirt, where they are safe from the poison of Shanghai.

I used to own a Tibetan mastiff named Happiness, who lived in my three-by-six capsule in the slum tower with me, but he ran away a month ago. I see him sometimes in the narrow alleys that run behind the convenience stores and bike shops of the first floor, which drip with water from laundry hung in the top stories. In some capsule settlements, the stacks of capsules go up so high, on the ground you can’t see the sun. They say that each walled slum is actually hundreds of smaller capsule tenements, but that they have been built so closely together that they became one thing.

I whisper Happiness’s name, and try to lure him back to me with my own dinners, but he growls and won’t come. I sit on my bed inside the yellow plastic walls of my capsule alone with the electric fan directed at my face and eat canned pineapple because it is the only thing I can afford after paying the water bribe.

Feng Guniang had been a symbol for the dreamy helplessness of the Pearl of the Orient. And now that she was dead, that innocence dispersed like a cloud of perfume on a sigh. Her death was a cry for something to be done. I just didn’t know what to do.

The Boss hires eight new de-ribbed dancers at The Green Dream. Whereas I used to be the youngest and least experienced, and Feng Guniang used to be the eldest, I stay through so many seasons that I become the protector of the new girls. I am hardened by the cruel Shanghai that waits outside the back door of The Green Dream, but I’m not changed by it.

It is at that time the girls start dying. Someone is stalking them, killing them in terrifying ways. As the oldest and the most unsentimental, I have to take responsibility.

“This is not the first time there have been serial killers on Jiameng Street,” the Boss tells me, reclining on his velvet lounge chair with his opium pipe, his newly shined leather shoe crossed over his knee. One of his mistresses waxed his mustache this morning, and it curls at the ends like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup.

I stand with Lizi and Xiao Lian behind me. My hair is brushed into a chignon on top of my head, and I’m wearing a simple cream-colored qipao with light blue embroidered flowers. I’ve taken to dressing plainly offstage because in my mind, glamour was always Feng Guniang’s right. “Can’t you do something about it?”

“What do you want me to do?” he asks, taking a puff on the pipe. The advertisement board in his forehead flickers with lazy images, a video feed of his wife reading a magazine, a fat baby with peachy cheeks sleeping in a crib behind her. “Walk each of you home to your slum towers one by one? Hunt the killer down with my bare hands? Call the police, if you want. There’s nothing I can do. Hundreds of people die every day in this city. Many die in worse ways.”

Lizi brings him a plate of salted peanuts, and he stuffs a handful in his mouth, chewing loudly. He won’t say any more on the topic, and after a while I have no choice but to accept this is all the help I will get from him.

The girls accept their fate without arguing. They go back to their tiny makeup tables in the backroom and brush their hair and powder their faces, holding handheld mirrors. The mirrors magnify their eyes, their cheeks, to ghastly proportions so that all across the room, these parts of girls’ faces are floating in their hands.

I watch for a while, leaning on the doorframe with my arms at my side.

There is a perverted killer waiting in the city night. Ruan’er died a fortnight ago. Someone poured acid down her face as she walked down the street in her six-inch black pumps. She had a wobbling, feline walk like a swoon, a signature red peony pinned in her sausage curls. I imagine the bony chill when she feels the shadows moving behind her, but nothing is there when she looks over her shoulder. She walks more quickly with that mounting terror growing wings in her chest like a trapped bird, and before she knows it, something cold hits her in the face, and there is agonizing, wretched pain as her skin melts between her fingers and pours away onto the pavement.

Ruan’er would’ve tried to scream, before she found she no longer had a mouth to scream with. In my imagination, the killer puts her face in a patterned silk bag with a drawstring. He pulls the strings tight and puts the bag inside his jacket before leaping onto the low roof of a mansion and vanishing into the foggy night.

Three nights later, it happens again to Wanyue, whom we find with her long legs splayed shamefully, her face missing. A girl’s head is hideous without its face, nothing but a pink mass of mangled flesh.

I do not know what the killer does with our faces. I imagine their eyes are wide in his drawstring bag, disoriented by the sudden darkness enveloping them. Or perhaps they are a jumbled glob, like sweet jellied tofu. He has a different drawstring bag for every face he steals, and he keeps them in rows inside his jacket, which he can display proudly if he chooses to, but doesn’t. Every three nights, he follows one of us home after the Boss closes the Green Dream at four in the morning. There are other girls missing all across the city. I don’t know who they are, but I imagine that no one is looking for them either.

I go down to the deepest level of the slums, where sunlight never touches the ground, and the water from last season’s rain still drips from above. Nobody walks here because there are rats and murders, but the water pump is located in this part of the slum, guarded by gangsters carrying rifles, their waist pouches overflowing with money from the protection fee.

The higher-ranking members of the Triads have pulled out a red plastic table with low stools and are playing a game of dice. The glowing eyes of alley cats peer out from between their legs and from behind sacks of rice like pairs of jewels.

“Please,” I say to Fat Tiger, who is the leader of the Three Fists. “The de-ribbed dancers of the Green Dream humbly beg for your assistance in a matter that troubles us.”

He grunts without looking up from his game.

“There is a serial killer, who melts our faces with acid.”

I wait, while the gangsters roll another round. They make an exaggerated show of laughter and pat the table in mirth.

Finally, when Fat Tiger realizes I will not go away, he leans into the light to see me better. “And you want my help? For all you know, I might be the serial killer.” He throws his head back and roars.

But I know that Fat Tiger is not the serial killer.

“You have liquefier guns, with Chaozhou lasers. Please help us.”

Fat Tiger’s sleepy eyes widen. “I have liquefier guns, do I? Well, if I do, each one cost me a hefty sum you couldn’t sell your life to pay for. What do I owe you to waste one in your hands?”

I curtsy ironically. “We help you pass the nights away when you are lonely and in need of company. We dance for you, and mix you the finest cocktails, and entertain you with our acts of contortion.”

He studies my mien, and I know that he is looking for signs of fear, but I’m not afraid of him. Fat Tiger is a bully, but he is as much a part of our walled slum as I am. “You would kill a man?”

“The police wouldn’t care if I turned him in alive.”

So he tries again. “A young lady like you believes that murder will bring justice?”

“I am only angry, and I don’t wish to hide it anymore.”

A door bangs open somewhere, and a heavy-boned woman in an apron patterned with rainbow snails hobbles out, carrying a pot of stewed pork and potato. My mouth waters at the hot steam that wafts through the alley. The cats begin meowing, and more eyes appear in the darkness, drawing closer to the table.

The woman is Fat Tiger’s wife, and she wears a flowery dress under the apron. Underneath her dress, her arms are thick pythons; a lopsided mountain of sea-green curlers is arranged atop her head. “Stop bullying the girl,” she tells Fat Tiger, and lands a hard slap across his ear. “Give her what she wants so we can have our dinner.”

Fat Tiger cuffs her hand away and calls her annoying. The other men lower their heads and pretend not to see, as the couple erupts into a slapping match. Only I watch, as she pinches his ear between her fingers and twists, while he yowls and throws jabs at the jiggling flab of her upper arm. Finally, having had enough, Fat Tiger’s wife shambles into a corner, calling him a bastard turtle’s egg, and lights a cigarette.

Fat Tiger grumbles under his breath and collapses back on his little red stool.

After a while, he snorts. “Give her a gun then, and pray she doesn’t blast her own throat out.”

At night, I shiver as I lie awake with the gun beside me on the cot in my three-by-six, listening to the water that drips continuously from above, through all the uneven levels of the slum city, toward the alleys below. A blue light pulses on the flank of the gun, indicating the laser is active, and I know that if I pull the trigger, a nullifying beam of heat will eradicate whatever I choose as my target. It is hard to miss with a liquefier gun. That’s how Fat Tiger’s goons have beaten every other gang in the city.

Still, I don’t sleep. I blink at the liquefier gun, imaging myself in an alley with the serial killer, the weapon hoisted on my shoulder. I can’t imagine how I would find him, what we would say to each other. Am I supposed to bid him farewell, if he doesn’t kill me first? What is life, if death comes so easily?

I see the faces for sale the next day, in a boutique shop on Avenue Charles de Montigny in the French Concession. Ruan’er’s beautiful face, mounted on a pink doily, her almond eyes still with dark eye shadow on their lids, staring blankly outside the window of the shop.

The shopkeeper steps out from behind the shelves, which are filled with girls’ faces, all set in lace and held up by dainty brass tacks. She has been sweeping dirt from the aisles.

“May I help you?” she asks, and her voice is sweet like icing on cupcakes. She wears a floor-length dress made of navy chiffon that swirls like a tornado at her feet. I cannot tell what her ethnicity is, but it’s likely a mix of Chinese and European, her hair swept into a tight bun atop her head.

“Who buys the faces?” I ask her.

“Collectors,” she answers, with a wide sweep of her arm. “Appreciators, connoisseurs in the art of incorporeity. Every face is unique, you know.”

I tiptoe down the aisles of faces, afraid to make any sudden movements lest I startle the faces. But of course they do not move, or blink. They are just girls’ faces. Even in death, they are quiet and unmoving, pretending that nothing is wrong.

“The other day, a man came in, looking to buy a face. He offered a gorgeous sum,” the shopkeeper continues from the other side of the aisle. I see her from between the pale cheekbones of the faces, leaning on her broom. I find Wanyue’s face on another shelf, her shining red lips still parted with her last breath.

“Which face did he buy?” I ask the shopkeeper.

“One that has not been collected yet,” she replies, joining me in the aisle, and brushes her finger gently along Wanyue’s cheek to remove a thread. “But this face is different. This face is a jewel in the New Orient, that shines like the North Star, brutal and bold with eyes made from rubies, apart from all the other faces in New China. This is a face of The Tigress Awoken.”

Her voice rises to a ringing crescendo, which reverberates like tin in the sunny afternoon daintiness of the boutique shop. I cover my ears but it won’t stop, and when I stare into the shopkeeper’s face, her smile looks like it has been carved there with a knife. Suddenly, I am afraid.

I run out of the shop, the bell on its door jingling behind me, and run down Avenue Charles de Montigny, which is just an ordinary Shanghai street, full of bobbing parasols fighting for room on the sidewalk and long trench coats that sweep the pavement, and stare at the large billboards about the New Chinese Dream fixed on the sides of red mansion skyscrapers that wobble into the sky like endless pagodas. The women on the street carry stiff laminated paper bags full of their noonday shopping. Some are eating fruit off sticks, candied hawthorn berries and mandarin slices.

I drop to the ground and hold my knees against my chest. I want nothing more than to be consumed by the mobs of people who walk with their heads down, heading for their afternoon high in the opium dens on Jiameng Street. I think about the gun lying in my capsule, waiting for me to find the boldness to fire that one shot. If I could, I would tie the sun to the sky so that night would never have to come. Look at me! I scream at the people who walk past, but we are all invisible to each other.

I don’t know where I am safer, outside or inside—or if safety exists anymore.

A few nights later, it is the fourteenth day of the seventh lunar month, the Ghost Festival. Plates of food have been left on the street for the ghosts to eat, and several of the girls are burning ghost money to appease the dead spirits that wander back from hell on this day to visit their families. The Green Dream is alive with gossip and good cheer, fragrant smoke wafting through the establishment; the Boss has ordered special delicacies and wine to be brought to each table free of charge.

The first row of seats in front of the stage is left intentionally empty for the ghosts. It is a strange experience, dancing for an audience that is not there. Real ghosts do not come to see the show. All of that is superstition; humans cannot do anything to absolve a ghost’s pain.

As I dance, folding my body in the alien forms permitted by my de-ribbed waist, I glance over to the front right corner of the audience as I am accustomed to doing. I am looking for Feng Guniang’s German businessman.

Tonight I am surprised to see he has brought a new lover, an artist from Guangdong. She is older than Feng Guniang, and wears a wide-brimmed hat with a long green feather. Unlike Feng Guniang, she has made an effort to preserve her dignity by refusing to sit in her German lover’s lap.

I hate her, although she’s done nothing wrong, and I don’t even know who she is. I hate the German lover as well—he has not gone to see Feng Guniang once since her suicide. You can sleep with a ghost, you know. You can hold it in your arms and whisper things in its ear all the same. I want to ask him why he hasn’t done this.

I curtsy my finish to a round of applause. Afterward, when it is Xiao Lian’s turn to dance, I go to see Feng Guniang, whom I myself have neglected for a fortnight, ever since the serial killer made his presence known. It is her festival, after all.

I hear her singing in the roofed corridor over the pond, by the Pavilion of Listening to Billows. There are red paper lanterns floating in the water, meant to guide the ghosts back to hell. The lanterns form a pretty parade down the pond, attracting dragonflies, although I am not sure if the dragonflies are real or mechanical. Feng Guniang is crying on a marble bench in the corridor.

“Xiao You,” she whispers, trying to put her hand my cheek, and failing as always. “Why haven’t you come to see me?”

Something has changed about her. Her body has, if anything, grown colder and more solid, leaning more toward this world than the one she must leave it for.

I sit next to her, listening to the swish of the projected willows. I take the top off a bamboo cage filled with hot stuffed jujubes, which I have brought to her as an offering. She eats the food with her fingers and begins singing again. The goldfish somersault in the pond, creating satisfying splashes. I take my shoes off and dip my toes in the water.

We sit like that for a while, surrounded by the illusions of a peaceful garden.

Feng Guniang stops singing. “Mathias has a new lover.”

I freeze, unsure how to answer. “How did you know about that?”

“I go to the Green Dream a lot,” she replies. “I dance on the stage when none of you are looking. I try to touch him but he can’t feel me.”

“Why don’t you kill him?” I ask her. “Ghosts can kill people, can’t they?”

Feng Guniang shakes her head tearfully, takes another bite of the stuffed jujube. “They can,” she whispers, “but I won’t.”

I feel it again, the empty space in her chest that is filled with her silent bitterness. There is a space like that in everyone’s heart in New China. It has caused all this. I want to ask her why she lets him do this to her.

“Feng Guniang, you must’ve seen the serial killer. What does he look like? Where is he?”

She shakes her head. “He’ll kill you if you go after him.”

“Fat Tiger gave me a gun.” I’ve brought the gun. I lay it on my lap and show it to her. “Please, Feng Guniang. You’re the only one who can help me. I have to stop this.”

“Are you going to leave if I tell you? Don’t leave me. I’m so alone here. He has forgotten all about me. Everyone has, except you.”

“I’ll come back,” I promise her. “When have I ever broken a promise to you? I’ll bring you sweet-braised ribs next time, cooked so the meat falls off in your mouth. But let me do this for our sisters.”

She is silent for a long time. The parade of paper lanterns passes us, bobbing towards the Bridge of Ethereal Butterflies, where they pass single file under the arch. I wonder if they are really headed for hell, or if they’ll only find shore in the morning. Finally, she bows her head. “He lives in a longtang called Magpie Alley, not far from the Green Dream.”

I begin to pack the empty bamboo cage, piling the last jujubes into a napkin so Feng Guniang can eat them after I’m gone.

Feng Guniang stands and takes my face in both her hands. This time I feel her touch, clammy and transparent, and I shudder. She is becoming more solid. No, I want to tell her. You must leave this world, not stay in it. “Promise to be careful,” she whispers to me.

I squeeze her hand and promise.

On the unluckiest night of the year, when the streets float with the ashes of ghost money and papier-mâché animals burn like effigies in hell, I hunt down the serial killer.

Magpie Alley is an ordinary alley, stained, flowery women’s underwear drying on laundry lines and fat coils of sausage hanging on tin wires in the windows. A dog that looks like Happiness lies in the corner behind the Dumpster with his paws extended in front of him, busy chewing a bone.

I look for the serial killer’s window. I imagine it must have the silk drawstring bags hanging in it, arranged like perfume sachets stuffed with aromatic herbs on a girl’s dresser. I don’t imagine he is the type of serial killer who decorates his walls with butcher knives or torture contraptions. His lust for killing rises from a more literary desire. The bags may have lucky patterns sewn on them to describe the faces he has stolen—peonies or lotuses for femininity, a bat for happiness, a double butterfly for love. Murder can be art too, as long as it is done carefully enough.

But when I find his window, which I was fated to eventually, there are no drawstring bags in it.

Instead his window is hung with bronze mirrors that have a water caltrop embossed on the back, the kind of mirrors ladies used for makeup during the real Ming Dynasty. Some of the mirrors face front, out the window, and others face back. Many people in New China mistake the caltrop for a grinning skull and thus consider the mirrors unlucky, but they are overlooking the abstract symbolism behind the original caltrop mirrors, which was that caltrops grow in water, and water does not lie.

I hoist the liquefier gun over my shoulder by its strap and begin to pull myself up by the kudzu binding the walls.

“A lot can be said about a window,” the serial killer tells me when I reach the top, sliding the pane open for me to climb in. “Some say the most precious window of the world is the eyes, which are not really a window but a mirror.”

He regards me calmly through a colorfully painted dixi mask, whose expression is the hardest of all Chinese masks to decipher because it is expressionless. In it I cannot find a man, or a god, or a ghost. Its eyes are closed.

I smooth my qipao back over my knees, and level the liquefier gun at his heart. At this distance, it is impossible to miss. He smiles—I can tell by the skin on his neck and chin, crinkling. “Not everyone in this city pretends to sleep,” I tell him, and I press my finger down on the trigger.

A stream of blue light leaves the gun, and he raises his hands to shield himself. But the beam does not pass through him. I only have a heart’s beat to feel shock before I see that he has held up a caltrop mirror, which deflects the beam back the way it came.

They say that real killers are incapable of feeling fear, that they throw their heads back in the face of death and laugh as he is doing now. Well, I learn that I must not be a real killer as that blue light comes dashing back to me, and I stumble back from it in vain. It doesn’t matter if I was the one who fought back. In the end I am the same as all the others who did nothing. What was the difference to be made, between silence and screaming, acceptance and delusion, if it amounted to nothing? I, too, am helpless.

The beam of light splashes me in the face like water, and I don’t have time to scream. The sensation of a thousand nails rakes across my face, as if my skin is nothing but papier-mâché like the animals we sacrifice for the Ghost Festival, and beneath it is fire that bursts forth and burns my body to ash. I sink to my knees on the serial killer’s carpet, weeping as he pries my hands off my face and takes it from me—not holding it with a drawstring bag, but with his bare hands.

“Do you really think I am the worst killer in Shanghai?” he asks me quietly, holding my folded, melted face in the cup of his hands. “Or was it your desire to change something that cannot be changed that drove you here and killed you?”

He seals my face in a glass jar painted with swans that is plugged at the top with a corkwood screw. “Farewell,” he says to me, and he steals quietly out the window.

I count my breaths in the shadow he has left, and I begin to wonder if it was a delusion to think a girl missing four of her ribs is enough to make a difference in a smarter, crueler world.

But I am not dead.

He has left my eyes in my face and spared my life. I grab one of the many caltrop mirrors and turn its face to me. What stares back is an amalgam of mangled flesh and ugliness where skin used to be that makes me howl, and the worst part is that I can see it all. I dig my fingers into my eyes to make sure they are real. He didn’t take my eyes. Why didn’t he take my eyes?

Then I remember a sentence that was spoken to me, in a voice sweeter than cupcake icing.

This face is a jewel in the New Orient, that shines like the North Star, brutal and bold with eyes made from rubies, apart from all the other faces in New China.

My face is the face of The Tigress Awoken.

“Please. I want to buy that face, for whatever price you name. It’s my face.” I am a beggar on the floor of the boutique, grappling at the shopkeeper’s hands and dress.

The shopkeeper looks down upon me from atop her long neck and names a sum taller than the sky needle in the Bund. She knows I cannot pay.

“Please let me have it for a little less,” I beg her.

She shakes me off her leg as if I’m a leper.

“But you can’t afford the price I have named.”

I crawl to the shelf where my face sits on a pink doily, watching the sunset outside. It has forgotten all about me, fever replaced by a stunned nothingness. Inset where my eyes should’ve been are two bright rubies. I wish it would scream for me, but it is just a face.

“No, no, no,” I say to the shopkeeper, grabbing her hand. “No, you can’t take my face away from me. It’s mine. You can’t do this.”

“It was sold to me. It is mine by right now.”

I scream and claw at her, but it is no use. She drags me by the hair down the aisles, through all the faces that stare without blinking, and deposits me outside on the sidewalk. “Leave my shop,” she says as she pulls the blinds shut, “or I will call the police.”

She pulls the door shut and locks it from the inside.

“Help me,” I whisper to my face through the glass of the window, but it ignores me. Perhaps it is angry. I have failed it.

I feel naked and defenseless. They are disassembling my body bone by bone, feeding it to the hungry city that is always looking for victims, always waiting to take advantage of those who are trying to change it. I begin to look for my ribs in the cemeteries of Jiameng Street, which are just behind the opium dens, far enough that you can’t see them past the red mansions built to hide them. I thought my ribs might be buried in a box, nestled under a grave or an ornamental angel. I dig holes under the back patio of the Green Dream until the Boss chases me away with a broom.

He screams when he sees me without my face, and drops the broom.

“Never come back,” he tells me, as if I am a monster and not his once-prized dancer. “What are you doing in my establishment? Get out!”

I flee from the opium dens I have called my home, with no cheeks for my tears to roll down, to Yuyuan Garden, where the illusions of bamboo groves and sponge rocks stand guard over empty pavilions. A howl rises from the Pavilion of Listening to Billows.

It’s Feng Guniang, who floats on her back in the pond.

She is no longer wearing her red dress. She is naked, her white body smooth as a statue. Her eyes are more sunken, dark holes with no bottom that bore into the pits of her skull. Her hair is gone, in its place a naked pallet of ridged white bone.

She swims to me and rises out of the emerald-colored water like the Goddess of Mercy. I wade into the shallows to meet her, mechanical goldfish darting away from my thighs in a panicked frenzy, and fall into her arms.

“Jian,” she whispers in my ear.

“What are you talking about? What happened to your dress?”

“When a person dies, they become a ghost. When a ghost dies, they become a jian.”

She holds her arms up for me to see. Ugly black scars mar her wrists. Black blood drips continuously from them, into the water.

I look down at the scars, unsure what to make of them. “You killed yourself again?”

“I cut myself open and served my heart to him on a platter, tonight at the Green Dream. But he didn’t eat it. He wanted to eat rose cake pastries, imported from Yunnan. I put my heart back, and in case that didn’t kill me, I cut my wrists on his broken teacup. He leaned over to kiss her and shattered it.”

I sob into her solid shoulder. Feng Guniang doesn’t shiver.

“You have changed, Xiao You,” she says, brushing a strand of hair off what’s left of my skull. Her fingers are wet and clammy. They smell like the river. “I feel the anger inside you. It rises like a fire clawing at the inside of your ribs, trying to get out of you. It begins in the space where your eleventh and twelfth ribs used to be.”

I lift my face from her neck. “I feel the anger inside you,” I tell her. “It is empty and silent, and cruel like an iron weight, and it sinks inside you, making an abyss beside your heart that grows deeper with every breath you take. It too begins in the space where your eleventh and twelfth ribs used to be.”

We stand in the water, the ghost and I, our arms wrapped around each other.

“You were right,” I admit. “I shouldn’t have gone after him. It wasn’t enough.”

She shakes her head and regards me sadly. “Have my face,” she says. “Or at least what’s left of it. I killed myself twice and I only lost more. I see now that the steps I have taken are useless.”

I remember what the shopkeeper said. Each face is unique, and bears its own story. Feng Guniang’s is written with sorrow and weakness, but within it is an ethereal beauty that speaks of times passed away. If only we had been born in another era, where the world was not so cruel, she might have lived.

No,” I tell her. “Your face is beautiful. You keep it.”

Feng Guniang takes a step back from me, and I realize that her skin has become airy and light, like mist. I cannot feel her anymore.

“Neither of us won, Xiao You, but you still have hope. You haven’t failed, you know. He took your face, but you don’t need one.”

Another tear rolls from my eye and drops straight to the water with no cheek to catch it. “Not even the Boss can look upon me anymore.”

“Where’s my dress?” Feng Guniang says, turning around in the water. “Let me make a mask for you—a new face that you can show off to the world.”

She makes the mask for me from her qipao, which she had draped over the Bridge of Ethereal Butterflies. The parade of paper lanterns from the night before finds their way back to us and bobs around her in a circle of light as she sews. They have been waiting for her, hiding under the bridge during the brief summer showers and peaking out every hour to see if the sun had returned to our grey sky.

There is no power in anger, only loneliness. Feng Guniang and I used to hold each other on the stage of the Green Dream, while the servants waved colored lanterns, and somersault over each other. Each time I would feel the fluttering of her heart when my hand brushed her chest, and I would know she was looking at her German lover. She never cried for help in my arms, but neither did I.

In the end it is not anger that will save us. It is whatever comes after.

Finally, she releases me and wades back into the water. “There,” she says to me, standing back to admire her handiwork. “It’s a beautiful mask. I wish I had one like that while I was alive. I would wear it every day.”

And she smiles. Feng Guniang’s smile is disarming, even when she is an eyeless jian.

“Where will you go?” I ask her.

“I don’t know,” she replies. “There are other worlds that call for me, where I will face whatever comes. But you must go on living, Xiao You. I always depended on you to save me, but you’re the one who can save everyone.”

The parade of paper lanterns forms a neat line for Feng Guniang to follow. She wades back into the water, her arms making wide ripples.

“You must go on fighting, Xiao You. Remember that.”

She retreats further into the water, while I call after her not to leave me. Afterward, I sob for a while under the projected willows waving their branches over my head. Willow leaves float down and stick to my hair. In the distance, light and chatter from the opium dens forms a smoggy halo over Jiameng Street. The Ming-style skyscrapers of the Bund sleep quietly, their red exteriors darkened in twilight.

I stand waist-deep in the water, wearing my new red mask, watching all of it drift further from me, but then the gentle waves pull it back. The moon casts its billowing reflection on the pond, always just out of reach.

There is a city out there named Shanghai, a city with ghosts and shops that have women’s faces, neon lights and opium dens, my enemy and my home. It is a city sinking beneath the weight of its own grandeur, but I will pull it back piece by piece, until it is whole again. One day, Happiness will come back so I may clean the lice from behind his ears. I’ll use my earnings from the Green Dream to buy canned eel, which used to be his favorite food. Maybe we’ll move to a bigger capsule, one with a TV for us to watch English cartoons on.

Next year, when Feng Guniang comes back on the Ghost Festival, accompanied by her entourage of red paper lanterns, I’ll bring her sweet-braised ribs as promised. I’ll even bring her a plum blossom pressed between the pages of a magazine, so that it never withers. Plum blossoms are the first to bloom every year in Shanghai. They bloom in winter.

One day, Shanghai, I will stand in your streets without feeling fear.

march-endof

JessicaBioPic Jessica May Lin recently returned to the San Francisco Bay Area after moonlighting as a nightclub pole dancer for a year in Beijing, China, and is now completing her last year at UC Berkeley. Her fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in Chiral Mad 3, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, and others. Her nonfiction stories have been published in the Chinese-language edition of the New York Times. Visit her website at jessicamaylin.com.

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Fiction, Issue 29

Another Beginning, by Michael McGlade

Ógán is a magpie, but he wasn’t always a bird.

An Interrupted Beginning

Ógán is twenty-one. He is studying history at Queen’s University, Belfast. Succumbed to a powerful drug fugue in his dorm room, he is paralyzed, unmoving for a whole day except that within himself he’s travelling through Indonesia; a trip he and his fiancée Niamh have meticulously planned for years, and which they intend to take after graduation. When he eventually comes to, Ógán realizes the places he wants to travel to will never live up to his dreams. He rushes over to Malachy’s.

Guide To Pronunciation and Meaning

Ógán (pronounced OH gawn) means youth.

Niamh (pronounced NEE uv) means brightness, radiance.

Malachy (pronounced MA la kee) means messenger of God.

The Real Beginning

Ógán loses Niamh to his best friend Malachy. Ógán and Niamh had been high school sweethearts, and the three of them had been inseparable—the “Three Blind Mice.”

Ógán stumbled onto this scene: the affair in full swing, the pair of them at it like otters in his best friend’s bed (he’d seen a documentary about how otters held hands when they slept—but this right now was absolutely not cute). Ógán had been let inside by a still-stoned flatmate, the squawking pair growing louder as he raced down the long, cement hallway toward that familiar sound—knowing it was Niamh behind the locked bedroom door, his teeth zinging like when foil shorts out your fillings.

Some things can never be unseen.

beginning01 Thinking back on it now, he often wonders if maybe he should have just gone home instead of shouldering the door open. He often thinks of how he stood there like a gormless gobshite, ogling the romping quislings.

He expected Niamh to blurt out it was a mistake, that this had never happened before. But it wasn’t. And it had.

Now to cause an immense uproar, chew the scenery like Al Pacino! But no words would come. Instead, he went for Malachy but that buck-naked eejit punched him hard. Weepily trudging back to his dorm, Ógán dumped Niamh’s stuff out the third-floor window. He never saw either of them again. Last he heard, they’d taken the trip to Indonesia.

That summer passed in a violet daze, to Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around And Fell in Love.” That spiteful song followed him everywhere: laptops, car radios, ringtones. On the solstice he broke into his old high school and entered the history classroom where he’d first met Niamh. There, he downed a pint of whiskey and a packet of his father’s blood-thinning medication.

The End.

Some Common Misperceptions

The nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice” is about three bishops burned at the stake by Queen Mary I of England. Bloody Mary liked burning people, and 280 other religious dissenters met the same fate during her five-year reign. Many nursery rhymes are based on horrible real-life events. “Ring a Ring o’ Roses” is about the plague. “London Bridge Is Falling Down” is about child sacrifice. “Jack and Jill” were two young lovers thrown to their deaths. Ógán has confirmed the validity of these statements in conversations with the dead.

The End Is a Beginning

Ógán is a magpie. He has black and white plumage and a sleek elegant tail. Up close, his black plumage has an iridescent violet sheen on the wings but it turns glossy green on the tail.

He coasted the thermals over Slieve Gullion Mountain, a half-mile high, as effortless as standing still. His new form had taken a bit of getting used to; the ruffle of his feathers, how he sensed minute beginning02 changes in air current through his entire body. He swooped like black lightning, landing in the back garden of his family home on top of the small granite gravestone for Buster, his Jack Russell.

The back door of the house opened and a tiny wrinkled woman with glasses half the size of her face threw the heel of a batch loaf onto the paved walkway. Ógán flapped over, pecked some, then cawed at his mother.

“Every day you eat all my bread,” she said, “and never get no fatter. Just like Ógán used to.” Her shoulders hunched and she took the Padre Pio medal from beneath her blouse and kissed it.

A sharp whistle pierced the air. Since becoming a magpie, Ógán had heard that whistle several times; it was warning him about a trapped soul. A violent soul. He had to deal with it: this was part of his job.

He flew south, following the whistle thirty-five miles to a ghost estate outside Drogheda, spotting from a mile off the violet shimmer of the haunted house. The neighborhood was recovering well from the housing crash, and half of the houses that had lain vacant for nearly a decade were occupied. One of them, a detached two-story redbrick, was occupied by a man conducting a one-sided argument.

Ógán perched on the windowsill. The man (mid-twenties) jabbed his index finger towards the corner of the living room wall, then struck, punching yet another hole in the plasterboard that bore a dozen already, his knuckles the color of a Bloody Mary. A baby screamed upstairs.

Ógán found the newborn writhing in his cot, and from the smell the nappy hadn’t been changed all day. A woman shrieked. In the kitchen he found her listening intently to the extractor fan. She was begging for a voice to stop, pleading, but then climbed onto the counter and slammed her head into the stove’s aluminium hood, streaking the metal surface bloody red. There were other holes smashed into the walls, these with a sledgehammer. The couple had been working over the entire house, searching for something. Ógán knew a wronged soul often manifested like this, driving the inhabitants to self-harm or murder/suicide. He didn’t have much time to intervene. Ógán had seen how quickly people could kill each other just to stop the voices.

He circled the building, paying particular attention to the structure. Nothing untoward. Sometimes it was a body nearby in a shallow grave, but the yard was well-maintained, flowerbeds blooming with the first flush of summer, grass clipped. There was a scarcity of furniture within, almost Spartan décor. Perhaps this family had just moved in and, without signs of a recent grave, he could discount them as murderers. Something much older and malevolent was present.

And then he saw it.

Glistening within the crewcut lawn, pink and pulsing. He swooped down to beak the worm and swallowed it, whole and wriggling. It was delicious, reminding him of ham, mixed with a little dirt. The dirt was the best bit. Kept him regular.

From the lawn, he saw a row of bricks along the base of the house that appeared newer than the rest. A section of those bricks had also been removed and replaced, the mortar different. Concentrating, Ógán visualized the empty space beyond the bricks and his body dissolved, re-materializing on the other side. It always felt like plunging into a swimming pool, ears popping followed by a weird chlorine odor, but it was a neat trick.

Within the shallow cavity beneath the house there was a bundle wrapped in plastic, the scent of death masked with quicklime. Inside were two bodies: husband and wife. This close to the body, Ógán knew the tragic story:

She killed him and he deserved it. The bastard had a nasty gambling habit before the housing crash put him crazy; he attacked her, almost killed her. She stabbed him with a kitchen knife. Self-defense. Right now the bastard was already in The Dark Place, flayed by a demon that looked like his wife. The end.

But the woman remained to poison the building. There were gashes on her wrists, proof she had turned the knife on herself after the murder. Who had put the bodies here? That was the real reason she hadn’t departed this plane.

He summoned the woman’s trapped soul to its body. The woman, Aoife, hovered over her corpse, before Ógán guided her out of the building, upwards.

The young couple in the house had returned to normalcy. The woman rushed into the living room, her husband staring wide-eyed at the holes he’d punched in the walls. They hugged each other and kissed, relieved it was finally over.

Ógán guided the dead woman towards the light, moving from the dark to gray.

“You’ve been dead eight years, Aoife.”

“But I only killed him yesterday…”

Dead Time always moved faster.

“I’m not being punished for killing him?”

“Self-defense,” he replied. “But suicide is a 500-year sentence.”

She lurched to flee, but here he was all-powerful. Nobody escaped.

“I don’t make the rules, I just follow them. We all follow them.”

She struggled, trying to fight him off, pulling toward the house and her decaying body. Still, they continued onward into the grey. Directions were meaningless; only Ógán knew the way out.

beginning03 “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “But we’ll get to The Grey Place soon. It’s not so bad, you’ll see.”

“Why do I care what some dumb bird says?”

“Did you know, magpies are the only non-mammals to recognize our own reflections.”

“Why are you a magpie, and not a raven or a crow?”

“Crows are criminals,” he replied. “It’s the punishment for being a low-level criminal, sentenced to be a crow.”

“But magpies are thieves.”

Where the Rumor Began

Rossini’s opera La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie) has a servant girl sentenced to death for stealing silver even though the magpie did it. It’s a common misperception that magpies are thieves and that we steal shiny objects. In fact, shiny objects are extremely annoying. The glare hurts my eyes.

“What about my body?” Aoife asked.

“Somebody will find it, eventually.”

“You bastard, you’re just leaving me there to rot? No burial?”

“Your suicide sentence isn’t your worst problem,” he explained. “The haunting and torture of that family … that’s a millennium right there. A thousand years in The Grey Place.”

With Ógán concentrating, they dissolved and rematerialized in The Grey Place. Globules of prismatic light—souls—wandered chaotically, zigzagging and colliding like excited particles. Others adopted mournful poses and wandered, moaning. They didn’t have to, they were free to do whatever they wanted, but many elected to remain penitent and dour, even though it had no outcome on their sentence. The Grey Place wasn’t a punishment, it was more of a holding area; a place where souls contemplated their earthly behavior before being allowed into The Big House. They could form a jazz club for all The Boss cared. But they continued moaning, rattling chains, posing like that Scream painting.

“How did you transport us here?”

“I can transport anywhere in the universe, but it’s quite impossible to breathe on Mars, so I’m mostly on Earth.”

“Then you can get inside the foundations of my house, get my body out?”

As much as he wanted to make whoever had hidden two corpses beneath that house pay, it wasn’t his job.

A Visit To the Big House

A hard-faced, soft-bellied man in a toga was standing on a wooden crate on a street corner, orating to no one in particular. “Can one believe there exists presently a brand of condom entitled Trojan?” Homer said. “Alas, it should evidently be noted that the Trojan Horse, after infiltrating the outer defences, forthwith, in a clandestine attack, ejected hundreds of soldiers. Is this truly not an unfortunate implication for a prophylactic?”

Homer regarded his audience, which was much smaller than he usually got at the Greek theater for his evening performance. Two people were present: Dali twisted the waxy tip of his drooping mustache, and Picasso was dressed like a matador. Neither of them applauded.

Ógán swooped down and dropped a silver drachma in the pileus cap at Homer’s feet. Happily, Homer cleared his throat to continue; the others groaned.

beginning4 Ógán flapped alone toward The Big House. The light was diffuse, like being inside mist; the buildings, cobblestone streets, and people emitted luminosity. Sitting on a nearby bench, a man wearing a black three-piece suit was sheltering beneath a black umbrella. Edgar Allan Poe adjusted his sunglasses and scratched in his notebook with a quill.

“You should really have chosen the form of a raven,” Poe said. “Magpies have too much white.”

Ógán landed on the bench. Poe dipped his quill in the ink bottle, but it was empty. He glanced pleadingly at the bird. Ógán concentrated, and a bottle of the blackest Indian Ink materialized.

“Has thou ever read Jonathan Livingston Seagull?”

“That seagull’s such a poser,” Ógán replied. Then: “Because I’m a bird I’m only supposed to read books about birds?”

“Which postures an interesting conundrum, my half-raven friend. Exactly how doth one, being a bird that is, and thusly lacking thumbs, read a book?”

“I can still peck the buttons on my Kindle,” he replied. “Quoth the magpie, nevermore!”

Ógán flapped off to find The Boss. Although finding him wasn’t exactly how it worked. The Big House took whatever form you desired, and while this usually involved soft white clouds and angels with harps, for Ógán it was the flat-share where Malachy lived, where he had found him with his fiancée Niamh.

The walls were translucent as jellyfish, and Ógán glided down the hallway to enter the bedroom, which looked exactly as it had that day; the bed sheets tousled, dirty jeans and socks piled in the corner. Malachy hadn’t even cleaned up before Niamh arrived—that’s how routine their tryst had been. Ógán landed on the desk, and a snap of his wing cascaded a laptop and geography textbooks onto the crusty floor.

“I’m not picking those up again,” The Boss said.

His voice reverberated from everywhere. He had no face, no body. He was everything and nothing.

Ógán squawked and got to the floor, lifted everything back onto the desk. “You see everything,” he said. “So, when do they die?”

The Boss had promised Ógán that he’d be allowed to decide a punishment for Niamh and Malachy. He’d get to reap their souls and ferry them to The Dark Place. Let them suffer for a few millennia. That should be payback for how they’d destroyed everything he cared about.

“You’ve got work to do,” The Boss said. “Time to take another one back.”

The room dissolved like sugar in water and Ógán rematerialized on the tiled floor of a diner. His feathers spasmed and he staggered a couple of steps. He hated it when The Boss did that.

Two men were arguing in a corner booth. Ógán took flight and landed on the shoulder of the larger man, who had coiffed black hair and huge mutton chops. A half-eaten cheeseburger was oozing oil on his plate. Elvis jabbed his finger at Jim Morrison’s shirtless chest.

“You can’t keep being the same person throughout history,” Elvis said. “I mean, Michael Hutchence? Seriously? That’s what you wasted your reincarnation on?”

Jim brushed his mane of hair out of his face and took a swig of whiskey. “Being Plato with a guitar worked for you last time round, fatboy. But this isn’t the seventies anymore. They have cell phones, but they don’t use them to speak to each other on—they use them to write shit on the internet.”

Frizzy-haired Janis Joplin, in the next booth over, strummed her guitar. “Don’t just be one of the regular weird people this time,” she said.

Ógán guided Elvis to the jump point, a swirling portal that appeared in the diner’s entranceway. Elvis was squeezed into the sequined jumpsuit he had barely fit into before his Las Vegas blowout, rolls of fat bunching the seams. He turned to Ógán and said, “What’s an internet?”

The Residue of Life and Death

The piercing whistle led Ógán to an industrial garment laundering facility outside Belfast. He’d been to the city many times, watching Niamh and Malachy grow their family. Waiting.

The facility was empty because it was still a couple of hours until sunrise. Yet Ógán went around to the walled-off yard and found workers sheltering beneath a rusty piece of corrugated steel, smoking. Raindrops daggered down like shiny coins. He made his way inside, industrial presses squeezing out white bed sheets and towels for the hospitality industry. The windows toward the front had been sealed with cardboard, giving the appearance that the factory wasn’t in use. This was an unscheduled nightshift.

Eimear was reaching with her red raw hands into the mangle, a huge, gaping black crusher of a thing that gripped the sheets and pressed them between solid rollers, wringing moisture out. The whistle ceased, the rollers stopped, but the mangle still pulsed with violet light. Life was sticky and didn’t want to leave. Ógán had learned death always leaves a residue.

Eimear tugged at a knotted sheet caught on the inner mechanism. The mangle cranked forward, trapping the woman’s hand before it whirred into life, dragging her towards the crushing rollers. Ógán swooped down and pecked the off button but the mangle was not deterred. The woman screamed but her co-workers did not hear her above the growling machine.

Ógán drove his beak into the power cable. Electricity sparked like fireworks, a wallop to his kidney that threw him off his feet. The whole facility went dark as Ógán stumbled onto his feet, beak scorched and sore.

Workers rushed to Eimear’s assistance—she was alive and uninjured, but as the power came back on, so too did the mangle. It had maimed countless people over the past two years, because, Ógán saw, there was a trapped soul within its machinery.

Ógán materialized inside the mangle, where the trapped soul was wedded to the mechanism. He gripped the soul in his beak and ripped. The soul split apart, most of its essence escaping into the ether. “You’ve been dead two years,” Ógán told the remains of the man.

“But just yesterday, I fell into that mangle.”

“Take me to your body,” Ógán commanded.

The mauled soul swept a hundred yards east to the Lagan River. There, weighted with rocks, his body lay hidden in the silt.

Ógán knifed the water and torpedoed the corpse, raising it to the surface. Somebody would find it. Somebody would bring the facility manager to justice. It was not his job to intervene and, taking to the sky corkscrewing with joy, he knew he had done the right thing.

But then, his wings seized and his wishbone froze in his chest. Ógán plummeted like a dead thing.

The Beak of Things To Come

A child’s hands cup him gently and he’s being lifted off the pavement. The world snaps into focus and the woman staring at him is Niamh. Her son, Riley, found Ógán’s twisted body on the pavement next to the Lagan while they were walking to school. She takes him into her hands and he meets her eyes. His heart quickens. He wants to kiss her, but he has witnessed the way she looks at Malachy, at their son—it was love.

Now her green eyes widen in fear.

The boy is strangely silent, when moments ago he chattered about how they needed to save wild animals. He’d been humming a magpie rhyme about a single magpie being bad luck.

Fun Fact

Magpies are symbols of happiness in Chinese culture. Koreans believe they deliver good news. In the myths of Native Americans (Navajo, Blackfoot, Cheyenne), we’re their faithful allies.

A Particularly Difficult Death

Car tires screech. A horn blares.

Niamh sprints onto the road, her boy having taken the crossing without waiting for the traffic signal to change. He’s directly in the path of an oncoming car. She throws herself at Riley, shoving him aside so the car crushes into her. Ógán is still in her hand, both of them thrown forward, tumbling along the road. She’s staring at him, pleading with her eyes as her nose runs bloody. A wound at the back of her skull gapes. Niamh dies. Her soul separates from her body. Riley is running to her.

Ógán loves her too much to let her die. He summons his energy into her and before he blinks out of existence, Niamh sits up, uninjured.

An Interrupted Ending

There are no ends, just new beginnings. That’s how it works, according to The Boss.

He said something about giving everybody a choice but not everybody recognized an opportunity.

“In fact, most people believe there are strict rules forbidding them from intervening.” Funny the things people cling to. Misguided, obviously.

It was difficult for Ógán to grasp because he was still re-forming, but he knew the drill: once as a dead human, and now as a dead bird. He was laid out on a black leather couch, the walls lined with books. He tucked his wings behind his head, crossed his legs and stared at the white ceiling.

“Did you know I was going to do that?”

Freud removed his glasses and fogged the lens, cleaned them on his lapel, and said, “The question is would you have still done it had you known you would?”

“He makes a fair point,” The Boss said. “I guess it’s time you took him back, Ógán.”

Freud stood straight now, his body rigid. He muttered under his breath, hands held in a shooing off gesture, but by then Ógán was ushering him to the jump point.

“Why did I lose flight,” Ógán asked, “if I hadn’t done anything wrong?”

“Unresolved issues,” he replied. “We can get to the root of it with free association. I say a word and you say whatever comes into your mind.”

“You know I’m Irish, right? Those tricks don’t work on us.”

“But, your dreams, I can analyse your dreams. Do you dream of big black dogs?”

“Every magpie does.”

Freud pushed back, trying to escape. Just like they always did, terrified of making a mistake.

Ógán took him gently by the shoulder and shoved him through the portal.

end-of-story-nov

michael

Michael McGlade is an Irish writer with almost sixty short stories in journals such as Dark Moon Digest, Perihelion, Voluted Tales, SQ Mag, and the forthcoming Night Lights anthology by Geminid Publishing. He holds a master’s degree in English and Creative Writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Ireland. Represented by Isobel Dixon of the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency. Find out the latest news and views from him on McGladeWriting.com.

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You Can Do It Again, by Michael Ian Bell. I come up again at the bodega on 189th and Amsterdam. When the vertigo and nausea pass, the shimmering forms resolve into bodies and storefronts. Trash bags are piled enormous in the street and I stare transfixed, one hand on the doorframe, steadying myself. In my other hand is a cola, cold like ice. I put it against my forehead and it shocks me into the moment. Every time is the same but it never gets so I expect it.

Dharmas, by Vajra Chandrasekera. The tuktuk driver spits a small fiery globule out of the side of his mouth. It spins as it flies, striated by angular momentum, and burns a hole in the street, burrowing instantly into the asphalt. I crane my neck outside the vehicle as the tiny, bubbling crater recedes into the distance, watching the curl of smoke until I have to duck back inside to avoid decapitation. Traffic is so loud we can only speak by shouting, but I still think I can hear the fireball hissing. And then gone, lost beneath and behind in the past, heading for the Mohorovičić discontinuity while the street moves on.

Fiction, Issue 29

The Block, by Kostas Ikonomopoulos

The tenement block stands at the edge of the city overlooking a ravine and the hills beyond. The block is perpetually shrouded in mist and when it rains its dark exterior acquires a darker hue. It is old and unmaintained and so are its residents.

For unclear reasons no one lives on the first three floors. On the fourth floor lives a retired folklorist with a passion for Javanese shadow play. Every Sunday evening he invites a few of his neighbors over and he performs the same stories again and again to the sounds of a Gamelan orchestra, a recording he made himself sometime before the last war. When he is done, he takes down the white sheet and then he places his figures in a brilliantly polished chest. The figures are ancient-looking things made of buffalo skin and wood; their color has disappeared.

Madam Meletova loves puppetry in all its forms and always attends the folklorist’s sessions. Many years ago she was the Justice Minister’s mistress. It was said that he used to sign execution orders while she was fellating him. The minister is dead now and advancing years have granted her respectability. She lives alone in spacious block01 rooms just above the folklorist. She never invites anyone in but when she opens her door passersby can see many framed photographs on her walls and a gown or négligée flung over an armchair. Some nights she drinks cognac and sings forgotten arias. She has a beautiful voice and it carries through her open window and reaches the other tenants, who stop what they are doing and listen with melancholy etched on their features.

Majarek shows up at the folklorist’s most Sundays, always accompanied by Sebastiano, the taxidermist. Everyone knows that Majarek is a war hero with a long service in distant colonies now renamed. He has lost his left arm and he wears a prosthetic when he ventures out of the block. He never wears it indoors, treating it, in a way, like a hat. Sebastiano carries strange odors, fascinating and repulsive, reminiscent of lilies and the carcasses of horses. Majarek and Sebastiano seldom speak to one another, yet they are often seen together, smoking cigarettes or observing murmurations in the twilight. They live in adjoining rooms on one of the upper floors.

The others are not regulars and they attend the shadow play perhaps once every few months. Schlossmayer is the oldest and most reclusive of the irregulars. When he arrives at the folklorist’s, he sits next to Meletova and closes his eyes. Perhaps he is there only for the music. Then there is Irene, a woman of indeterminate age recently retired from her position as head nurse in the city’s hospital for the criminally insane. According to Irene, Schlossmayer was the head of his country’s secret police during a brutal dictatorship. Irene maintains that Schlossmayer is a true psychopath who has tortured and murdered many men and women. Nonetheless, she greets him with kindness and sits near him at the folklorist’s apartment. She has even been inside Schlossmayer’s rooms, which she claims are filled with old books in many languages. The books with titles she could read, she says, appeared to be monographs on subjects such as Asiatic falconry and Baroque furniture.

In the bowels of the block, its boiler room, its terrace and its staircases, men and women wearing drab, heavy clothing make random and unexpected appearances. There is no superintendent and no listing of residents so it is not possible to know whether these people actually live here or are merely visiting, though it can be said with certainty that no regular visitors ever come, no family members, or distant relatives, or friends from various social circles. The residents of the tenement block appear to have no families or friends on the outside. They live retiring, monastic lives, pursuing solitary passions.

II.

At the bottom of the ravine is a dried riverbed. Sebastiano, the taxidermist, often walks there, as does Madam Meletova, whose first name, never told to anyone in the block, is Alexandra. On occasion, Sebastiano returns from a walk with a dead bird that he proceeds to embalm in his apartment. Alexandra walks in the early morning, dressed as though she were about to attend the opera or the theater. She often emerges like a lone survivor of some unreported catastrophe before Majarek’s eyes.

At this hour, the one-armed man sits on a stone bench near the front entrance reading his crumbled newspaper. The war hero greets the aged concubine and watches her as she walks away, swaying her block02 hips now that she knows he is watching. Each time she disappears into the morning, Majarek experiences crushing, devastating sadness. He looks down at his fake arm and his polished shoes and then he looks out into the distance, at the highways and the office buildings, at the world of the living. A profound loss darkens his insides and he wills himself to stand up and go back to his apartment, a man who is all past.

Mornings are difficult for the other residents as well. Irene, a chronic insomniac, stands on her balcony and smokes, gazing at the hills with bleary eyes. She thinks back to her countless night shifts at the asylum, the impossible stillness of those hours. Then she returns to her kitchen and boils water for her tea. She sips it while looking absentmindedly at the plastic table cover. The folklorist is hard at work in his study. He is laboring on an ambitious project, a compendium of death rituals. His frustration often overtakes him and he tears up the pages he has written since dawn. He wants this book to be his legacy, a definitive work, something that cannot be bettered or surpassed. Schlossmayer thinks about killing himself but he reasons that he is old and death cannot be far. Still, he keeps a pistol. Today, it lies in plain view between a Cyrillic Bible and a treatise in German about navigation in the Middle Ages. He often moves it around, compelled by an urge he has never been able to define.

At noontime, the block is dead silent. The tenants are absent, and it is unclear where they have all gone. Meletova’s door is closed but most others are left ajar. There is a basement beneath the basement and perhaps this is where all the residents go at noon. The lower basement is accessed through a metal trapdoor next to the janitor’s closet that is covered with an old rug. There are posters on the damp walls and any descent into the sub-basement is witnessed by faded cabaret dancers and music hall performers. Of course, the lower basement is not the only possibility; there are other places in the block that can claim the living. On the south side of the rooftop terrace is a cavernous pigeon loft. On the fifteenth floor, a sealed room may be accessed by those who know the combination for the ancient lock. But wherever the residents of the block go, they are returned by late afternoon. Their reemergence is followed by the renewal of the vile smells emanating from the taxidermist’s apartment workshop, and the renewal of the folklorist’s pacing and anguished mumbling.

When evening falls, the block is spectrally lit by primitive and defective lamps. It looks like a giant gripped by ankylosis. Its long shadow falls across tarmac and gravel, across the banks of the dried riverbed, and merges with the denser shadow descending from the hillside. Disturbing noises rise from night birds and crawlers. And then the block’s own emissions start escaping from windows, doors, cracks, and fissures, as though the block were a music box opened by a curious child.

III.

Friday evening, a gathering takes place on the tenth floor, inside a vast apartment whose inner walls have been demolished. The invitation was issued by Irene, in the form of torturously calligraphed notices slipped under all the apartment doors. The tenants have been summoned to decide Schlossmayer’s fate, though it is unclear what gives them the authority to do so. Irene, resplendent in her white psychiatric nurse’s uniform, offers the assembled residents a lengthy monologue. She reiterates her suspicions regarding the old recluse’s murderous past. Then, dramatically, Irene takes out a folder from a leather satchel and drops it on the long table spanning the room. The residents, seated around the table in uncomfortable chairs, look at the folder and then at Schlossmayer, who sits by himself off in a corner, with accelerating embarrassment and discomfort. The hermit gives the nurse a look of reproach, as if to say, I thought we were beyond all this, that we were civil to each other. The proceedings have taken him by surprise, and yet he came to the gathering of his own accord. As he took the stand to defend himself, even though no proper authority compelled him to do so, he was, as always, cordially greeted by his neighbors.

Irene refers to the folder on the table as the ‘new and damning evidence,’ yet she presents it neither to those gathered, nor to the old man whose fate is being decided. Sebastiano thinks how odd it is that no one has been appointed judge on this matter. Even if a majority of the assembled decided, one way or the other, who was going to enforce the decision? Who was going to support it with authority? Majarek, who is very cultured for a military man and has an art historian’s sensibility, looks up at the ceiling; the cracks, mold, and discoloration form patterns and designs that remind him of the ceiling of the Senate Room in the Palazzo Ducale.

Irene asks Schlossmayer, in a rather friendly manner given the circumstances, to comment on the new evidence, although the only thing Irene has said of it so far is that the ‘new and damning evidence’ supports the previous evidence that was brought forth when the issue was first raised. No one remembers when the issue was first raised, much less the original evidence, and at that point, Alexandra Meletova stands, and for a moment, rocks back and forth. She has been drinking and it appears to the assembled that she might actually sing. Instead, after steadying herself, she approaches Irene and whispers something in her ear. The retired nurse turns pale. Alexandra returns to her seat.

Irene stands and awkwardly addresses the assembled once again. She claims it was all a joke she conceived, a play to enliven this evening, that she intended, at the end of the performance, to admit it was all an act and take her bows. She approaches Schlossmayer and lays her hand on his shoulder.

For a minute, nothing happens.

The folklorist is the first to go. Sebastiano follows, and then the others, one by one, file out of the room. The large apartment is now empty, save for Schlossmayer, who looks utterly exhausted and defeated. He stands up with effort and shambles out of the room and down the corridor towards the stairs. In his room, he takes up the pistol and sits at his desk. He looks at the pistol for a long time. Finally, he stands up, goes to the open window and starts shooting at the hillside, at the dark and unmovable heart of the thing that haunts and traps them all.

IV.

That very night the birds arrive. It is a peculiar and unseasonable migration. Sebastiano, of course, is aware of this phenomenon and of the pull the building exerts on this strange breed, which has yet to be classified. Large corvids with blood-streaked bellies fly in and land around the pigeon loft. They start shrieking and rattling with a focused intensity that terrifies the residents. Meletova cannot tolerate the cacophony and so she places a record on her primordial gramophone and opens her windows. The music ascends to the terrace like a bronze shield and the cries of the birds crash against it. Somewhere in the middle floors of the block a light comes on.

Kang, unseen for two years, is now frantically gathering herbs and minerals from his cabinets and mixing them inside a silver urn. He sets the mix alight and, holding the urn with both hands, takes the stairs to the rooftop. The smoke coming out of the container is block03 choking him and he falters. Up above, the birds go into a frenzy, like a panicked camp anticipating a devastating assault. The residents’ nerves are frayed. The folklorist, knowledgeable and dedicated as he is, breaks down and falls on his floor. Wracked by insomnia and shamed over recent events, Irene’s veins unfurl like satiated serpents. Her clammy skin is taut and, like a bow bent without mercy, she reaches her snapping point and starts screaming back at the birds.

At this very instant, the old pharmacist finally arrives at the terrace and places the urn. The smoke rises, flashing blue and crimson, and moves towards the malevolent flock. A vengeful shrieking pierces hill and building and human flesh alike but it cannot stave off this defeat. The birds rise, a flurry of screaming and feathers. Suddenly, all motion stops. For a time, the birds are suspended, as if pinned to a painted sky. At the blink of an eye, they are hurled across the night, as though swept away by the hand of a random god.

Silence descends upon the block. Kang slowly reclaims his weapon and makes his way back to his rooms. There, he retires among the paraphernalia of his trade and falls asleep next to his fragrant vials. One by one, the others come to their senses and rejoice: somehow, they have been reprieved. And no one is more aware of this unwarranted, unexpected and undeserved miracle than Sebastiano. He remembers when, more than ten years ago, the birds came and stayed screaming for a week. At that time, the taxidermist had tried to hang himself but failed. Old Cazares went insane. Arletta flung herself from her balcony to the dried riverbed below. The lives of all the residents were damaged and disrupted. Kang was away that week. Perhaps the birds knew it and that is why they descended upon the block for so long and with such soul-piercing and persistent malice.

But this night is won. Alexandra’s song can now be heard, victorious and unrestrained, climbing defiantly towards the darkened regions of the sky. Irene sits at her kitchen table, drinks her tea and smokes, waiting for the morning.

The days reclaim their pace and unfold with languor. Majarek experiences a kind of peace that has eluded him for years. This morning, he has received an official-looking letter from the hot and distant land where he served his flag for many years. The letter acknowledges Majarek’s contributions. The new government is grateful for the assistance he rendered during the turbulent transition. An invitation to a ceremony is included and states, in no uncertain terms, that the Falcon’s Wings, the new country’s highest decoration, will be presented to him at the City Hall in one month’s time. Pride now softens Majarek’s gloomy and depressive tendencies. He can even follow Meletova’s moving figure with no more than basic pangs of pain. He starts making travel arrangements.

By noontime, all of the residents know. First, he tells Sebastiano. A random meeting with Schlossmayer by the boiler room gives him the opportunity to spread the news further. Then Irene hears the news. One by one, they all felicitate the military man and he accepts their smiles and their praise, unaware of the resentment in their hearts, a deep-seated rancor that arises from their diminished humanity, their isolation, their failures and inner exile.

The folklorist is the first to voice his objection, tactfully, of course, to Sebastiano and Irene. He clothes his seething jealousy in careful words. Wasn’t Majarek given a certificate of recognition by the opposition (now defeated and exiled) in that distant land? Hadn’t he accepted an instructor’s post at a neighboring republic when he was younger, a country often at odds with the one that now wants to decorate him? The folklorist is an expert at casting aspersions. He is motivated by selfishness and fear. Majarek’s ascension will overshadow the folklorist’s future accomplishments. He instinctively knows that this tenement block is large enough for only one man’s work to flirt with history.

Sebastiano is torn, because he considers himself Majarek’s friend. He knows that this honor will bring Majarek closer to his estranged family, taking him away from the block and the present miserable circumstances that bind them. The taxidermist wants the military officer to remain. He loves him. Of course, he would never admit it. He often reminisces to himself, about their evenings of companionship, about that shared estrangement, about that comfortable silence at dusk. He closes his eyes and sees Majarek smiling sadly, Majarek without the prosthetic arm, in all his glorious vulnerability. All his history, all his struggle, all his pride. All his loneliness carved in his lean face, all his past behind gray eyes that have gone grayer on long ocean voyages. The discipline, the self-denial, the dashed hopes, and more than anything, the nobility that lifts Majarek and separates him. Sebastiano agrees that perhaps the foreign government should be made aware of a possible conflict of interest that might take an embarrassing turn.

Alexandra likes the way Majarek looks at her; he makes her feel younger and desired. But in all the years they have known each other, he has never tried to beguile or seduce her. Her flesh has aged and withered and still Majarek waits. It is almost too cruel. Why does he taunt her? Bitterness overwhelms her. He denies her even as his gaze fills with yearning. How can she forgive him? If he were indifferent, if Alexandra merely suffered from unrequited love, bitterness would have no place. But this is too much for any woman to bear. And now Majarek looks happy and hopeful again. Where block04 does that leave Alexandra? And so she agrees with the others that something must be done. She would deny him this new hope, this new beginning, the way he has denied Alexandra her own. Let them know he is no hero, no nation-builder! Let them know he plays all sides, he works for whomever pays, he swears no allegiance! He is like all other men, he disappoints and he compromises. But Alexandra is wrong. She does not know that Majarek is burdened by guilt. That Majarek supported the coup that ousted the previous government. That men from his own regiment dragged the Justice Minister outside the city, doused him with petrol, and set him aflame. That it was Majarek, himself, who stripped her parents’ estate of all valuables and set them on the path to exile. Majarek was young then and for the rest of his career he tried to make amends for the excesses of his youth and use wisdom and compassion in all his dealings. But he knows that to be with Alexandra—whose name he alone in the building knows—he would have to tell her the truth, and she would hate him.

The others have nothing against Majarek. But they fear change. And it feels wrong for anyone to leave the tenement block alive.

VI.

Schlossmayer sends the letter. He is an expert in such affairs. He has no quarrel with Majarek, but feels no empathy either. Where is Schlossmayer’s reward, where is what was promised to him? Unbeknownst to the others, Schlossmayer also sends another message, to Majarek’s estranged son, arousing the young man’s vanity and poisoning whatever remains of filial love and the awe he owes his father.

Two weeks pass. Sebastiano gives a lecture on taxidermy that only Irene and the folklorist attend. Kang makes a single appearance: he spends two hours at the terrace, next to the pigeon loft, looking for something. He is witnessed by two women, who might be new residents, and who happen to be visiting the terrace themselves. When they notice him they withdraw, as if they were caught doing something terribly improper.

Then, the two officials arrive. One is in uniform. The other is wearing a black suit. They inquire after Majarek. Majarek sees them upon returning from a walk along the riverbed with the taxidermist. Sebastiano has been trying to spend more time with his friend, now full of regret for going along with the plan to discredit him. Sebastiano is on the verge of confession. He hopes that nothing comes of their intervention, but he suspects that events have transpired that cannot be undone. When he sees the two men, his stomach turns. A pitiful sound escapes his lips.

Majarek recognizes both men and he smiles. Accelerating his pace, he leaves the taxidermist behind. He believes the men have come to congratulate him, these men who have shunned him for so long. He walks towards them with purpose, even more content for the fact that he is wearing his prosthetic arm and his clean suit jacket. The men straighten up as he approaches. Majarek outranks them.

Irene is about to exit the building when she sees the three men through the glass door. She stops. As she witnesses the silent drama, the thought occurs to her that what is transpiring is one of the stories told by the folklorist’s puppets, a tragedy played out in light and shadow. At first, all three men are stiff. Majarek becomes animated. The man in uniform hangs his head. Majarek turns to the man in the black suit. Irene believes that Majarek has just won some minor victory when the suit, with impossible speed, slaps Majarek across the face. The black suit takes out a letter and holds it up. Majarek takes it, reads it, and takes a small step back. Majarek sheds all nobility and bearing; the prosthetic hangs like a simian extremity. His knees buckle. The uniformed man quickly reaches out to him and steadies him. Majarek, invoking decades of pride and discipline, breaks free of the other’s grasp and straightens. Majarek again addresses the black suit. The man’s face registers surprise, disdain, doubt, fear, all in quick succession. Choked with shame, Irene wants to run out and tell the men it was all lies. Majarek is beyond reproach, Majarek with his one arm, and gray eyes, and tired smile, Majarek in his titanic solitude undreamt of by lesser men. Once, when phantom pains in his missing limb had become unendurable, he sought her out, but Irene had nothing with which to comfort him. He told her, then, how he lost his arm. Irene told no one else that story, but during awful nights, when regrets and insomnia threaten to unravel her, she remembers it, and tears of gratitude dampen her pillow until sleep claims her. Why have they done this to the best of them? Irene is certain she will run out. But she stays rooted in place until the uniform and the black suit leave and Majarek is left alone in the middle of the courtyard, forlorn and sacrificed and having lost something for which there is no prosthesis.

VII.

Majarek spends the night chain-smoking in his room. Painstakingly, he reconstructs what has happened and what needs to be done. He is a soldier and no stranger to pain, misfortune, and defeat, and he is block05 not without allies. He has friends he expects will come to his aid. He was a great tactician once. Now, he plans his next move with great care, accounting for all contingencies. In his great mind he organizes his defenses. But he does not know that the great hollow horse is already within the city walls.

A young man comes to his door and knocks. The sun is still not up. The young man drove through the night, bursting with self-righteousness, and arrived to claim the confrontation that was for years denied him. No one saw him climb up the stairs and walk down the corridor leading to his father’s door. Sebastiano, unable to sleep, the glassy eyes of his dead animals looking at him accusingly, hears the knock. Like Irene, Sebastiano is drowning in remorse, and like Irene, he is not able to do a single thing to help his friend. Unlike Irene and Sebastiano, many others are sleeping peacefully at this hour. The folklorist is dreaming of Mount Merapi as seen from the top of Borobudur. Schlossmayer seems to have found meaning again through his last vile act. In molding and breaking the wills of men he finds both ecstasy and comfort. For a long time Schlossmayer has enjoyed Meletova’s protection; the woman is also a creature addicted to intrigue and subversion. She has acquired access to the residents’ secrets and unforgivable acts. She is the repository of their collective shame. Of course, she also knows Schlossmayer for who he is. But he shielded her after the old regime collapsed, after her lover was immolated, after her parents were driven out of their estate and their ancestral land, and she is indebted to him. She hopes Schlossmayer will die soon and release her from their terrible bond. Until then, she guards him, and those around him fall.

The door opens. Father and son face one another. Majarek looks incomprehensibly at the younger man. The light from the lamp makes Majarek’s shadow fall on the boy, heavy and absolute, the way it has been all their lives. The early hour, the stillness in the corridor, the window facing the darkened hill: the men stand suspended in time. The terrible meeting they both have craved is at hand.

The young man walks in. The door closes. Sebastiano hears their muffled voices in the adjoining room. The taxidermist stands still next to the wall, the tension stretching his body like a string. His lips are sealed, he guards his breath as though it were his soul. At first, the voices are indistinguishable. His friend’s voice is quiet, reasoning, pleading. The other voice starts low, but gets sharper, rises in anger, becomes shrill with indignation. Majarek, again: explaining, first with authority, then with sadness. The son: getting louder, mocking, erupting in cruel laughter. And then comes the inevitable, pillowy silence, heavy and stifling, draping the dawn in despair.

The son leaves, all threads cut, his father dead to him.

VIII.

It is a strange and glorious morning: the mist has lifted for the first time in years. On the balconies and on the terrace, in the courtyard and along the riverbed, the disbelieving residents turn their faces towards the sun and then gaze upon the verdant hills, which are resplendent and shining, as though they have just been polished to perfection. No one remembers such a day. The folklorist has left his desk and his chapter on Neolithic mummification techniques and stands before a massive, glassless window on the first floor corridor. Kang stands beside him, his eyes like milky orbs, and looks upon the trees on the hillside, impossibly well-defined against the dark but satiated earth. Has Kang regained the perfect eyesight he enjoyed in youth? Even Schlossmayer, a man resistant to natural beauty and an implacable enemy of common sentiment, grins like an idiot on the terrace, a fresh breeze caressing his dried and spotted face. Irene and Sebastiano have forgotten the apocalyptic night they have just survived and walk hand in hand—without even realizing it—towards the hills. Meletova has left her door open and music from her phonograph rolls down the staircases and climbs the barren walls before spilling out to caress them all with longing and delight. It is a virtuosic viola da gamba performance and the bass has a resounding, otherworldly quality. The concubine appears to have shed decades. She wears a long red gown with intricate lacework, its exquisite craftsmanship complementing the three rows of pearls resting on her alabaster skin. From his vantage point on the first floor, the folklorist sees her emerging in the courtyard and for a moment, violent, lustful and brilliant thoughts flash in his mind, the thoughts of a young man who, aggressive and self-assured, is about to embark on an adventure. He turns to explain this to Kang, but the old pharmacist is not there. Kang has gone below, to the basement beneath the basement, the one accessed through the trapdoor next to the janitor’s closet and down the staircase overseen by cabaret dancers and music hall performers on faded posters. The pharmacist has gone deep and will not come out again, for like ancient Diagoras, Kang has discovered that a moment of perfect happiness is the ideal moment for death.

Now the long forgotten and the no longer seen come out and reacquaint themselves with life and light and friends. The Krebs sisters, still clutching Thermos flasks full of plum liquor in their gloved hands, descend the hill and meet up with the nurse and the taxidermist. Strilic, the impresario, a man thought to have died or to have vanished fifteen years ago, appears on his balcony, though the door leading to his apartment remains sealed with layers of undisturbed dust. On any other morning this would be cause for alarm or astonishment, but not this day. Mesmerized, entranced and enchanted, the residents absorb rays of sun and bliss, all their troubles forgotten.

Inside his apartment, Majarek looks for a length of rope.

IX.

Indignities accumulate in his final hours. He has misplaced important papers, including details of people who might have otherwise been able to help him; he is out of food and drink; and he discovers that he is no longer in possession of his pistol. Despairing, he searches for alternatives. He does not find the rope he is looking for, but in a flash of clarity, he realizes that it would be of no use to him anyway: he is neither criminal nor traitor. Die he must, but not this way.

Alone in the building, drifting along corridors and staircases that appear lit for the first time, he makes his way inside various rooms. Irene’s bathroom cabinets are filled with pharmaceuticals, but he has no way of knowing their effectiveness. In the early moments of his desolation, he contemplated stealing embalming fluid from Sebastiano’s laboratory, but soon discarded the notion. He had a horrid vision in which he lay on the floor, without motor skills, twitching and soiling himself. Now he finds himself in front of Kang’s door, but it is locked. Despondent, he returns to his quarters.

He has knives, of course, ceremonial daggers sharp enough. But it is a perilous proposition for a one-armed man. He could ascend to the terrace and jump to his death. But men have been known to survive falls, even from great heights. And, of course, dignity, always dignity, the memory of his essence that must be preserved. So he leaves his rooms yet again, fearing that whatever is attracting the residents and keeping them outside will vanish, and that they will return to find him, adding more embarrassment to an existence that has become synonymous with it; or worse, noontime will arrive, forcing everyone into temporary banishment. The building has already started to tremble, an invisible wave rising out of the bowels of the lower basement. Majarek fears he will run out of time.

At last, he comes to Schlossmayer’s door and finds it open. Entering, he is astonished to find book-lined shelves and cabinets but nothing else that reflects the man: no photographs on the walls, no uniforms in the closets, no memorabilia from different times. He had not believed Irene’s description of Schlossmayer’s rooms. Now, bewilderment washes over him. He has trouble reconciling the old foreigner’s malice with his erudite predilections. Not for a moment block06 has he doubted that Schlossmayer is behind the slander that has ruined him. Yet, he marvels that such a man should come to possess things of great value and beauty. Standing between two rows of incunabula, Majarek forgets the purpose of this hour. A large desk is situated in front of the grand window. On it, a Coronelli globe tilts at an impossible angle, but somehow remains in place supported by two woodblocks. Momentarily, the one-armed man considers a friendship that never was; the man who has undone him could have been a great companion. The conversations they could have had, the obsessions they could have shared. He sits on the leather armchair behind the desk and allows himself a moment of peace. He notices a glint from the top of a cabinet against the back wall. He looks at it until his eyes tear up, so strong is the reflection. He stands and walks towards the source of this unbearable brilliance. Wedged between a Flemish notary’s account of a medieval murder and a Buddhist scripture in Pali, reflecting the improbable rays of this improbable sun, he finds Schlossmayer’s firearm and relief envelops him. He takes the pistol in his hand and finds pleasure in the familiar weight. He returns to the leather armchair, the weapon evoking memories of battles fought under a merciless sun, a life of service and loss, of barracks and offices that stank of stale smoke, of ancient trains and desiccated plantations, of corpse-filled fields at dawn, of artillery shelling, of his amputated arm. But nostalgia evaporates, and only this acute present pain remains, a pain that wears the face of his son.

So he stands up and leaves.

On the stairs leading to the rooftop he sees an old couple, sitting like students, holding hands. He has not seen either of them before. The woman’s face is daubed with white and her lips are clownish and red. As he passes by, they both smile toothless smiles, smiles full of intolerable understanding. As he walks past, up the stairs, Majarek senses them standing, receding into the building, the midday hour fast approaching.

Finally, he arrives and stands alone at the top of the tenement block.

They have all left. The hill, the ravine, the courtyard: all empty. The firmament has darkened. On the terrace, Majarek leans against the pigeon loft. He has always loved high places and he wishes to be buried in the sky.

No bitterness mars his final moments. The soldier knows his life is forfeit. Majarek feels light without his prosthetic; the unpinned sleeve is flapping in the wind. Beneath his feet, a deep silence reigns inside the block. He is utterly alone, but this mission is the simplest he has ever undertaken. Ever systematic, he test-fires the pistol at the distant city. The report reverberates all around the hill and the dried riverbed. There is only one question left: head or heart? He hesitates, not out of fear, but because he knows the ludicrous preoccupations of the living. For him, all that is random and all that is necessary, it all comes to an end. Does it matter if the casket is open or closed? His son will not be there. No one who matters to him will be there. And he discovers a certain freedom in this thought.

Time has always seemed slow in the tenement block, but Majarek’s ruminations have been lengthier than expected. Soon the residents will reappear and perhaps some will come to the terrace in order to gaze at the darkening hill from this very spot, a vantage point that justifies the entirety of the crumbling building that supports it. Majarek smiles at a memory: Olafsson, the folklorist, once told him a story about a man who promised to build a thousand towers in a single night and raised demons from the earth to help him do so. The demons worked through the night and were constructing the last tower when someone lit fires all around. Believing that dawn had come, the demons melted back into the earth and the man who had summoned them failed to keep his promise.

What nonsense! He takes one lingering look around. The sparse trees on the hillside appear to be undulating as if pressed from above. A bird rises out of the branches, followed by another and another until the swarm is formed. The familiar shrieking is heard as the corvids unexpectedly return for another assault.

Majarek puts the barrel in his mouth. When the metal touches the hard palate, he pulls the trigger.

end-of-story-nov

kostas

Kostas Ikonomopoulos was born in Athens in 1976. He studied in Greece and the UK. Over the years, he has worked in education, development, trading & outsourcing, gaming and publishing, in Europe, South Africa, China and SE Asia. He recently published a non-fiction book about ruined and neglected sites of cultural significance in Singapore, where he has been living for the past five years.

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The Half Dark Promise, by Malon Edwards. Something moves in the half dark two gas lamps ahead of me. I hold fast at the edge of a small circle of gaslight cast down from the street lamp above me. I don’t breathe. I don’t move. I just hold my breath so long that I get lightheaded as I try to drop eaves hard into the half dark around the gas lamps ahead. But all I hear is my steam-clock heart going tanmiga tanmiga tanmiga in my chest.

States of Emergency, by Erica L. Satifka. In a no-tell motel just outside Billings, the psychotic cattle rancher known as Paranoid Jack freezes when he sees the baby-blue eyeball glowering at him from the mouthpiece of the Bakelite phone. “Hello? Hello?” Jack swallows down the bile rising in his stomach. Nowhere is safe. He sets the phone back in its receiver and walks out to the motel lobby.

Fiction, Issue 29

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.

The second woman to live in the four-gabled house pulled her children from the ground like stubborn roots. They came out of the soil smelling of pollen, with faces like tulips. They were healthy until she cut their stems, and then they withered. They returned reedy and gray-faced to the earth.

The third woman in the four-gabled house said she had no children.

The fourth woman in the four-gabled house built her children from the parts of old radios and tractors. Their cries sounded like the spinning of propellers. Some of them could blink and one could even smile, but breast milk fried their motors. In their mother’s arms, they dissolved into heaps of crackling wires.

The women had been married before, to ordinary men, but no one wanted to mention that in light of what happened to the children.

The women in the four-gabled house no longer got many visitors.

All through the month of September, the women in the four-gabled house watched as a sober, clean-faced young creature walked down their street, past their house, to the end of the cul-de-sac, then turned and walked back.

The stranger would not walk in a neighborhood as unfashionable as their neighborhood if she did not want something with the four-gabled house and the women who lived there, they were sure of it.

“We should call someone,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable of the four-gabled house. “Get a neighborhood watch together.”

“Nonsense. She’s probably selling magazine subscriptions,” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable of the four-gabled house. “Or collecting bits of metal for the war effort, or trying to interest us in a quilting bee so the orphans can have blankets. Or she’s from some society that has asked her to come by our house, but the problem is that she’s just too scared to do it.”

“Are we still frightening?” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable of the four-gabled house. “I thought we’d gotten past that a few decades ago.”

“She’s a young girl in a fashionable hat,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “What could frighten her more than four old mothers with nary a man between them?”

“Well,” sniffed the woman who made her bed in the first gable. “If she ever came down to my cellar, she’d know real fright.”

September became October, October passed into November, and a damp, uncertain snow shimmered on the walks when the stranger came at last to the four-gabled house.

Her knock was hesitant, as if she feared to hurt the door.

The woman who made her bed in the first gable of the four-gabled house came to the door. The scent of myrrh clung to all her clothes and the damp of cellar walls clung to all her eyelids. She was the least approachable, so she always dealt with strangers.

“Please, may I come in?” said the stranger, and the woman who made her bed in the first gable thought for a moment, then nodded once, solemnly, and stepped aside.

The young woman crossed the foyer into the sitting room, where the other three women were waiting. “I’ve brought a pie for you,” she said, pushing a towel-covered dish at the most approachable person in the sitting room, which happened to be the woman who made her bed in the third gable of the four-gabled house. “I hope you like rhubarb.”

“Certainly,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable, and while she smiled warmly, her hands trembled when she took the dish. “Thank you, dear.” She said dear after a long, conspicuous pause, as if correcting herself.

“My name is Marigold Hest,” said the stranger. “I wonder—do you know my husband?”

“I doubt it,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable, at the same time that the woman who made her bed in the second gable said indignantly, “Should we?”

“Never mind that,” said Marigold. “In fact, I’m glad. It will make things simpler.” She sat for a moment, fidgeting with the brim of her hat, then huffed out a soft little breath and added, “I’ve heard that you have children here. I need one.”

“Do you think they fall out of the eaves?” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable. “What makes you believe we have a child for you? You’re a married woman—go get one off your husband.”

The young woman blushed as pink as rhubarb, but she persisted. “People talk about you. They say you used to be midwives, and now you’re witches. They say you’re descended from the women who they hung in Salem. They say you’re German and came to Amherst to seduce our men and spy on us. But I don’t care what you are. Somehow you get babies, lots of them. Please, let me have one.”

None of the women said anything for a long while. The woman who made her bed in the first gable of the four-gabled house raised her eyebrows. The woman who made her bed in the second gable stifled a laugh. The woman who made her bed in the third gable did nothing. At last, the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable said, “And what sort of child is it that you’re wanting?”

“Any sort,” said Marigold. “Really, any one would do. As long as I can get it soon.”

“We’re not an assembly-line,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable. “Did someone tell you that we had… procured a baby for them?”

“No,” said Marigold, in a whisper that sounded more like yes.

“We wouldn’t,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “Ordinarily. Not out of selfishness… dear… but because we can’t.”

The others looked at her, noticing the word ordinarily and wondering if a stranger in a fashionable hat really counted as an exception. They had made an exception, once before. The exception was why the woman who made her bed in the third gable did not have children.

“But if you can try,” said Marigold. “If there’s any chance that you could get one for me, that would be better than no chance at all.”

“Why?” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable. “You’re young yet. Do you need a child now?”

“I’m afraid to say,” said Marigold. “Must I say?”

“No,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable, before anyone else could speak. “We will try. Let us try.”

The woman who made her bed in the fourth gable was the first to take up Marigold’s cause. She took apart the ice box for its metal, marooning a bottle of milk and a package of frozen vegetables so she would have the materials to begin constructing a child. Sighing in resignation, the other women prepared a meal with all of their perishable foods. This had happened before, with the lamps and the radiator and the toaster oven. Wartime made metal hard to come by. Scrap-metal children had been rationed almost out of existence.

“This could be my last,” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable. She had a spoonful of warm grape jelly in her mouth, a soldering iron warming in her hand. “For a while, anyway, this could be my last.”

The probable lastness of the child did not make him any more eager to survive.

When he was complete, a small frame of plated steel and plastic with a hungry gaping buzzsaw mouth, the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable called Marigold to the house and laid the child in her arms.

“Oh,” Marigold said. “Oh. What a miracle he is.” She kissed the shining smooth metal of his face, and held him in her arms. She said already he felt like hers. And then she went away.

For three days, the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable stayed there, weeping for the child she had abandoned to another woman, drinking cocoa made with curdled milk, listening to the radio: Little Orphan Annie had adventures twice daily; the president reported on the War only once, at five. On the third day Marigold brought the pile of wire and aluminum back to the four-gabled house, tucking him underneath her pea-coat to shield him from the wind. She wanted him buried properly; she wanted to go on pretending that he was a real child; she wanted to be told sorry.

The women who lived in the four-gabled house frowned and shook their heads. But they would not say sorry. They were glad to see that a young pretty stranger could not succeed where they always failed.

“A pity, that I could not make a better child,” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable. “But not, I suppose, a surprise.”

“A pity,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable.

“A pity,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable.

The woman who made her bed in the third gable would not say anything.

They let Marigold bury the child; she had already purchased a headstone for him.

“Bury him anywhere you like. Just, please,” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable, “not where water can reach him. He’ll fry if water reaches him.”

Marigold didn’t say what she thought, which was: he’s already dead, why should it matter what reaches him? She only nodded. She shifted his small body in her arms, and she handed the women a printed invitation to a wake that none of them would attend.

The woman who made her bed in the second gable felt a sort of pity for Marigold, now that the girl was grieving like the rest of them. That Marigold considered herself their superior, that she came to them in secret with her fashionable hat hiding her prim face, only made the girl more pathetic. She had not realized yet. She didn’t know. Some women simply aren’t meant for children.

The child that the woman who made her bed in the second gable made for Marigold would be a calla lily, with a decorative white face and a stem that wouldn’t wilt—at least not for a while. “Come twice a day and feed her,” she instructed Marigold, tipping a watering can over her own brood of children.

The wet soil darkened to a rich, nourished color. Marigold studied the ground attentively. “What is that you’re feeding them?”

“What does any mother feed her hungry infant?”

The girl’s eyes widened. She said, “I don’t believe I can do that, ma’am.”

“Don’t you ever call me ma’am,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable. “When your child pushes her way out of the ground, when she looks at you with her hungry mouth wide-open, then you’ll believe you can do it. The milk has to be yours, understood?”

“Yes ma’am,” said Marigold, cowed but unrepentant, watching as a row of robust, root-colored children uncurled their long tendril-arms and lifted their faces to the sun.

The woman who made her bed in the second gable had garden clippers that she kept in perfect condition. She polished them before and after use, kept them from rust, and removed them from their leather case for one reason only: to cut loose those children who had come to term. It was with great reluctance that she handed the clippers to Marigold, who cut her child out of the ground and then, minutes later, sent her back to it.

“It seems wrong to bury her where she grew,” Marigold whispered.

The clippers rested in the pocket of Marigold’s flannel skirt. With uncharacteristic gentleness, the woman who made her bed in the second gable took them and returned them to their leather case.

“We could try again,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable, but she said the words so Marigold would know she didn’t mean them. And Marigold, sniffling, obediently shook her head no.

“I think my husband suspected, after the first child,” she said. “Perhaps it’s a blessing that this one died so soon. It would be wrong to try again. Wouldn’t it?”

She wanted to be told: no, it’s not wrong. Let’s try. This time your child will not be fed on borrowed breast milk. This time you will not make a diagonal cut down your child’s stem, as if she is a flower you are preparing for a vase. This time you will be better.

“Years ago, I let them grow too long, and they hurt me,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable. How many years, the girl would not know. “They made my insides ache. But I wanted them to stay with me longer, that’s why I did it. You don’t yet know what it feels like, to lose them again and again.”

“It must be dreadful,” said Marigold.

Later, she baked an apple tart. She smudged all the lipstick from her mouth and let her fashionable hat sit crooked on her head, and she sought the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

The women who lived in the four-gabled house found each other in tabloids, then in Sunday papers, then finally in a medical journal that three times failed to pass a peer review. But before then, the woman who made her bed in the third gable had lived alone. And the house had only one gable, and she could bear no children.

To the woman who made her bed in the third gable, this was a tragedy.

To the rest of the world, it was a great relief.

The woman who made her bed in the third gable gasped in fright when Marigold came to her door. Visitors, when they came to the four-gabled house at all, never climbed the staircase to the rooms where the women made their beds. When the woman peeked around her bedroom door, she sighed softly in relief and stepped aside. Marigold removed her hat, then stepped over the threshold.

“Is that apple?” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

“Yes—a tart.” Marigold handed over the steaming dish as if she could not wait to be rid of it. The woman who made her bed in the third gable set the dish aside, and did not look in its direction again.

“I suppose you heard what happened to the last baby,” Marigold said, after a moment.

“I’m so sorry, dear,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable, her voice quivering on the final word. “That must have been very hard for you.”

“Yes,” said Marigold. Then, steeling herself, she added, “I want to try again.”

“I’m afraid that’s how all her children come out… dear. They simply cannot survive without the earth to nourish them.”

“Not from her,” Marigold said. “From you. Please. It would mean the world to me.”

“How much is the world?” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable, frowning. She studied Marigold. “I’m not sure you’re ready to bear and bring up the sort of child I would make, dear.”

“When will I be ready?”

“There is one other woman in this household you have not asked for a child.”

“I had not thought she would say yes to me,” said Marigold. “I rather thought she disapproved of the whole thing.”

“She said no to you when you were young and childless. She did not want you to be happy. Now you have lost two children, and you ask her only for the chance to lose another.”

“So I will lose her child too?”

The woman who made her bed in the third gable would not say.

In the cellar, the air smelled like rust and formaldehyde and old gardenia petals. The temperature was many degrees lower than it was in the rest of the four-gabled house, and Marigold wrapped her coat tightly around herself as she descended the stairs. She had no tart or cake for the woman who made her bed in the first gable, for she suspected that nothing baked or roasted would satisfy such a woman, and she was right. The woman who made her bed in the first gable liked pickled things, things crunchy with salt and long-preserved, and she hated how fresh dough collapsed on her tongue. When she saw Marigold, she always thought of that fresh-dough feeling.

“I know already what you are coming to ask me,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable.

Marigold stepped down off the last step, making it squeak. “What will you say?”

“I don’t know yet,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable. “You’re not much of a mother so far, with your hat on straight and only two children in the ground. You don’t deserve my child.”

“And how many children do you have in the ground?” said Marigold.

“Two thousand, four hundred, and eighty-one,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable. “Some were twins,” she added.

“None lived?” Marigold said.

“None,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable, with a touch of pride.

“Then I don’t think I want one of your children,” said Marigold.

“I don’t think you do,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable, “I shall give you one.”

The woman who made her bed in the first gable no longer made her bed there. She holed up in the cellar with a block of brie and a feather-stuffed duvet, and she emerged only to wash her wine glass or collect the lukewarm cup of Earl Grey that the woman who made her bed in the third gable left out for her each afternoon.

The women did not like to interfere in each other’s creative processes, so none of them peeked down into the cellar. The woman who made her bed in the cellar did not care to discuss the child she was fermenting, though if she had, she would have told them that he was fashioned from the heart of a white rabbit, four dollars at the pet shop around the corner, and twice embalmed in myrrh and soda ash.

He had to grow in his mother’s womb, so she washed out the pie pan that Marigold had brought and sealed it with a glass cover.

Inside his tin womb, the child soaked and swelled and slowly became animate.

Inside her duvet, the woman who made her bed in the cellar dreamt of all the children she had lost inside her wombs.

The child reached such a size that he no longer fit inside the pie pan, then such a size that he no longer fit in a three-gallon pickle jar. The woman who made her bed in the cellar was stubborn, she wanted to see Marigold mourn, so she dug a hole, four feet deep, in the cellar’s dirt floor. When she was finished, she padded the floor with rock salt and lowered the child into the hole. February was halfway over, the temperatures were still low, and the cold and the salt would preserve the child for a few days more—long enough to make the girl believe, long enough to make her miserable when he rotted.

The woman who made her bed in the cellar did not always produce beautiful children, but this one was exquisite, a wet blood-colored salamander-like creature whose arteries worked like legs and whose eyes could see even in the depths of the cellar. In the womb of the earth he grew to three feet in length before he cried for release.

The woman who made her bed in the cellar telephoned Marigold to announce the child’s birth, knowing at half-past five her husband would be home, knowing that Marigold herself would be away at one of a dozen equally useless ladies’ society meetings and thus unable to intercept the call.

“Your son is crying for you,” said the woman who made her bed in the cellar, when a man answered.

She laid the phone down, waiting to feel satisfied, instead feeling hungry.

Before they had been women who lived in the four-gabled house, they had been:

A maiden aunt.

A minister’s wife.

A washed-up stage actress.

A nurse.

They did not resemble themselves anymore.

When Marigold came to the cellar, the woman who made her bed there had already left. The feather-stuffed duvet and frozen block of brie were gone; fourteen cups with shallow pools of Earl Gray in their bottoms remained. Marigold looked at each of the teacups, listened for her child’s cries, and felt reluctant to walk any closer to the dark end of the cellar.

Upstairs, the women who made their beds in the four-gabled house were making dinner.

Damp, rich sounds came from the dark end of the cellar and echoed off the brick walls until Marigold could not hear the banging of pots and pans upstairs, nor the record spinning on the player, nor even the sounds of the women’s voices.

She was afraid, but she would not leave the cellar without a son. She took up the iron bar propped up against the wall—she did not think, “someone might have put this bar there”; she thought very little—and walked forward until her child leapt up from the grave where he was born, four feet tall, hungry, hissing wetly at his mother.

Marigold swung the iron bar and struck the child in his moist, blood-colored forehead, then struck him again. She flew at him in such a fury that she did not stop to wonder what or who he was until he was already dead.

“Bury him yourself,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable when she heard. “Didn’t I already dig a suitable grave?”

“Won’t you have some shepherd’s pie before you go back down there, dear?” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

Buttered baguette slices, tin cups of milk, heaping cuts of pie: a good meal by ration standards, a good meal even by pre-war standards, and they had ruined it for her. The women smiled proudly at their visitor.

“I suppose I might have a little,” Marigold said, polite in her fashionable hat, black blood drying on her hands.

When all five plates were empty, the other women retired to their gables. The woman who made her bed in the third gable washed each plate, carefully, methodically, while her guest waited at the table.

Then she said, “It hurt to lose that one, didn’t it, dear?”

“Yes,” Marigold whispered. “It was my fault, this time.”

“You’re ready now,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable, “for the sort of child I could give you.”

“I don’t know if I can bear the pain of another child,” said Marigold.

“I know,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. She dried the final plate and wiped her hands clean on her apron, then made for the staircase. “Come along now, dear.”

“Where are we going?” said Marigold.

“The fifth gable,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable of the four-gabled house. “We’ll need privacy.”

Marigold’s husband waited at home for the arrival of their adopted son. Marigold could not leave empty-handed. Marigold was unaccustomed to wanting something that once lost could not be regained. She followed the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

The fifth gable was smaller than the others, drafty, the walls windowless. A vase of dying gardenias rested on a small end table in the corner. The gardenias had been wilting for longer than Marigold had been alive, which comforted the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

“Sit down,” the woman said, motioning to the armchair in the middle of the room. A thin layer of dust covered its seat and arms and high, narrow back. Marigold settled into the chair and held her crumpled hat in her lap like it was a small and ill-behaved dog.

“Do you expect you’ll have to be tied down for this bit?” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

“What are you going to do?” said Marigold.

“Oh, I do very little, dear,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “You said you wanted a child, any child, isn’t that right?”

“Ye-es,” said Marigold, in a lilting voice that sounded more like no.

The woman who made her bed in the third gable got to her knees and rested her clasped hands in Marigold’s lap, as if comforting, as if pleading. “Whatever else you do, dear, remember to blame yourself.”

She rose to her feet and turned and left, locking the door from the outside.

Inside the fifth gable of the four-gabled house, dampness became cold and dimness became darkness, and Marigold’s skin felt like wax beneath her fingers when she tried to rub her gooseflesh off.

The women who lived in the four-gabled house buried Marigold’s cellar child together, all but the woman who made her bed in the first gable, because she could not make herself look at the mangled body of the child she had made.

“We should sing a hymn,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable.

“Why?” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable.

“It’s conventional. She’d like that.”

The women contemplated the idea of being conventional for a while. Their eyes lost focus as they studied the raised mound of earth with the cellar child inside.

“He was such a fine boy,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “But I’m glad she hurt him, I must admit.”

The woman who made her bed in the third gable could only bear children in the womb of another woman’s suffering.

Marigold came from the fifth gable of the four-gabled house looking smaller, with hair like straw. The women had a luxurious breakfast prepared for her, butter on the toast and sugar for the coffee. Marigold stirred cream into her coffee with one hand and supported her squalling, red-faced child in the other.

“A hideous creature,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable, after Marigold and the child had gone. “No offense.”

“None taken,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “He wasn’t really mine. None of them have been.”

“If you made me one, he would be different,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable. “My hurt would be the furthest thing from hers, and the child who came from it would be strong and strange and proud.”

“Perhaps in a few years,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “You haven’t felt enough yet. I couldn’t be sure of the outcome if you hadn’t felt enough yet.”

And the woman who made her bed in the first gable knew this to be true, having seen many dozens of the small dead fish-like things that came from half-felt suffering. She could not rush suffering, so she returned to her cellar and shut her door and set to work on her next child. This time, she thought, perhaps she would love them enough. Perhaps they would hurt her so deeply that she could at last ascend to the fifth gable and bear a child that would live.

end-of-story-nov

Kay Chronister ‘s fiction has appeared in
Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Clarkesworld.
She lives in Seattle with her miniature
dachshund, Victor Hugo.

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website_sept15thumb Dustbaby, by Alix E. Harrow: There were signs. There are always signs when the world ends. In the winter of 1929, Imogene Hale found her well-water turned to viscous black oil, which clotted to tar by the following Monday. A year later, my Uncle Emmett’s fields came up in knots of blue-dusted prairie grass rather than the Silver King sweetcorn he seeded. Fresh-paved roads turned pock-marked and dented as the moon. Tractor oil hardened to grit and glitter, like ground glass.

Fiction, Issue 29

Palingenesis, by Megan Arkenberg

palingenesis-title

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
~Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto I

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.

palin06 Most people are wrong, as it happens. I’ve lived in this city all my life, and the real explanation has nothing to do with the river. In the early 1840s, a pair of hearty Dutchmen were surveying for the highway that would link the port and railroads of the urban south to the farmland and sawmills of the north woods. Here, nestled among the ridges and kettles that the glaciers’ icy fingertips carved out eons and eons ago, they planted the sign that marked the halfway point along that road. A resting place for weary travelers. A city born of exhaustion.

I am so fucking tired.

The thing is — and I’m finally starting to admit this to myself — I don’t believe there’s a puzzle here. There’s no way to turn these jagged pieces into a smooth picture of something that makes sense. First you’d have to crack off the extra material and file the edges down, like you’re shaping a mosaic from pottery shards; you have to break away more and more to even get the right shape. This story is like a vase made from other, broken vases. And maybe it will hold water when you’re finished, but probably it won’t.

The painting is still there, hanging at the top of the main staircase in the county art museum. The landing makes a shallow triangle between the main collection, the American Indian gallery, and the eternally empty corridor labeled “Special Exhibits” on the map. You can use up all the fingers on one hand counting the number of times I’ve gone to that museum in the last year, and I find myself pausing in that tight and windowless space every time, hoping to see something different. I’m always disappointed.

Both the printed and electronic maps call the painting White Moose, but the name on the museum placard is Katabolism. The word has something to do with digestion, with the extraction of energy from chemical compounds. The first time I saw that title, I thought the artist was a pretentious fuck. Now I’m not so sure.

In any case, the title on the map is an accurate description. The oil painting shows a white bull moose, lumbering through a landscape that looks not unlike the glacial moraine that gnaws perpetually at the city limits. He’s no local fauna, though, and he’s bigger than life-size on the canvas: seven or eight feet high at the shoulder, his antlers spread off the edges. The antlers are thin and asymmetrical, with six points on his right and seven on his left. His eyes are the same color as his coat, slightly filmed.

Every time I see him, I think how much better I would feel if he were an albino, a lovely red-eyed creature like the rabbits and sometimes deer that I find stumbling in my backyard in winter, when the snow-reflected sun is too bright for them—something natural, fragile, and not-at-all sinister. But the white of the moose is not an absence of pigment. His color is something creeping over him, coating the duller, natural life underneath. Every time I see him, the white has spread a little farther.

The placard gives only three initials and a year: Y. L. H. 2012.

If you’re one of the people who believes that Blair is dead, then near as I can tell, this is the painting that killed them.

I’m not certain, yet, if I’m one of those people. But then, I’m certain of very little where Blair is concerned.

palin02 They were not my son, and they were not my daughter; but what they were remains unfathomable and changeling. I’m not talking about sex, those hundreds of quiet and not-so-quiet confusions that stalked my child for the seventeen years of their life in this city. I am talking about how hard it is to even think of Blair as my child — to claim Blair as mine, when they seemed so determined to be anything but.

(Speaking of Blair in the past tense has started to come naturally, and maybe that’s the most fucked-up thing about this whole mess.)

When I get home from my shift at the library, I stand in the laundry room at the back of our little bungalow, take their t-shirt from the hamper, and smell the cinnamon smell of their shampoo. I can’t remember their face, not really: only pale skin, dark eyes, red hair that was always too long and always faintly damp. White as daisy and red as sorrel, or however that fairytale goes. I don’t even have a photograph.

I stand in their bedroom beneath the pitched roof of the eastern gable and smell the stinking richness of their favorite myrrh candle, which is still cemented to the window ledge with its own gray wax. The desk beneath the window is littered with sheets of the cheap, yellowish paper that the secretary at the Catholic church on Kilbourne let me rescue from the recycling. I can’t see any words or lines of ink, perhaps because whatever was there has faded after so many months of sunrises. Or maybe there was nothing there to begin with.

Alone in Blair’s bedroom, I cover my mouth with both hands and say things that a mother should never say to her child. The words tear their way out of my throat like knives. I beg them to come home, you little bastard, come back and stop all this bullshit about the paintings, about Y. L. H. and the things we see in the forest. Please, come home. You’re killing me.

Finally, when I am too tired to beg, I tell them to go fuck themself.

But to begin at the beginning.

January, grey and dreary, and school was back in session after a tempestuous winter break. I found out from the newspaper that a membership card for the art museum cost twenty-five dollars, fifteen with student identification. I got a letter from Blair’s art teacher and that was good enough for the woman at the ticket counter. Unlike me, Blair never had a talent for words. They pulled Ds and Fs in one English class after another, losing books, failing to turn in essays. I thought art might give them whatever we try to get from stories.

Once upon a time there was a forest, ‘savage, rough, and stern…’

From that first afternoon, all they could talk about was the White Moose.

“I think he’s one of them,” they said.

We were walking home along the east bank of the river, where shards of brown ice ground against the shoreline. On either side of the path, the Rotary Club’s rosebushes slept under cones of yellowed Styrofoam. I was cold and only half-listening.

“One of what?” I asked.

“You know. One of them from the forest.”

And in the savage forest there lived a mother, and her child…

I glanced at them out of the corner of my eye. Their hood was pushed back despite the cold, and their hair glinted like copper. Hair like a lost penny, my mother always said. She was a woman to whom anything beautiful looked lost.

“In the painting, I saw ripples on the leaves at the bottom,” Blair said. “The light’s distorted, almost like they’re underwater. But it’s just him. He fills the whole kettle — the whole canvas. It’s just that he’s denser in the shape of the moose.”

No, I thought then, it’s impossible. In the January daylight, I wasn’t even disturbed.

“That’s only the style,” I said. “Don’t make something out of nothing.”

On our left, a brick staircase ran from the river walk up to the Fourth Street Bridge. I began to take the steps two at a time.

“It isn’t nothing,” Blair said stubbornly. “Whoever painted that picture must know about them.”

“No one else knows about them, Blair.”

Blair wasn’t following. I looked back over my shoulder and saw them staring, not at me on the stairs, but at the glimmer of black water threading through the ice.

“Who do you think the artist is?” they asked. “Y. L. H.?”

… a mother, and her child, and a witch.

“I don’t have a clue,” I said, and kept walking. I meant: I don’t want to know. Let’s not find out.

Or maybe it began before that.

Maybe it began the day Blair told me that they were not a boy, and the only thing I felt was relief. Does that sound terrible? Does admitting that make me an awful mother? I don’t know. But I know that I had never wanted a son. I didn’t grow up with brothers or cousins, only with the faces on the news, and the broad and smirking faces in the bars south of the depot, the hungry faces trailing tired women in convenience stores, the post office, the high school gymnasium. Savage, rough, and stern. When I imagined having a son, I imagined him growing up like that. I’d never wanted to deal with that kind of man, and I can’t help but feel, guiltily, like I was granted an unspoken wish.

palin01 Blair’s father had that particularly male helplessness, sucking and draining, pressuring and pleading, and both the best and the worst you can say is that it doesn’t leave bruises. I can remember all those nights in supermarket parking lots or under movie theatre marquees, when he had followed me somewhere on the bus because he just had to be sure. “I’m such an idiot, Joan,” he would cry. “I always knew I’d do something stupid like this and make you leave me.” And because he was pitiful, because he needed saving, I had to tell him I’m not going anywhere, baby, and hold him while he sobbed.

In the end, he was the one to leave. He found the energy somewhere, and followed the freeway south. Maybe this all started the day he left, and I stayed. The day the forest pulled me stronger than he had pushed, in the way of every fairytale without a happy ending.

One evening in February, a week or two after that first visit to the museum, Blair was late coming home from school. Not late enough for me to really worry; merely a dress rehearsal for everything yet to come. I sat by the kitchen door, watching the sky darken and considering whether to call, when I heard the front door snap against the siding, and Blair swept in with a slushy gasp of twilight. They were looking at something on their phone as they stepped into the kitchen and flipped the light switch.

I closed the book whose pages I hadn’t turned in half an hour.

“Where have you been?”

They shrugged. The shoulders of their thrift-store jacket were fuzzy with dust. “Downtown,” they said.

“Anywhere specifically?”

It was a chance laugh, to break the tension that wasn’t quite thick enough to acknowledge. They looked at me without smiling.

“Victor’s.”

Victor’s was a café on Rhodes Avenue, the very edge of downtown. I don’t know what the cavernous pile of red brick had been originally, with its alcoves and square turrets like the growths of some rhomboid crystal, but the interior space glowed with recent renovation, all waxy yellow wood and bare Edison bulbs. The coffee was mediocre, the pastries gluey and flavorless, but they housed a spectacular collection of shit: knock-off Tiffany chandeliers, assorted sporting equipment signed by virtual unknowns, and musical instruments missing strings or vital knobs. The café was a garage sale written by H. P. Lovecraft and illustrated by Virgil Finlay.

“What’s that on your phone?” I asked.

Their fingers tightened around the pale blue case, an almost undetectable moment of hesitance. But they passed me the phone without a word of complaint.

I don’t know what I was expecting to see. Dim and indistinct, with the hallmark shallowness of a cheap cellphone camera, the photo showed a woman sitting at a high table at Victor’s pastry counter. The first thing I noticed was her scarlet leather boots, the black heels hooked over the rung of her chair. The second was her hair, white as milk and hanging down to her thighs.

I felt a creeping chill up my spine, like the sensation you get when you swim into water that is suddenly deeper than you expected.

“It’s her,” Blair said. “Yelena Linden Hersh.”

I handed the phone back. “How do you know her name?”

“I asked, after I took the picture.”

“How did you know who she was?”

Instead of answering, Blair swiped their screen and passed me the phone again. It was still Victor’s — I recognized the pounded tin on the wall. Blair had tried to photograph a painting, but the phone camera wasn’t up to the task. The texture of the canvas stood out prominently. So did the globs and ridges of paint caked along the bottom. It looked like a painting of a bog, some vast surface of black water, and the thick knobs of paint bobbed along it like something alive.

“It’s brilliant, isn’t it? Look at that one towards the front.” Blair tapped a red-enameled fingernail against the screen, on a pale blur in the foreground. “It looks like a frog, doesn’t it? But there’s a woman just under the water. That white thing rising to the surface is her breast.”

The sick feeling had traveled to the pit of my stomach. “Blair,” I began, but I couldn’t finish. The painting was at once too strange and too dreadfully familiar.

Blair slid the phone into their jacket pocket without another word. They tucked a lock of flame-orange hair behind their ear and stepped into the living room. I heard the static click of the analog television turning on, and took a slow, shuddering breath.

What do you call the opposite of déjà vu? Not the sense of a recurrence, but its inverse: The feeling that this is a moment to which you will return. That was what I felt, envisioning that painting by Yelena Linden Hersh. That small breast in the water, beckoning like a ghost.

The things in the forest are still there: still filling the kettles like mist and twisting the light like water, still pulling at my heart like every hunger in hell. They haven’t gone away just because Blair did. It’s not that I thought they would leave — just that it wouldn’t have surprised me if they had. I don’t know the shape of this puzzle, remember. I can’t begin to imagine how all of it does or doesn’t fit together.

palin07 But they are still here, as much as they have ever been. Vaporous and vast, they seem as much air as flesh, although sometimes I can make out a shape — a deer or elk, or else some long-snouted, carnivorous thing. Soft black eyes emerge from the places where they are densest, and nearly human mouths shape words I can almost understand. Sometimes I think they are drawn to me, although this might be abhorrent self-flattery.

Still.

Some mornings, just after sunrise, I walk down to the woods behind the bungalow. For an hour or two, I sit very still on the remains of a farmer’s fieldstone fence, holding out my empty hand. They come to me out of the water, out of the air, and they kiss my palm as though tasting for sweets.

Some of these mornings, I have seen Yelena Hersh in the forest, walking in her scarlet boots. Her black jacket is buckled to her chin and she walks briskly without looking down. I called to her, once, but she didn’t even look my way.

There is nothing strange about her being there, I try to tell myself. It’s a small city, and the trails through the forest are popular. I have seen a lot of people walking. But she’s the only one I’ve ever seen when they are around.

In March, the art museum hosted a show of local women artists. It was mostly watercolors of cats and pencil sketches of tractors: also a quilt, a ceramic beehive, a few mercury-glass sculptures that I couldn’t figure out. The latest offspring of Yelena Linden Hersh’s brush hung just outside the gift shop, between a pastel sketch of sleeping kittens and a rack of dusty scarves.

It was called Anabolism. Which is the opposite and compliment to katabolism; it’s a kind of reassembling, the re-linking of molecules after the body grinds them up for energy. Anabolism is how the body lengthens bones and grows muscles. How it makes more of itself, I guess, out of everything it takes in.

The painting showed Blair emerging from a pond in one of the larger kettles. The water came up only to their knees, but there was a weirdness about the ripples that made me think Blair was floating rather than standing on the ground underneath. There’s no telling how deep that water is out there in the moraine; geologists say it can be as little as two or as many as two hundred feet.

In the painting, Blair was naked. Each skinny muscle tensed in the cold, layering blue shadow on pale skin. The slight tuck of the waist looked like a teenage girl’s. The flat thighs, even larger than life on the canvas, seemed small enough for you to cup your hands around—to snap with a flick of your wrist. I don’t remember the face.

“What if people recognize you, Blair? What if kids from school go to the museum?” Arms folded across my stomach, I sat on the sea chest in the corner of their bedroom. Despite the asthmatic chug of the heater, everything felt cool and damp to the touch. The candle on the window ledge burned greasily, leaving a myrrh-scented streak on the ceiling.

“Blair?” I repeated softly.

They looked up from the spread of paper on their desk.

“What do you think people will say?”

“Fuck people,” Blair said. The thing that lurked in their eyes was tense and coiled, too ravenous to be fear.

Here is the damned thing, or one of the many damned things in this whole hellish business: I can’t prove that Yelena Hersh had anything to do with Blair’s disappearance. I can’t even prove that Blair began meeting her. Those fucking paintings might have been proof once. They aren’t any more. They still exist, but they aren’t Blair any more. And maybe I’m mad for thinking that they ever were.

People in this city, they have all the answers they feel like looking for. Blair was a sad kid, a confused kid: it’s all there, wrapped up in whatever was or wasn’t behind the zipper of those weathered black jeans. “Kids like him disappear all the time, Joan,” the secretary at the station said to me. “They just do. Don’t go dragging a woman’s name through the mud over it.”

So where do they go, the kids like Blair? Do they evaporate into thin air? Wash down the river, get carried out to the lake, like all the other flotsam and jetsam from exhausted cities like this? Sometimes I imagine Blair has gone to find their father; other times, while walking over one of the bridges downtown, I think I see their face in the river, floating between mats of leaves. Sometimes the fantasies comfort me, and sometimes they don’t.

Maybe the kids like Blair start spending their evenings with strange women twice their age — women who wear scarlet boots and black wool, who dream of ghosts and monsters, whose hair is white as milk. Maybe they spend too much time wandering in the forest, snooping in the ruins of barns and sugar houses that the maples are slowly reclaiming: maybe they get lost in the woods. Or maybe they get eaten by witches.

Maybe you’re getting frustrated with me now, with my increasingly evident disregard for the facts. What really happened? you may well ask. What’s the true course of events? But the only truth I know for certain is that I am fucking exhausted. You cannot begin to understand how tired I am. And I don’t think that having the answers will let me sleep any more soundly.

Palingenesis. In its simplest translation, it means rebirth. Sometime in the nineteenth century, it got picked up to describe the now-discarded hypothesis that ontongeny recapitulates phylogeny — the development of the fetus proceeds along the same lines as the evolution of the species. Or, in another version, that children become educated by passing through the earlier stages of human society. From barbarity to civilization. Another discredited, Victorian idea.

palin05 In the painting, Blair could almost be sleeping. Their eyes are closed, the lids wet and purple. Their limbs are folded up, almost fetal, the dry pink of knees and elbows picked out with the medical detail of anatomy plates. The setting sun is at their back, and the blowing leaves have started to mound up around their feet. You can feel the wind gusting from that direction: a bitter, northern wind.

Why is this the image burned into the back of my eyelids? Why do I remember this, and not their face? I’m afraid that’s a question to which I already know the answer.

(Another riddle: If Katabolism is the painting that killed Blair, what does that make Palingenesis?)

I don’t know if there are other things in that painting, or if the bending of the light along the forest floor is just an accident of style. I must admit that I haven’t brought myself to look too closely. The one unforgivable piece of strangeness — the part that would tell you the name of the artist, even if you didn’t see the stark initials in the corner — is the sapling that sprouts from Blair’s genitals. It is slender, leafless, and almost the same color as their skin: a sickly, peeling white with scabs of pink. Where the bark pulls away, the pulp that shows beneath is black as rot.

In the second week of April, at Yelena Hersh’s request, the directors hung Palingenesis at the top of the main staircase in the county art museum. They put the White Moose back before the end of the week, after unspecified complaints.

By then, of course, it was too late. By then, Blair was gone.

In our last conversation, the day before they failed to show up for school, Blair told me a secret about Yelena Hersh.

“She has a son,” Blair said. It was Sunday evening, and we were loading groceries into the trunk of the Nissan: cans of beans, boxes of macaroni, and a half-gallon of skim. Everything teetered on the edge of the mundane, precariously normal, until Yelena intruded like a ghost.

“A son?” I repeated, and Blair tipped their head in a nod.

“When she was younger than me, she got pregnant. She gave him up for adoption.”

I frowned, at a loss for the proper response. Blair slammed the trunk, disturbing a layer of late, powdery snow.

“She says the news terrifies her now. It’s all men with guns, men with knives. Men who run over women with trucks and strangle children by playgrounds.” Blair watched me wheel the cart to the side of the car, sliding their hands into the pockets of their jeans. “She’s afraid she’ll see him on the news one day. Or she’s already seen him, just didn’t recognize him as hers.”

The next day, Blair was gone. And I wonder, now, if the news is something that terrifies every mother with sons. Or if we were just the strange ones, Yelena Hersh and I — the Pasiphaes of our century, afraid that we would give birth to monsters.

To early-twentieth-century sexologists, anabolic and katabolic were gendered terms. The female was anabolic, conservative and preserving. She consolidated the evolutionary adaptations of her species, passing them to her offspring. The katabolic male, creative and destructive, was responsible for the mutations, for everything novel or monstrous — two sides of the same coin.

All of that is bullshit, of course. If Blair has taught me nothing else, it’s this — the creative and the destructive chase each other perpetually, like blood and bathwater swirling around a drain. But preservation, that’s the most ridiculous fantasy of all.

palin04 Sometimes, I imagine that Blair’s father saw those paintings. That he recognized his child and came to find them, that he offered Blair a better life than I could give them here. This is improbable. As if Blair’s father could be in this city without me knowing. As if he had any interest in art. It’s easier to believe that they left with their father, though, than what the school counselors try to tell me about suicide and statistics and ‘kids like him.’

It is easier, also, than imagining that the forest had something to do with it.

There is a new tree, now, where the dead farmer’s fence runs to a halt some fifteen yards from my property line. A skim of peaty water pools over the fallen leaves, and the tree grows from it, white as milk. I’ve gone so far as to step into the water, reaching for the bark, which looks so warm and soft. But the mud beneath my boot gave way, and my foot sank far enough that I knew the water was something more than snowmelt.

Maybe if I hadn’t stepped back onto solid ground, I would have something closer to an answer.

Or maybe Blair ran away. Maybe you ran, sweetheart, all on your own, without your father, without ghosts or monsters or Yelena Linden Hersh. You were never good with words, and you wouldn’t have left a note. You left me paintings instead, and maybe all the explanation I’m searching for is there. If only I could bring myself to look.

“I know why you don’t like her,” Blair said to me once. It was a morning in late March, before they left for school. We stood on the back deck in our jackets, and with cold, bare hands, they held the birdfeeder steady while I poured in the mix of seed.

“You want to be special, don’t you?” Blair said. “That’s why you won’t believe that she can see them, too. You want them all to yourself.”

On a sudden impulse, I pressed a kiss to their forehead. Some of the seed missed the feeder, pouring out into the slush, but they didn’t turn away.

“Yes,” I whispered, mouthing the words against their skin. Maybe they heard me, and maybe they didn’t. “I always have.”

Katabolism should not be confused with katabasis, which means a journey into the underworld. Katabasis is Dante and Aeneas, Orpheus and Psyche. It’s revelation and love and disaster. Anabasis would be the return, if a return from the underworld is possible—a suggestion for which I haven’t seen much evidence. The words can also mean, respectively, a retreat down to the water, and the journey back inland or uphill.

Some of the reviews in the papers and the online magazines misprinted the titles of Yelena Hersh’s paintings. Anabolism and Katabasis, digestion and descent. The pieces from two different puzzles pushed inelegantly together, and that makes as good a metaphor for me and Blair and Yelena Linden Hersh as any other I could come up with.

The word palingenesia appears once in the New Testament. It describes the new creation, in which the order of the old will be utterly overturned. I’m not holding my breath. But I guess every city has an explanation, even the divine ones. And I guess creation requires destruction—revelation, uncovering, apocalypsis — before everything else.

If you were here, sweetheart, I’d tell you to run.

This city is not for you. You are not tired yet.

Today, by the white tree in the brown water, Yelena Hersh is sitting on the remains of the fieldstone fence. Her scarlet boots are speckled with mud, and a vast white creature like a moose leans down to nuzzle her shoulder. She does not seem to see him. She sees me on the trail and raises one hand, a trembling salute, and her white hair falls around her face like a curtain.

The things in the forest — I don’t think that they are older than us. Not exactly. I’ve begun to think they are us, or us as we will be. That is why the painting called Anabolism has started to look like something else: not Blair anymore, but a white canine thing, a carnivorous thing rearing on its hind legs. Another stage in our evolution. Perhaps the things in the forest are nothing better or worse than our children.

That’s all the Minotaur was, in the end.

I worry, sometimes, that I will wander into the woods one morning and they will no longer be there. It will only be the trees and water and dead leaves, and the unrelenting anabasis and katabasis of a landscape birthed by ice. I think the reason they frighten me is not because they are so strange, but because they are fragile. I am afraid that they will disappear.

Or that one day I will look, and look, and will have forgotten how to see.

palin03

end-of-story-nov

megan

Megan Arkenberg lives in Northern California, where she is pursing a Ph.D. in English literature. Her work has appeared in Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, and dozens of other places. She was recently the nonfiction editor for Nightmare‘s Queers Destroy Horror! special issue; she also procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance. Megan tweets @meganarkenberg and blogs sporadically at blog.meganarkenberg.com.

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In the Pines, by K.M. Carmien “You stink like city,” the woods-thing says. The pines close around them, a green wall, filtering the light to dim and gray, cutting off the world. It looks like a girl, this one. Waxy pale skin, lank dark curls, shabby blue coat. Most of them don’t. They look like trees, or thickets, or wolves, or cats, or patterns of shadow. But this particular one, which always claims the right to deal with her, wears the skin of a girl who was murdered by a drifter four years ago.

The Earth & Everything Under, by K.M. Ferebee Peter had been in the ground for six months when the birds began pushing up out of the earth. Small ones, at first, with brown feathers: sparrows, spitting out topsoil, their black eyes alert. They shook and stretched their wings in the sunlight. Soon they were pecking the juniper berries and perching on rooftops, just like other birds. They were small, fat, and soft; Elyse wanted to hold them. But they were not tame and they would not come to her.

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.

Fiction, Issue 28

A Drop of Ink Preserved In Amber, by Marina J. Lostetter

Amber knew normal girls didn’t have drawers in their chests. Or in their stomachs, or backs, or thighs. She knew her parents had had her specially designed by a geneticist in Pakistan, where the international genome-manipulation laws were more difficult to enforce than in the U.S. In the history of the world, there had never been another human like her. And she was human, even if she didn’t look it on an X-ray.

ink1 And her parents had made it quite clear that X-rays were to be avoided at all costs.

“You are too special,” they told Amber when she was little. “There are some things other people were simply never meant to know.”

At six, she rode her first airplane. She loved it — the roar of the engines, the rush as the aircraft took off and she was thrust back into her seat. It was her favorite part of their family trip.

Her least favorite part was airport security. That first time falling in love with flight was also the first time she was embarrassed about her body. Her parents asked for a private screening, and she didn’t understand why. The TSA agents ushered them behind an opaque barrier, still within earshot of the bustling and beeping of normal security. The area smelled strangely sterile, like a hospital, but the lady who approached Amber didn’t look anything like a doctor. The pat-down she received wasn’t especially intrusive — the woman was polite and explained everything she was doing and why. But it still made Amber feel terrible. Not because the lady was poking and prodding her, but because Amber lied when the TSA agent asked if she’d emptied all her pockets.

Mama had instructed her to say yes–had told her ahead of time that her drawers weren’t pockets and no one would ask her about her drawers.

After, they got on the plane. Amber rode the whole way with her hands over her heart, protecting the secret Mama had stashed there.

They flew from New York to LA. Mama called it a “test flight.” Daddy said her drawers were big enough to use now, but they had to be sure. Neither of those things made much sense to Amber, but, they were her parents, and she wanted to do them proud.

Six long hours later, they landed and retrieved their bags. Emerging from the terminal into the hot California sun, her parents gleefully loaded her into a rental car, laughing. Daddy drove, and Mama sat with her in the backseat.

“You can open them up now,” Mama said with a smile. “You did a very good job. You’re a very good girl.”

Amber didn’t feel like a good girl. She didn’t know why, but hiding her drawers from the lady in New York felt wrong.

She took off her shirt anyway — the one with the cartoon dinosaur with googly eyes — and pressed the center of what should have been her breast bone.

When closed, the drawers were invisible; she looked like any other pudgy child, with uninterrupted contours, a round belly, and tiny limbs. But when she pressed just right, large sphincters unfurled like flowers, letting the bony drawers slide out.

Supple skin covered in fine, velvety hair encased the calcium structures. The drawers were well-padded with cartilage and thick skin, protecting whatever she — or her parents — chose to hide in them.

Mama kissed her forehead and gently plucked a piece of cut amber from her daughter’s chest. It was set in a roughly worked bronze brooch, with small accent rubies encircling the main stone.

“Look,” Mama pointed to the center of the honey-colored gem. “There’s a spider in the amber, perfectly preserved.”

Breaking News: In light of the twelve genetically-modified babies born at UK Centurion Labs — all exhibiting signs of what some are calling transmorphic-posthumanism — members of Congress have pushed forward consideration of a bill that would regulate modifications and define what changes are acceptable here in the U.S. Modifications of intelligence and basic human anatomy are thought by many to be clear violations of ethical reproduction by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Amber’s parents told people they were archaeologists. It wasn’t until long after that first flight that she learned “archaeologist” did not mean “smuggler” or “black-market dealer.”

“Is it because of what we do?” Amber asked when she was eight. “I can’t tell them about my drawers or else they’ll find out about the pretty jewelry and stuff?” She sat at the kitchen table, swinging her little legs while munching on dry cereal.

“The average person doesn’t want to know that people like you exist,” her mama said. “It makes them angry that you’re different. It makes some of them violent.” She brought her tablet over to Amber and pulled up a news article.

“Six Dead at Mod Clinic, Suicide Bomber Suspected,” read the headline.

“So you can’t tell people, understand?” Mama said. “It’s to protect you, to keep you safe. Daddy and I don’t want anything to happen to you. There are people who would want to hurt you. People who would want to study you. The government might want to take you away from us because of how extensively we modified you. We just couldn’t take it if something…”

Her lip trembled and she took a deep breath — at which point she devolved into tears.

Even at eight, Amber had the wherewithal to think, If you wanted to protect me so much, why did you modify me?

Update: The federal government has now outlawed human genetic modification. A doctor caught modifying an embryo will have their license to practice permanently revoked, and may spend up to ten years in prison. If a woman is discovered carrying a genetically modified fetus in the first term, the overseeing medical professional is responsible for ensuring the pregnancy is terminated, under threat of similar penalties.

In grade school, Amber didn’t tell anyone about her drawers, but she used them to do magic tricks. Because her parents often took her to foreign countries for weeks at a time, Amber missed many of the social crucibles of youth. Birthday parties and sleepovers were held without her, as were dances and soccer games. She did her best to capture the attention of other children when she could.

When springtime came, she did a special trick. She would invite a handful of kids down to the river and show them how she could make birds and frogs disappear. First she had to catch them, which was a special trick on its own and led to many bruised knees and bum lips. But when she had her prize, her audience would watch, enrapt, as she moved her hands swiftly behind her back or under her shirt before revealing them to be empty.

ink2 “You just dropped it,” a boy inevitably accused, and she always took it as her cue to bring the creature back again.

Once, when she caught a young songbird, it started singing inside her chest. The chirping had a hollow, far-away quality to it, ghostly and reverent. Amber opened her mouth to make a joke, and the song sprang past her lips as surely as if she’d sung it herself.

It took the trick too far. That particular set of classmates wouldn’t speak to her after that. One of the boys threw rocks at her every chance he got.

Play magic is one thing, he said. Real magic is another.

It was the first time she understood how the headline about the suicide bombings applied to her. In sharing some of her secret, she’d scared the other kids.

Mama hated it when Amber did tricks with animals. The frogs made her drawers slimy, and the birds left welts and scratches. “And, you smell like a pond,” she said. “Plus, it’s cruel to use a living thing like that. Now be a good girl and hide this ring for me. Your aunt is coming over and I don’t want her to realize I took it.”

Update: The United States is the fourteenth country to pass a federal law that not only prohibits the creation of genetically modified humans of any kind, but details the legal methods of post-delivery disposal. Should one of these, quote, ‘abominations,’ be discovered, the law describes the threshold for corrective surgery versus euthanization. Any modification of the brain is automatic grounds for extermination.

When Amber didn’t get her period like other girls, her mama explained that it was because she didn’t have a uterus. They’d had to shift a lot of her organs around to accommodate the drawers, and something had to go for them all to fit.

“It’s okay,” Mama assured her. “A uterus and company are nothing but problems anyway. Cramps, cancer, cysts. Be thankful we spared you all that.”

At thirteen, Amber was too young to really care that they’d also ‘spared’ her the problem of pregnancy. Well, at least I’ll never have to worry about ruining my jeans like Aki did.

When she reached high school, Amber realized secrets were currency. Gossip was good, sharing secrets with other girls was good. But, keeping secrets from adults was better.

When the head cheerleader offered her a cigarette behind the gym, she said no. Her dad smoked the occasional cigar and it turned her stomach every time. That stuff stank. But as she was waving the offer away, Coach Green came around the corner. The other girl looked so distraught, Amber had to do something. She took the smoldering cig and stuck it in her thigh drawer. It burned, but she did not cry out.

The blisters stung for days. She had the cheerleader’s admiration for months. She bore the scars for years.

It wasn’t just her parents’ gratitude and love she could earn with her drawers, she noted. If she let other people use them, perhaps they would grow to love her, too.

But, she had to be careful.

The boy who had thrown rocks at her in elementary school did his high-school senior project on “The Ethics and Morality of the Disposal of Human Experiments.” His thesis was not that such experiments were cruel to the subjects, but that they were cruel to the people who had to interact with those subjects. What might these man-made monsters do to “true” humans? How might they oppress them or violate them?

Throughout his presentation, Amber could have sworn that he was staring straight at her.

“In conclusion,” he said, “all modified ‘people’ should be institutionalized. For their own safety, and ours.”

Roaring applause followed.

If he’d known for sure about her drawers, what might he have done? Who might he have called?

In college, she majored in archaeology. Real archaeology. She built up enough courage to tell a few people about her drawers, but only her closest friends. She didn’t want to hide forever, but the recent abolishment of all mods made her wary. Sick-to-her-stomach wary. What if her friends rejected her? None of them had ever expressed anti-mod sentiment, but one never knew.

Maybe they would throw stones at her, too.

She cried when she told Aki. Amber had known her the longest, so it was only fitting she came first.

“It’s okay,” Aki said, hugging her close. “I know it’s not the same, but my eyes are mods. Near-sightedness runs in the family, so… I kind of get it.”

Yeah, she kind of did. But only kind of.

Afterward, they went out and got matching tattoos on their wrists. Two little gold keys each.

ink3 Thankfully, all of Amber’s friends took it in stride. No one was horrified, no one threatened to turn her over to the law, and a lot of them seemed pleased. After that, her drawers were never empty. Charlotte hid her pregnancy test in Amber’s stomach when her dad barged in on them. Raj dropped his bag of weed in her shoulder when a cop pulled him over for speeding. Quinn wrote a long, angry letter to her step-mom and asked if Amber could keep it in her chest until she felt ready to confront the woman who had abused her.

Eventually, Amber allowed herself a lover. She’d always been afraid of being intimate with a boy — once, during a hasty make-out session in high school, one of her drawers had popped open, and she’d fled the scene before anyone had a chance to find out. But, in college, she let herself be seen. A few potential lovers left once she’d shown them her body. Enough of them stayed. One even hung around, and he hid secrets in her drawers as well.

Amber’s own secrets never went in her drawers. They couldn’t fit; they were big and balloon-like and made her head swell as though it were filled with steam.

Update: During her upcoming address this evening, the President will remark on the topic of genetic modification — specifically whether or not all adult cases have been corrected. Our White House correspondent believes the President will say the brief era of modification is over, and that we as a nation — and perhaps even the world–can forget about this terrible period of human experimentation and return to the unified forward-stride of mankind.

Even after earning her doctorate, Amber still traveled with her parents; to Turkey, to Belize, to anywhere with antiquities worth stealing. It was the only way she could spend time with them; her parents were only ever home long enough to offload their loot. They filled her up like a treasure chest, muttering as they went — talking to their plunder more than to her.

Unfortunately, Amber’s profession lent an air of legitimacy to their black-market comings and goings. An air they wallowed in.

“One of these days they’re going to start weighing passengers when they fly, and I’ll have a hell of a time explaining how I gained thirty-five pounds in a week,” Amber joked as her mother stuffed a small gold censer between her shoulder blades.

They were in a dingy hotel room in Greece, the walls sported peeling wallpaper. The carpet had a bug problem, and the torn curtains were drawn tightly over the small, open window so that no one could see what they were doing. The room had no air conditioning, though the Mediterranean humidity made the room feel like ninety degrees when it was seventy-five.

Soft snatches of Greek wafted in from the fruit stand on the street below. Amber understood little bits of it, and the swift glimpses into local lives made her smile to herself.

Amber stood in the center of the room, mostly naked, which made it easy for her mother to access whichever drawer she needed.

“It’s called tourism, dear,” her mom said absently. “People tend to eat themselves to death when they travel. But you’ll never have to worry about that. Weighing passengers is too insulting, however practical.”

After her mother finished, Amber pulled on her robe and belted it tight. All of her drawers were heavy with relics from a vandalized fifteenth-century Roman-Catholic cathedral. The metal pieces in her hips poked at her, and she clinked when she shifted. The section of split tapestry in her side was rough — sure to leave a carpet burn. The most gruesome treasure, a mummified tongue — supposedly that of a saint — jumped slightly with every beat of her heart.

Secrets bled out of the brain, through the tongue. Keeping it in the drawer in her chest, the drawer she considered the most important, felt…fitting.

Amber stood full of history. She could feel them — all of the human fingers that had touched all of the human things in such human ways.

History was beautiful, and terrible, and full of secrets that need not be forgotten. Secrets that were all the more important now that their creators were gone. Secrets she was tired of stealing.

“Mom,” she said.

“What, dear? You need to hurry up and get dressed if we’re going to be on time.”

“I think this is going to be my last trip. This kind of trip, I mean.”

“Why?”

Because stealing is wrong? Because my drawers sport enough scars as is? Because I’m tired of you seeing me as a pack animal instead of a person?

“Because history shouldn’t be hidden,” she said. Amber pressed on her breastbone and her chest opened. She plucked out the tissue-wrapped tongue. “This isn’t just a thing you can attach a price tag to. It belonged to someone, saint or not. Someone spoke with this, kissed with it, ate with it.”

“It’s a tongue,” her mother said flatly. “We all have them, but very few are worth a villa.”

“That’s not… What I mean is… What about my drawers? What if, centuries from now, someone digs me up and sells off my pieces? What if I’m all that’s left of modified humans, and someone sticks me in their personal vault, and the world never knows.”

“Most people stay in the ground, dear. The world never knows about them anyway.”

Amber pursed her lips. “I’m trying to say that one person doesn’t own history, and shouldn’t hide history. If people dig me up in the future, I don’t want to stay a secret.” I don’t want to be a secret now. I want people to accept that I’m part of this world, too.

“You’d rather be put on display, like a relic, is that what you’re saying? You think this man wanted his tongue set under glass for people to ogle?”

“If the ogling means they try to understand him, that they acknowledge him, acknowledge the part of history he represents…maybe. I don’t know. I can’t speak for him, I can only speak for me.”

“And speaking for yourself, you’re too good to help your father and me? You’re standing on awfully shaky moral high ground. Selling these treasures has kept you in good clothes, fed with good food — you’ve seen the world. And if you think ‘legitimate’ archaeologists like yourself don’t shove history away, you’re wrong. For every artifact you see in a museum, how many hundreds — thousands — are stuffed away in warehouses? We’re doing exactly what you want: this way, someone gets to appreciate the past. We save history from the dead-depths of university collections and government vaults.”

Amber waved the tongue pointedly. “This was in a damn church.”

Her mother shrugged. “A church where mods like yours are considered a deadly sin. Nobody’s perfect. Now, get dressed.” She slammed the door on her way out.

“We save history,” Amber chuckled mirthlessly. She carefully placed the tongue back in her drawer. “Well, who’s going to save me?”

Her entire life, Amber had watched the news. They were always talking about her, even if they didn’t know it.

But in the last several years they’d stopped talking about her. No news updates, no new editorials or information spots. Nothing but the occasional rhetorical nod in a ‘somebody’s wrong on the Internet’ spew-fest.

She knew she should be pleased. She’d gotten away with it–she still had her drawers, and no one was suggesting they euthanize modified humans anymore. She was safe.

But safety meant disappearing. Being forgotten — like a dead language or a small tribe.

Modification is important. It happened. Its destruction happened. Why is everyone so eager to forget?

She’d drafted several letters to news stations, a few to her department head at the university, and a handful of blog articles she could post anonymously. She was just waiting for the day she’d be brave enough to break her silence and submit one of them.

But the truth was, she wasn’t brave. She’d never been brave. She didn’t know how to stand up to her parents — she was a grown woman, a professional, and still she helped them smuggle. She didn’t know how to tell her friends that, just because she’d told them about her drawers, it didn’t mean they were free to use them. These days her drawers concealed proof of her friends’ affairs, secret credit cards, and past-due statements.

She knew now that sharing her drawers didn’t equate love, but it was a difficult habit to grow past. Just like she knew hiding her drawers from the general public didn’t equate with normalcy.

How could she stand up to the world if she couldn’t stand up to the people she loved? How could she be sure that she wasn’t expunged from history if history was intent on forgetting her?

When Amber turned thirty-five, she gave herself a present. It was a painful present, a permanent present.

She took all her secrets and poured them into her drawers: her desire to know another modified human; her fear of being forgotten; her perpetual grief over her sterilization; her anger at her parents and her friends; her anger at herself; her anger at the world.

ink4 And her deep love of the ancient, of the past.

And her love for her parents. Her love for herself.

Her love for the world.

Amber covered every inch of her drawers with beautiful, broken secrets. Secrets that she would ensure could not remain hidden forever.

In the years that followed, she tracked down the brooch she’d first carried–the one with the spider suspended in amber. The man who owned it became a good friend, and never asked to put anything in her drawers.

Ten years after that, Amber began to make funeral plans. Not for her parents, but for herself. She knew she still had long years ahead of her, but there were a lot of pieces to put into place if she was going to get the postmortem treatment she wanted.

Her death was important because her life was important.

She told her elderly parents about her plan, and they didn’t hate it. She showed them what she’d done to her drawers, and they cried.

They cried because, for the first time, they understood what they’d done to their daughter.

“We defaced you, we…” Her mother couldn’t get the words out. She dabbed at her weak, watery eyes with thin, shaking hands. “We were selfish.”

Amber took her mother’s hand. “Selfishness is very human.”

She told her colleagues at the university about her drawers. They wanted to tell the news, to let the public know that mods were still around.

But Amber knew it would mean little. The people of today wanted to forget mods. It was the people of tomorrow Amber needed to tell.

No one was sure what they’d find when they opened the Tomb of the Unknown Doctor.

Three centuries previous, a Brown University professor had been buried underneath Rhode Island Hall, home to the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology at the time. The individual’s name had been purposefully expunged from the record, though innumerable campus legends swirled around the possibilities. Instructions for the tomb’s opening were left at the university, carved in the stone of the tomb’s outermost wall. On the three-hundredth anniversary of its closing, the tomb was to be opened by three archaeology graduate students specializing in, of all things, ancient ink and tattooing.

One of the selected grad students went by Melissa, though Melissa wasn’t her real name. Her given name was attached to a rap sheet filled with ridiculous charges of self-mutilation, and she preferred to keep such absurdities to herself.

Ink was her life — was a part of her very soul–and though she was allowed to study it, her culture forbade her from using it to express herself the way she wanted. Tattooing was a nasty, backwards habit, they said. Only a barbarian would want to mark themselves for life.

Melissa wore long sleeves in public, even in the dead heat of mid-August. Whenever a cuff rode up she quickly tugged it back down, afraid the black spirals of her first self-applied tattoos might show. Friends and would-be-boyfriends who had accidentally seen her markings had all urged her to get help. They thought the artwork covering her body indicated mental illness.

What the ink represented was her lust for life, for memory. When Melissa looked in the mirror, all she saw was beauty. A beauty that connected her to thousands of years of history.

Now, Melissa sat in a darkened university lab over her lightbox — well after the building had officially closed for the evening — studying captures from the CT scan taken of the mummified body they’d found in the Tomb.

She and her team had expected tattoos, of course. Why else would the instructions call for such specific grad students? But this —

This was glorious.

The whole team had been present for the scanning, which had revealed rectangular, calcified structures within the corpse. That in itself was a major discovery. How could someone filled with compartments — moving compartments, like drawers — have survived? The organ displacement alone should have led to a stillbirth if the drawers were natural. The team suspected they weren’t, but until now, such extreme modifications were thought to have been a myth.

During the scan, Melissa had seen something unusual and kept it to herself. There were patterns on the inside of the drawers — the internal skin was almost black with it. The others thought the variations just the natural texture of the skin, but Melissa had her doubts.

Yes, the body had external tattoos, but nothing extensive or unusual for her time. Nothing that would have warranted the grad-student request.

So, what if the patterns weren’t natural?

Maybe she’d been selfish to keep the notion to herself. It didn’t matter now.

Holding a magnifying glass over the first cellulose slide, Melissa squinted. There — was that swooping line a letter? Could it be script?

She could have turned on a holo-table to take her notes digitally, but instead she grabbed a pad of paper and a pencil.

She sketched the lines without looking, hoping they’d appear more familiar in her own hand. Yes, yes — that was an S — not just an S, a whole word. Yes, yes!

Frantically, she transcribed all she could make out. Some of it appeared to be garbled nonsense; they’d need better images to decipher it. But some she could clearly read.

It’s a memoir, she realized. This woman, this unknown professor, had tattooed her life story on the inside of her drawers.

Melissa worked all night, giddy with the discovery.

“But, what’s your name?” Melissa asked the cellulose.

After a long while, the mummy divulged the secret.

As the sun’s rays slipped in through the lab windows, Melissa’s inhibitions dissolved away. This woman was as marked on the inside as Melissa was on the outside. They were two sides of the same skin; sisters-in-spirit separated by centuries.

Slowly, Melissa stood and strode away from the lightbox, toward the morning glow. With each step she shed an article of clothing, leaving fabric scattered across the floor like flower petals. When she reached the windowpane, she looked down at herself. A myriad of black marks — depicting everything from her mother’s smiling face, to a silhouetted flock of starlings, to the Chinese character for eternal — stared back.

This body is for all the people who have been used, then forgotten, stated a portion of the memoir she’d transcribed. For all of those history overlooks or chooses not to remember. It is a symbol of every inconvenient historical fact, every dirty secret and every ‘dangerous’ life.

“Thank you, Amber,” Melissa whispered.

It were as though the long-dead professor had given Melissa her blessing–as though somehow she’d known that the future would continue to forge secret-people who lived secret lives.

“Rest easy,” Melissa said. “We will not be forgotten.”

end-of-story-nov

marina Marina J. Lostetter’s original short fiction has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed, InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Flash Fiction Online. Originally from Oregon, she now lives in Arkansas with her husband, Alex. Marina enjoys globetrotting, board games, and all things art-related. She tweets as @MarinaLostetter, and her official website can be found at www.lostetter.net. She’d like to give a special thank you to SB Divya for providing the prompt that became this story’s title.

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Fiction, Issue 28

To Sleep In the Dust of the Earth, by Kristi DeMeester

Lea and I met Beth when we were thirteen. That was the year Lea had legs that wouldn’t fill out her shorts. The year I started sneaking Marlboro Lights from my mother’s purse to share with Lea in the back corner of Benjamin Harper’s abandoned lot.

“He was going to build on it. A house for his wife. But she died, and he just…” Lea made a fluttering motion with her fingers, scattered the smoke streaming from her lips.

“Jesus. We’ve only heard the story about a million times. Give it a rest.”

“I just think it’s sad is all. You don’t have to be such a bitch about it, Willa,” Lea said and flicked her butt into the grass.

There were rumors that the lot was haunted. Little kids would dare each other to sneak out there at night. Sit right where the front door should have gone and stay until morning. For the older kids, it was a place to do all of the things our parents said we shouldn’t. Even still, we hung at the periphery of the land, far from the heart of the house Harper would have built.

“You don’t feel something when we come out here? It’s so quiet. My hair gets all prickly,” Lea said.

“Like something big is about to happen. Like right before a door opens. When you don’t know who’s on the other side.” She looked somewhere just over my shoulder.

“Someone’s here,” she said and let out a deep groan. Her eyes fluttered into her skull, and she began to twitch, her fingers going rigid, and her back arching.

“Stop it,” I said, and she let out two more guttural grunts before dissolving into giggles.

“Seriously, Lea. It’s not fucking funny,” I said and pushed her. She tumbled backward, and then, for what couldn’t have been more than two maybe three seconds, I couldn’t see her. Dark hair and eyes caught in the act of falling suddenly vanished among grass grown tall.

Must have been a trick of the afternoon sunlight because there she was again, those legs in the dirt and a smile streaked across her face.

“You asked for it,” she said and brushed her hands over her thighs. “Shit. SHIT. Godammit, Willa,” she said, her fingers spread wide.

“Nope. Not falling for it again.”

“No. My ring. My mom’s aquamarine ring. It’s gone. She’ll kill me.”

“It must have fallen off when you fell. Hold on. We’ll find it.”

dust1 Later, Lea and I would chew Klonopin and tell each other that there was nothing strange about the day Beth stumbled into our lives. We were just two girls kneeling in the grass, hands outstretched. We must have felt her. Positions of supplication. Must have noticed the moment the sky went darker and the birds fell silent. I don’t think we ever got up from that place. Not really. I think there will always be the two of us seeking something that will not be found.

“There’s a hole here,” Lea said, and I peered over her shoulder.

“Looks like an animal den or something.”

“I think I see it,” she said and poked her fingers into the entrance.

“Don’t just shove your hand in there! It could be a snake hole. Don’t you pay any attention in school?”

“Doesn’t matter any way. Hand’s too big. Help me find something to hook it. A long stick.”

We have different memories of the first time we heard Beth’s voice. For me, Beth sounded like someone trying very hard to not be heard. A quiet rush of words that she hoped would fall from her lips and into the dirt. Lea said that Beth’s voice sounded like water. Something that slipped into your head and sloshed around so that you couldn’t get it out no matter how hard you tried.

“I can get your ring for you.” Beth looked whitewashed. Skin the color of oatmeal. A beige jumper that brushed a pair of knobby knees over a white t-shirt and a pair of crummy, knock off Keds. The kind of girl you see but don’t spend too long looking at.

Lea turned to me and rolled her eyes. “I can’t deal with this weirdo right now. My mother is going to hit the fucking roof. I’m not even supposed to touch the damn thing.”

“I don’t think we need your help,” I said and turned my back to her. Message sent loud and clear.

“I’m Beth. I just moved here,” she said, and Lea muttered something under her breath about being a homing beacon for idiots.

“Really. I can,” Beth said and pushed her way between us.

“Is she fucking serious?” Lea said, but Beth only smiled and thrust her hand inside the hole.

“No way your hand is that small,” Lea said.

“Maybe she has baby hands or something,” I said.

Even now, I wonder if it was the lot acting on Beth. Leaking into her like venom into blood. Most of the time, I think that it was Beth all along. That the darkness we came to know was already a part of her. That she released herself into that place. Into us.

I think I’m still choking on her.

When Beth handed the ring to Lea, the gem cast glittering flecks across Lea’s cheeks. She stood before us, head bowed, while Lea stuck the ring in her mouth to suck off the grit.

“Thanks. Really. You have no idea the shit storm that was coming my way. Your hands must be fucking tiny,” Lea said once the ring was safely back on her finger.

“I’m Beth,” she said again.

We should have never told her our names. Sometimes, things are meant to be lost. There are things you aren’t supposed to go looking for.

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter.

We were seventeen, full of a stolen box of Franzia White Zin, lungs heavy with smoke. Our lips and tongues and teeth pressed against the mouths of boys who told us they were students at GSU but were actually seniors at the other high school. It was almost funny how stupid they thought we were, but they were warm, and we were cold, and there were empty places in the world that were filled with the things we had lost.

Always, Beth was in the background. Hovering behind us while we tested the waters of adulthood. Always watching with her quiet, pale smile. For four years she’d been with us. We didn’t tell her to leave.

Even after all that time, we didn’t know much about her. She didn’t answer most of our questions when we asked them. There were the things that she told us: that her father moved the two of them here after her mother died; that he stood outside of her bedroom at night–to be sure she was breathing; that her favorite color was yellow. Sunshine yellow. The color of joy.

There were the things that she did not tell us: why we weren’t allowed to come into her house; why she never spoke of her father after the first time she told us about him; why we never saw him — not at school to pick her up, not at the grocery store, not at PTSA meetings or driving his car or the hundreds of other ways you’ll see someone’s father; why she had scratch marks on the inside of her thighs.

Eventually, we stopped asking questions, and Beth faded into the background of our lives until we needed her.

During those four years, Beth found all of the things we lost: my favorite lipstick that I thought was in the bottom of my purse; a safety pin earring Lea’s first boyfriend gave her before she let him feel her up for the first time; a pair of yellow sunglasses I bought with my babysitting money. Nothing important. Nothing that we couldn’t live without, but it was amusing. Lea and I had something that set us apart from everyone else. It made us different. Interesting.

We would end up at the empty lot, and Beth would sit next to the hole and presto, just like magic, whatever item we’d been searching for would emerge clutched in her fist.

“She’s stealing that shit. Trying to convince us she’s special,” Lea said after the second time.

“I don’t think so. She’s never excited when she finds something. Or proud of herself. If anything, she looks ashamed. Like she’s just done something dirty.”

dust2 “Uh. Yeah. She stole our stuff.”

We hid random things in secret places: in shoe boxes in the backs of our closets, stuffed down garbage disposals, thrown into the woods on our way to school, eyes closed. We didn’t tell each other where they were, but when we told Beth about what we had lost, she would lead us to the lot, put her hand in the hole, and pull out each and every trinket.

I’m not sure if she knew that we were using her. If she understood that was the only reason we let her hang around. Because she could find lost things and bring them home again like our own personal magic trick.

We liked to think that we were doing her a favor. That without us, she’d languish in social hell. No friends. No one to talk to. We adopted her because it amused us. We curled her hair to see if we could, put coral lipstick and liquid eyeliner on her as if she were a doll, and then gave her the crumbs of our affection. Still, she smiled at us and took us down to the lot when we had something that needed finding.

“Don’t ask Beth to come. She gives me the creeps when we have boys with us. The way she sits there and stares. Like she’s never seen a pair of tits before,” Lea said.

“Maybe don’t pull your tits out then,” I said, and she flipped me the bird.

Lea and I were in love with the feel of warm hands against the small of our backs and the musty scent of Acqua Di Gio, and the boys who had lied to us could give us both. We were going to meet them down at the lot.

I can’t remember the boys’ names — they were generic, Chris or Mark or James. What I do remember is a swoop of strawberry blonde hair, freckles, green eyes. Hands in my hair and on my waist. Laughter. Someone brought a radio and Pearl Jam was singing in the background about last kisses. Everything moving in slow motion, like a dream. Beth somewhere in the background, humming along.

When the other boy, Lea’s boy, started screaming, I thought I had fallen asleep, slipped into the half shadow world of nightmare. Beth stood beside him, her arms cradling something I couldn’t see, and the boy screamed again.

“What the fuck? What the fuck?” He scrambled backwards.

“I’m sorry,” Beth said and extended her arms outward, offered him whatever she held.

“Please. I thought I could do it. I could feel him. Down there in the dark,” Beth said, and the boy recoiled.

“Get her the fuck away from me,” he said, but no one moved.

“Beth,” Lea said and reached out for her, but she turned away, clutched the thing in her arms to her chest.

“I’m sorry. I thought I could bring him back for you. You miss him so much. I can feel it,” she said, and I saw what she carried. The rotting body of a small, white dog rested in her arms. Eyes glassed over like two dark marbles.

If the boys ran, I don’t remember. There was only Beth, sobbing, her fingers tangled in the dog’s white fur. It took two hours to get her to let go of it, to convince her to bury it under a pile of dead leaves, and get her on her feet.

We took her home; walked under moonlight that turned Beth’s hair silver, the streaks of mud on her fingers into ink. I don’t ever remember her as beautiful, but that night, her beauty was a terrible thing.

“What did you do?” I said when we got to her porch. Her eyes were translucent. It was like looking through glass into something with no bottom.

“Father made me a door,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s there. Behind the door. But I can’t open it completely. Not yet,” Beth said and disappeared into the gloom of the house.

That night I dreamed of Beth. She crawled out from between my legs, her fingernails digging against my thighs.

I saw Beth’s father on my eighteenth birthday. There was a party. Champagne in plastic cups. Dancing with Lea while Shirley Manson screamed something I couldn’t quite make out. Beth smiling and shaking her head when my mother offered her some champagne.

We never talked about the night with the dog. That year, when something went missing, Lea and I let it go. Didn’t wonder about where it had gone or tear apart our rooms searching. The lot and the things we did there faded into the myths of our childhood.

I was going to New Orleans for school that fall. Lea was headed to Atlanta to chase a bass player in a shitty rock band. “He’s really good, Willa. They’re going to make it. You’ll see.”

Beth was going to stay home. Take care of her father.

“He’s sick,” she said, but she never told us with what. Only that she had to help him. The idea of her in that house, alone with her father — a man I’d never seen — nauseated me.

“You need to be out. On your own. You know, live,” I told her. The way she smiled at me — lips chewed open and bleeding — made my skin itch.

In three weeks, I’d be far away from all of it: from Beth, from the lot, from all the lost things she had found. From the nightmares that were coming more and more frequently. From the new fear curling hard and sharp in my belly.

Lea went home early. Her rock and roll boy had told her that he might drop by later. She wanted to be sure she shaved her legs in case he did.

dust3 One by one, the partygoers stumbled out into the night, followed the moon back to their beds, until there was only Beth and me.

“Walk me home?” she asked.

I don’t remember getting up to leave, my feet falling into the familiar path to Beth’s house. Right onto Lakeshire, left on Hope Circle, left again onto Cumberland Way. We were standing on her porch, when I realized that I had dropped out for a bit. I dismissed the lost time as being more than a little drunk.

Beth turned to me, took my hand, and opened her front door.

“Come inside,” she said, and I hesitated, my foot brushing against the threshold. Warm air pressed against my face, heavy with something that smelled like yeast, like bread baking.

“I shouldn’t,” I said.

“It’s okay.” Her hand was hot over mine, and she pulled me inside.

“I want to show you something.”

The door closed.

“I want you to meet my father. He’ll be so happy to see you again. It’s been so long,” she said, and I wanted to tell her she was mistaken, that I had never met her father, but my tongue was heavy and her hand pulled me into the dark.

“This way.”

She led me into a hallway. Pictures lined the walls. A series of Beth at various ages, her hands and arms covered in dirt as she offered them to whomever stood behind the camera. In some she was smiling, her teeth long and wolfish. In others, she looked down, her hair covering her face.

“We’ll go through the door. And then everything will be fine. Like it was before. Before everything was lost.”

Beneath our feet, the carpet had given way to hard packed dirt, the walls covered with moss. A man stood at the end of the hallway facing a door, his back to us. Dark hair streaked with silver, clipped short. A white shirt tucked into jeans.

“This is my father,” she said, dropping my hand. The man turned, bending to place a kiss on his daughter’s lips. When she opened her mouth to him, I tried to turn away, tried not to hear Beth moan, but my arms felt heavy and would not move to cover my ears.

Beth paused before the door, her hand pressed against the wood.

“You always were my favorite, Willa. Will you help us? Will you help me find something that we lost?” Beth opened the door.

The doorway opened into Harper’s old lot. We were inside the hole, the one where Beth found lost things, looking out and up into the night sky. No moon. No stars. Only the sound of something vast moving just beyond the hole. Something dragging itself along dirt paths.

“He made me a door. And I went searching. Hands seeking in the dark. Looking for what we lost. It took a long time, but I found her. She was so small. So quiet. Curled up like a cat at the bottom of a well,” Beth said, and her father took her hand.

My mouth tasted of blood, sweet and hot and full of iron.

“Who did you find?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

Beth went down on her belly with her father behind her. They crawled up, up, up and through the hole and into the night, leaving me behind.

Whatever crawled along in the dirt laughed.

“Mother. We found you,” she said, and I closed my eyes.

We bury our dead in the ground. We tend to the seeds and water them with our tears. We wait and watch. Sometimes, what we find is beautiful. Other times, all of the hope we put inside the seed rots and decays. Then, we mourn all we have lost. The things we can never find. What we have thrown into the woods with our eyes closed.

The next morning, I woke up in my bed with no memory of how I got there and the fuzzy leftovers of a champagne headache. My thighs burned, as if someone had clawed their way out of me, but there were no scratches. No blood.

Three weeks later, I boarded an airplane for New Orleans. Neither I nor Lea heard from Beth after the night of the party.

Over the next three years, Lea and I drifted apart and came together with the strange consistency of childhood friends. We called each other when the men next to us were sleeping, and we whispered the lies that we had rehearsed, the fabricated stories we’d adopted to keep ourselves sane. If Lea had her own secrets to keep, I didn’t ask, and she never asked me either.

“I dream about her,” Lea said.

“Me, too.”

“I called her house once. About a year ago. A woman answered. Said that she was Beth’s mother, but her mother died. Didn’t she? I think about her, but everything blurs together, and I can’t be sure if what I’m remembering is real,” Lea said. We didn’t have to say that we were afraid.

Neither of us went back home. Our mothers begged us to visit, but we came up with reasons to stay away. Finals to study for. A new job that wouldn’t give us the time off. A cold that I just couldn’t shake. If Beth even still lived there, we didn’t know. We didn’t ask our mothers, and they never mentioned it. It was like she had never existed — a ghost.

Eventually, I convinced myself I had dreamed that night, down in the hole, with the stars so clear, but every couple of months, I would wake to the taste of dirt in my teeth and Beth’s voice in my ear, her nails digging into my thighs.

It took twenty years for me to come home.

I was twenty-seven when I met Vasily and fell in love with his dark hair and hard tongue that cut straight through words rather than bending around them. I was thirty-two when Terrin was born and learned how the knowing of love is a little like drowning.

Terrin was four when we lost him. An accident. Sun in the eyes of the driver behind us. Didn’t see the brake lights. No one’s fault.

Five months went by, and I could not move. Could not speak. Vasily packed his things. In the story I tell myself, he kissed me when he left.

dust4 “Come home, Willa,” my mother said over the phone. She sounded like an old woman, and I thought of what it would be like to bury her. It would feel right. Not like the world had just slipped inside out.

“Did Beth move away?” I asked her, but I knew the answer.

“Who? Oh, Beth. I see her every now and then at the store with her mother and father. She takes care of them I think. Always was a strange girl.”

I went home and slept in my mother’s house. It was no longer mine. There was a bed that she kept, but the girl who had slept there was not me.

Lea came. Took a red eye in from Charleston. My mother let her into the bedroom, and Lea sat on the edge of the mattress, picked at a loose thread. Neither of us spoke, and she went away when the sun began to set, told me that she loved me, that she would be back.

I slept, and I dreamed of a little boy with dark hair like his father, a small hand curled in mine, the sound of his laughter. I waited. I spoke his name and hers into the silence.

It took nine days for Beth to come to me. I woke up to her crouched on the bed. Her feet were dirty, and she’d left dark streaks on the white quilt.

“Can you still find lost things?” I said. She took my hand, and I followed her out the door, down the streets I memorized as a girl and then followed when I was a teenager.

The lot had not changed. Broken bottles, cigarette butts, and candy wrappers still tangled in the grass. The ghosts of two girls and a third who came to them, who brought them nightmares. And somewhere in all of that, a door.

“There’s more than death in the ground, Willa,” she said and knelt down.

“Yes,” I said, and watched as she reached beneath the earth and pulled.

end-of-story-nov

Kristi DeMeester lives, loves, and writes spooky, pretty things in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Three-Lobe Burning Eyes, Xynobis 2, Nightscript, Black Static, Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume 1, and others. She is currently at work on her first novel. You can find her on the web at http://kristidemeester.wix.com/kristi-demeester

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Fiction, Issue 28

In the Pines, by K.M. Carmien

“You stink like the city,” the woods-thing says. The pines close around them, a green wall, filtering the light to dim and gray, cutting off the world. It looks like a girl, this one. Waxy pale skin, lank dark curls, shabby blue coat. Most of them don’t. They look like trees, or thickets, or wolves, or cats, or patterns of shadow. But this particular one, which always claims the right to deal with her, wears the skin of a girl who was murdered by a drifter four years ago.

The body, technically, is still living. The girl herself is gone or erased or sleeping in whatever dream the woods-thing can build for her.

The drifter is in pieces in his potter’s grave. Only the woods-things are allowed to kill in here.

That is, in fact, the subject of this meeting.

Harry Kang shrugs. She can’t argue there–she just got back from Duluth. The ghosts of steel shavings and city smog are still sunk in her shadow. Her brother works there in a warehouse that ships car parts. By all accounts he seems to like it, but you never can tell with Reg.

“I hate it,” the woods-thing continues, “Why do you go?” It seems more petulant than normal, and more on edge. It won’t stop moving — shifting from foot to foot, picking at the moss lining its cuticles, tugging its curls.

“Family calls,” Harry says.

It spits into the leaf-mould at its feet. Woods-things think family means never leaving. Means a fisher-king binding to the land. So none of them have ever thought much of Harry’s brother, when they consider him at all.

Woods-things spare very little thought for humans who aren’t either witches or annoying them. Or both.

“Come this way,” it says, “To see the body.”

That’s the thing about witching. At some point there’s always a damn body.

pines1 Harry has always been a witch.

It comes down through her mother, though they are so entirely different that’s it strange they have anything at all in common, even eye color (brown like soaked bark, like forest streams). Her mother’s magic is books and symbols and long bright lines of numbers. Harry’s is dirt and leaves and roots, blood and antlers, deadwood. Like her grandmother, long dead.

When she was younger, no one but her dared enter the family garden, for fear that the herbs growing there would rise up and choke them for daring to not be her.

In the town of Canby, Minnesota, home to fifteen hundred sixty-seven people, there is an understanding about the women of the Kang family and their little cabin just on the edge of the woods. It wasn’t always the Kang family — before her mother married her father Michael, new-come from Korea to look after the paper-mill’s machines, human as human and loving as the whole wide sky, they were the McKinnons. And it was known that the McKinnon women, for a price, would…help. In little ways. Lower a mortgage, ease a birth, punish a wrong the police ignored. A gift left on the concrete stoop of their little house at the edge of the forest could buy much.

(It was also known, although less well, that the woods, too, would answer a request, if paid in blood.)

At school, people would sometimes ask Harry to show them things. Harry, six years old and tick-swelled with pride, said that it was not for showing off.

And she did not, though they sang to her, though she slept and ate and dreamed restless hungry dreams in their shadow, though her father and brother went in with rifles and came out with deer, enter the woods. Her mother had asked her not to, and in those days Harry was a good girl. No matter how much she ached to go in — she was a good girl.

Then there was the murder, in the winter of 1998.

The girl in question, Harry feels it’s important to remember, was named Maisie Grant. Harry knew her, because Canby is so small that one must work not to be known, but not well. She was a junior in high school. She wanted to go to New York for film school, so she could make nature documentaries. Maisie was not afraid of the woods. She loved them, spent her weekends hiking with an antique compass and maps and fair-trade trail mix, taking gorgeous pictures with her little camera and pouring her adoration out over the trees.

The woods repaid her as best they could, but they could not save her from the knife. Woods-things must be woken. And despite all her love, Maisie never knew how.

When she didn’t come home that October Sunday, and when the police found nothing after those crucial forty-eight hours, Maisie’s mother asked Evelyn Kang to find her.

But it was Harry, fifteen and prideful and wanting the woods like some people want a lover, who went in.

The trees said to her: she is here.

The trees said to her: this is what you are.

The trees said to her: is it not time to become?

A good many of Harry’s reasons were selfish.

In she walked, her battered work-boots making no sound on the carpet of pine needles. A ghostlight burned pale gray-white in her upheld left palm. Shadows snapped and rolled around her, thrown into a frantic dance by her light. If she were being honest with herself, Harry would have to admit that the ghostlight wasn’t actually helping,

But witch or no, she was a child alone in the dark forest, and being without the light frightened her too much.

(Some of the shadows were not shadows at all, only things that looked that way, and were watching her. She could hear them whispering right on the edge of sound, but was still too young to know them.)

The trees sang, still, but did not speak. They weren’t going to hand her everything. Witches should know.

For a long time, till past moonrise, Harry wandered, not quite lost but not quite sure of the path. The still core of her where she kept her magic was buzzing with nervous excitement and worry and nausea.

Even then Harry was a realist. She knew how likely it was that there was a corpse waiting at the other end of this night, and that probably she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

The shadows dogged her path. Wolf-eyes gleamed about her, there and gone in half a heartbeat.

pines2 Finally she stopped beneath a massive, twisted pine. This wasn’t working. “New plan,” she said under her breath. Her voice trembled more than she’d like, but there was a thin clear thread of strength in it. Harry sat down, cross-legged, on the cold ground, and made her mind into a tiny hard-light sphere.

She breathed in. She breathed out.

She cast her mind like a dragnet over the woods.

Life jackhammered through her. Trees and insects, sleeping birds, owls on the wing, the huge slow pulses of moose and bears, great cats and the bright, brief little stabs that were rodents. The woods-things, alien and familiar all at once. The coiling, endless heartbeat of roots and moss and bones at the center of it all. And she forgot her name, and her purpose, and that she was a her and not part of the woods.

And, as payment for this forgetting, she knew everything.

Later, when she went home, Harry would learn just what she’d done and fear it. Then she knew it well enough that she didn’t fear it, because among the everything she understood how someone might remember she was a fifteen-year-old girl and become that again.

She knew where Maisie Grant was, and where Maisie Grant’s blood soaked into the earth, and she knew where the man who had killed her was, and what had been done to him for his crimes.

Then Harry collapsed back down into her flesh, and was only a girl. But she remembered what she needed. Harry stood on shaking legs, throat dry, eyes burning, and made her way through the dark woods to the clearing. Moonlight lay gentle over the leaves and the blood and the glassy-eyed dead face of the drifter, and on Maisie Grant’s body, which sat primly on a fallen log. The woods-thing inside Maisie’s skin smiled a rictus smile, wide as the ragged slash across Maisie’s throat, and said, “You’re the witch. We’ve been waiting for you.”

Harry swallowed down fear and revulsion and said, “I came for Maisie. Her mother wants answers.”

“And she may have them, but this — ” The woods-thing ran Maisie’s dead hand possessively over Maisie’s dead thigh. “This is mine. She gave it to me. She said I want to live I want to live, and she paid me with all of her blood, and this is what I could do.”

A bargain, freely made and finished in good faith. As much as Harry hated the idea of this thing made of wood and sap and old hungers inside the body of a girl she’d known — it was fairly done. To break it would break her power and anger the woods and a whole host of other things that she, young as she was, couldn’t imagine but knew would be terrible.

“That’s fair. And the drifter?”

“She wanted him to be punished.” The smile, which hadn’t gone away, widened. Maisie’s teeth were white and pearly, straight from years of braces, and gleamed unsettlingly in the moonlight. “I punished him.”

“That’s fair, too.”

“You’re a smart witch.”

“Well, that’s a requirement.”

The woods-thing laughed, and mercifully it wasn’t Maisie’s laugh, but high and chiming and completely inhuman. “Only sometimes. What will you give her mother for answers?”

“Give me her pack,” said Harry, “And a lock of her hair. It’ll have to be enough.”

It wouldn’t be. But then nothing would have been.

Harry buried the drifter in a shallow grave using his own collapsible shovel, and strode out of the woods into the Tuesday dawn with an aching back and blistered hands and a throat full of sour failure.

Her mother waited for her, and Maisie’s mother, and when they saw that she was alone, Mrs. Grant began to wail.

The trees said to her: come back soon.

Now Harry walks with the woods-thing that wears Maisie Grant’s flesh, hand-in-hand in the greenish light. (Over the past months it’s begun to touch her more and more, and she hasn’t found the voice to ask it to stop because she fears it will actually listen to her.) From far away they look almost ordinary, just two girls in the woods. Sideways Hansel and Gretel, ersatz Snow White and Rose Red. It leads her on a long and winding path, over streams and through thickets, skirting copses. She knows where she is, of course. A witch always knows. What she doesn’t know is quite where they’re going.

At last they come to a clearing, blasted and bare, an unnatural miniature wasteland in the heart of the forest. It stinks of rot; where the land is not bare dirt, broken-trunked dead trees stand. The wrongness of this is a coiling physical thing that punches up through her stomach and strikes at her heart. Her power buzzes angrily, shaping itself long sharp spines in answer.

Nauseated, Harry grips the antler-and-deadwood amulet around her neck so hard the points press little dimples into her skin, grounding herself with the pain, and raises a shield around herself. It cuts the feeling. Not enough, but she can work with it. Harry steps forwards. The woods-thing lets go of her hand, and shrinks into the shadow of the trees.

She never thought that she would think this, but it looks afraid. What has happened here?

In the center of the clearing lies a tangle of coyotes, bloodied, eyeless, mouths open in futile, soundless snarls. Even dead the bodies tug at the eye–they run into each other, with no clear ending or joins; they’re all one thing. They cast no shadow.

This was a woods-thing. Was.

“No,” she says, “No — “

“Yes,” says her woods-thing.

“What did this? Do you know?” Her voice is shaking. She lets it.

“One of us,” says her woods-thing. The anger and disgust in its voice are crawling dark things, tangled up and rusted-sharp. “One of us.”

No.

Yes.

“Help us.” It holds out its hands to her, pleading. “Please. Kill it and we’ll give you whatever you want.”

She’s being asked to answer an abomination with an abomination. And worse, she knows her decision already.

Harry steps out of the clearing, and she takes her woods-thing’s hands between her own and says, “Yes.”

She takes samples, blood and bone and earth and wood, and pictures with her phone. So many pictures that she has to start deleting older ones to make room. Then she plants bundles of green twigs (asked for, paid for, freely given) and tufts of her own short dark hair tied with twine taken from her pack around the perimeter of the clearing. Nothing will get in. If something rises, it will not get out.

She hopes.

Then she texts her mother and Amy Dove, who’s several miles north on the Fond du Lac reservation. By her own hand will the execution be don — but finding the killer woods-thing, that’s not something she has to do alone. It will go faster with three. And the faster, the better. How long before it kills again? How long before it tries to reach beyond the forest? How strong is it, fed on death?

“Stay here,” her woods-thing says as they reach the edge of the trees, “Don’t go.”

This is normal. It asks her, every time, and every time she refuses it because of course she does. She still lives in Canby no matter what she is. It’s a ritual, by now half-meaningless and comforting.

Now, though, it sounds afraid and on the edge of desperate.

Harry notices that more of them than normal are out — tangled through each other, dogging her steps. The trees around them are heavy with other woods-things, clad in shadow and leaves and mud.

They’re not meant to die, and there one of their own has gone sideways and awfully wrong, and so, against their nature, they’re trooping. And hers (since when is it hers? Since she needed a way to differentiate between it and the others in her head.) wants her to stay with it. For comfort. For safety.

It would be sweet, almost, if the heavy sick wrongness wasn’t still lingering in her gut.

“I’ll come back,” Harry says. And then, “Here.” She pulls the chain of her amulet over her head and loops it around her woods-thing’s neck. “There you go. Insurance.”

They stare at each other for a lightning-charged moment, and then it hugs her hard and fast and awkward. On instinct her arms come up, and for a second she hugs it back, breathing in its flowers-growth-sweat smell.

Then it melts away, and so do the others, and she heads out into the field.

pines3 The three witches hold their council of war in Canby’s best diner. Harry’s mother looks as she always does: hair falling out of its bun, clothes rumpled, glasses sliding down her nose. Amy is straight from her job as the rez’s public defender, pantsuit impeccable, scrolling forearm tattoos peeking out from the sleeves of her crisp white shirt. Over thick black coffee and cherry pie, amid the noise of conversation and the crackly stuck-on-the-sixties jukebox, they pool what they know. Or rather, what Harry knows.

Amy sums up their feelings with a succinct, “This is shit.”

“Tell me about it,” Harry says, in a tone that more accurately conveys fuck the universe.

“Language,” Evelyn adds mildly, and, “I have a search algorithm I can adapt for you.”

“And I’ve got a devil’s trap I can change,” says Amy. “Tell you what, I’ll stay overnight.”

Absentmindedly, Evelyn makes a sign with her fingers, and in response her phone texts Michael, telling him to make up the guest bedroom.

“Once we’ve got it,” Amy says.

“Once I’ve got it,” Harry says, “It’s my job. I catch it. I kill it.”

“How?” They ask in stereo.

“Greek fire,” says Harry. “Reg knows a guy who knows a girl in Duluth. I can keep a lid on it.” She’s only half as certain of that as she sounds, but she must destroy it on her first try and there is little Greek fire won’t burn. A woods-thing, born of trees, will stand no chance no matter how strong it is. Containing it after —

With a sort of grim humor, Harry thinks, I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.

“Are you sure,” says her mother. “About doing this alone? I know I can’t help, but Amy — “

“Mom,” says Harry. “No. This isn’t the kind of thing you can split.”

“She’s right,” says Amy. “It ain’t the Ides of March, here. Doing it together won’t make it less…”

“Shit,” supplies Harry. It’s easier to say that than to call it what it is.

Amy shrugs.

“Sweetheart, I don’t like the idea.” Evelyn squeezes her hand. “I want you to be safe, you know that.”

“I know, Mom.” Harry manages a smile at her. “But witching isn’t safe. You know that.”

“Oh, save us from overly clever daughters,” grumbles Evelyn, but worry still edges her voice. “Finish your pie.”

Dutifully, Harry finishes her pie, and tries not to think about what she’s going to do.

A day later, in the small hours of the morning, she rides shotgun in Amy’s car, a small pot of Greek fire balanced carefully on her knees. They drive on through the misty darkness, the world narrowed to the sedan and the half-circle of cracked asphalt illuminated by the headlights.

Amy says, “What’ll you do, after?”

Because she won’t be the same.

“Dunno.” Harry smooths one finger around the rim of the pot. “Stay, if they’ll have me.”

“Will they?”

“They asked me to.”

Amy shoots her a sideways glance. “They don’t think like us. Sometimes I think you’re too close to them, kid. You think they’ll be grateful, when you’re done? Maybe you’re right. But maybe they’ll kill you for it.”

Harry thinks of her woods-thing lacing its fingers through hers, and she thinks of the shadows weaving behind her footsteps and the gleaming wolf-eyes that follow her sometimes, yellow and utterly alien, and knows Amy’s right.

“Be careful, is what I’m saying.”

“I will.”

The forest at noon is no less dangerous than the forest at midnight, but the sun plays through the leaves and the birds sing, and it seems warmer, somehow. Harry knows that’s just her, but she takes comfort from it. God knows she’ll need it.

At the very edge of the trees, her mother draws her into a fierce hug. Harry breathes in the smell of faded perfume and old books and lavender conditioner and holds Evelyn tight against her. When they part, Evelyn folds a thin silver chain that glitters in a way that has nothing to do with light into her palm. Amy claps her on the shoulder and hands her a tiny burnished-bronze eight-pointed star. The word here is etched on the bottom in tiny Anishinaabeg letters.

Harry does not say the words if I don’t come back. Reg knows she loves him. Dad knows she loves him. Her mother will know what to tell them.

She says, “Thank you.”

And she walks into the woods, and she doesn’t look back.

Soon they close around her.

Soon after that, there is a woods-thing at her heels, and another, and another. Fox-shaped and thicket-shaped and twisting into her shadow. A stumbling bear; a silent shine-eyed moose.

Hers isn’t there.

It isn’t there.

And then, from much too far away, it screams.

The scream isn’t so much a sound as a feeling, shooting up from the forest like a new tree, piercing Harry to the marrow. She hits the forest floor on hands and knees, gasping, retching, and then forces herself to her feet and runs like she’s never run before. Desperation burns new-star hot inside her. Half of it’s hers and half of it’s theirs, spilling over into her through the winding roots of her bond with the forest. The silver chain of the search spell jumps and stutters in her hands and she keys it to her woods-thing and lets it go.

Witch and woods-things sprint through the woods. They bend the world around them by sheer collective will alone, shifting trees and roots and copses and thickets to make a straight path to the growing weight on the skin of the world. Harry can feel it. It’s starting to make her sick, that heavy dark wrongness that wants and wants. Endlessly hungry; endlessly ferocious. A rabid animal with magic twisted in it.

The woods spit them out into another blasted clearing. And there it is, a shifting mass of shadows and roots and what looks like the drifter’s corpse that turns the eye away. There are teeth in there, and a glint of sunlight-through-leaves, and thick gloppy sap. It’s swelled up like a spider full of blood from its first kill.

Harry’s woods-thing fights, stretching past the limits of the skin it wears. It’s not girl-shaped, not quite, not anymore. Fingers have crooked into branches, feet into hooves; where it’s been cut it leaks sap mixed unevenly with blood. Whip-thin thorny branches hang from its curls. It opens its mouth, wide and wolf-toothed, and screams again. Now it’s a sound, ragged, high, sharp and piercing.

Harry can feel the bright little point of her amulet around its neck.

That’s something to work with.

She draws the pot of Greek fire from her coat and holds it at her side, and with her other hand holds the eight-pointed binding star.

One chance. She’s got one chance to pull her woods-thing out of there, and if she doesn’t make it she’ll have to kill them both, because it can’t be allowed to eat her woods-thing and grow stronger. The knowledge is a stone in the pit of her stomach.

No time to brood, though.

“Hang on!” Harry winds up and softball-pitches the binding star into the center mass of the killer woods-thing and yanks, as hard as she can, on the power of her amulet.

pines4 The dead earth contracts under her woods-thing, pulling it back. It scrambles towards her, hands outstretched and growing, and loops its fingers around her forearm. She pulls. It’s heavy as lead, heavy as a lake. The killer woods-thing throws out feelers of shadow, clinging to it, but the shadows curl up and die at the edges of an invisible wall. Still it hangs on.

Hers, it’s hers, this monster-thing can’t have it.

“Mine,” she growls, and braces her feet, and gives one last great pull.

With a tearing pop, it comes out of the trap she made and falls at her feet.

It’ll live, she thinks with a stab of relief, but this isn’t over.

The killer woods-thing roars, and, with all her might, Harry throws the pot of Greek fire at its heart.

White-hot flames lick the sky. Heat sears her front, and an awful ratcheting scream drills into her ears, the sound of an animal in pain multiplied a dozen times over and folded back in on itself. The woods-things behind her scream too. Hers grabs her hand with fingers nearing human.

Tree-tendrils scratch and scrabble at the edges of the trap, desperate, seeking. Slowly, they crisp and curl and die. The screaming stops.

And her power snaps and cracks, turning inwards, clawing at her insides and slipping out at the seams. It leaks from her mouth and her nose and streams down from her eyes. Harry’s knees give out and she falls.

(She knew this was coming, she knew, but she wasn’t ready.)

She hits the ground and barely feels it. Someone is shouting at her. Someone is prodding at the sick sharp place where her magic is. Someone is calling, “Harry! Harry Kang!”

The words mean nothing that she can understand.

“Harry! Witch!” A slap cracks across her face. The sting is muted. “The fire is escaping, get up, stop it — Harry, please!”

Hot air rolls over her, intense as a kiln.

Her power curls inside her. Nausea stirs her stomach.

Harry, please.

Slowly, she cuts her way through the fog to rationality; realizes that she has to get up, but can’t quite grasp why. She gets one palm flat against the ground, then the other. Then she gets to her knees.

Then she sees the Greek fire eating its way through the barrier.

Oh. That’s why.

With a rush, she comes back to herself. Everything is too much, battling for her attention, scratching her mind raw. The broken pieces of her magic stab at her and at the fire alternately. She’s going to vomit. She’s going to pass out.

She’s going to quell that fire if she dies doing it.

(She really hopes she’s not going to die.)

Fire is hungry, always. There’s no way to feed it to satisfaction; it’ll always want more. But she can starve it to death, if she’s careful.

It’s so big, looming over them all like a wave about to break, and she can feel the weakness running in her bones. Harry swallows and gathers what she’s got left.

It will burn air. It will even burn on water.

But what’s left of her magic —

Maybe not that.

Harry snaps the trap open wide, and holds out her arms to the fire, and draws it inside her.

It burns all the way down her throat and into her stomach, and it fills her to bursting. It hurts so much, worse than the time she broke her arm jumping off the barn roof, worse than the time she left her mind wedged open and spent a week full of everyone else’s dreams, worse than the time she left herself inside a deer while it died.

She swathes the fire with every shard of power she has, cutting it to ribbons and smothering the individual pieces. Tiny sparks escape and bite at her.

Her fingertips start to smoke.

Still she goes on.

The burning climbs her arms, and she breathes out a long stream of woodsmoke with a whimper on its heels. An arm winds around her waist; shadows clump around her legs. The foxes and the moose press into her, their forms blurring. They open the heart of the forest to her.

But the influx of power is not enough. Stretching, choking on a scream, she draws on a year of her life, two, three. Four.

The fire inside her goes out, and Harry falls again, falls a very long way.

When she wakes, it’s to still greenness, and waxy-skinned hands tipping water down her throat.

A bone-deep exhaustion weighs her down. The world is dull and far away and she feels sick, still. Everything blurs. Her tongue is swollen and useless. And something–something else, something worse, is very wrong with her. What is it?

Her woods-thing says, “You’re awake.”

No, am I? she wants to say, but the words don’t come.

Her power is gone entirely, she realizes. She’s empty, drained dry. How is she alive?

Her woods-thing brushes the backs of its knuckles butterfly-wing-light over her cheek. “Do you even know how much you gave us? Everything. You brave idiot. What will I tell your mother? What will I tell your bird-witch?”

What’s going to happen to her?

“But we’ll take care of you,” her woods-thing goes on.

The earth is softening under her, slowly but surely. Swallowing her down. Peace steals over her.

Artificial. Imposed. The woods are doing this.

Harry licks her lips. Manages to whisper, “What are you doing?” Her voice is a barely-coherent rasp.

“Sending you to sleep.”

“For how long?”

“Shhh.” It lowers her to the ground gently and stretches out beside her, curling an arm possessively around her middle. “For as long as you need,” Harry’s woods-thing whispers in her ear. “Until you’re well again.”

Oh. That sounds nice.

The earth closes over them.

She sinks into sleep.

Months later, as autumn marches onward to winter, Amy Dove and Evelyn Kang stand beside a long low mound. Despite the cold, despite the frost, despite the pine-shadow it lies in, it grows with tiny blue-white flowers and nettles and tangled ivy. A many-eyed, many-jointed fox lies lazily atop it, watching them, motionless but for the lazy flick of its tail.

The woods are quiescent.

“I wish I could see her,” says Evelyn. “I wish Michael could.” He knows, but he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand that Harry will wake again, a line of code rescued from the cache, a bulb flowering in spring after a long winter. To him, she’s just gone. Reg knows better, but Reg is so far away.

Amy sighs. “Me too.”

They are silent a moment. Then they turn from the sleeping witch, and leave the woods whispering behind them.

In four years’ time, while summer rages green and hot, one short-nailed olive hand breaks up through the dirt of the mound.

end-of-story-nov

kathleen K.M. Carmien is currently a fulltime student in Princeton, New Jersey, where she attends Rutgers University. She currently reviews books for SFRevu. This is her first published story.

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Fiction, Issue 28

Even In This Skin, A.C. Wise

Mar has been binding her breasts for years by the time she starts visiting Jamie in prison. If the men stare, it’s at her ass; she can live with that. She isn’t packing today, so she doesn’t strut, just tugs her sweatshirt over her wrists before sliding into the seat opposite her brother. Today, she just wants to disappear.

skin1 “How are you doing?”

“Same old.” Jamie offers a lopsided almost-smile, lifting one shoulder to match.

Shadows tuck beneath his skin. His gaze cuts right, a pointed look to the empty seat beside Mar; neither of them are surprised, but it still hurts.

“Did you bring me the shiv I asked for? Or the cake with the file baked inside?” Jamie looks pointedly away from the empty chair, smile broadening into a grin, but one without real feeling.

The joke falls as flat, same as the last three times. Mar places a pack of cigarettes on the table.

“Mom did ask about you at least. She wanted to know if you’re eating okay.”

“Nice of her to call you to check.”

“It was an email.”

“Three squares a day, since she asked.” Jamie pats his stomach.

It’s flatter than hers; his jumpsuit hangs loose around an already narrow frame. His hair is buzzed short, and there’s a new mark above his ear, dark ink beneath the shadow of stubble.

At fourteen, with Jamie sixteen, Mar had come down the basement stairs to find Jamie’s friend Val giving him a homemade tattoo on the inside of his left forearm with a broken pen. Most of the tattoo had washed away, not deep enough to last, just deep enough to leave a faint scar from infected skin Jamie couldn’t stop scratching. This is how they’ll know you’re one of us, Val had said.

She doesn’t look away quick enough, but Jamie seems unfazed. “You like?”

He turns to show the stars marching crookedly up the back of his skull. At least none of them look infected.

“Jamie.”

Her hand is already halfway across the table between them, wanting to touch the stars. She pulls her hand back, and Jamie’s smile falters.

“They look great,” Mar says.

Hurt flickers in his eyes, but he schools his expression, the smile coming back at half force.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Jamie says. “Promise. I’m done with that shit. Really. They’re just stars.”

“I know.” Mar answers as quick as she can, but it’s not fast enough.

At sixteen, with Jamie eighteen, the flat crack of a gun -a sound like a branch breaking, like a fracture dividing their lives into then and now and no way to build a bridge between them – is indelibly imprinted on Mar’s mind. She ran, feet thudding on the pavement, trying to be as swift as she’d been when they were young and running through the woods, but she was too late to tell who fired the shot. Val and Rico and Tommy and Jamie all stood around the boy on the ground, and Jamie looked at her with stricken eyes, I didn’t do it, Mar, I swear.

Jamie pulls the cigarettes across the table.

skin4 “Don’t spend them all in one place.” It’s her turn for a joke that falls flat, smile feeling tender and bruised.

She plows on and they talk about nothing as the time ticks down. Then chairs scrape back from tables.

“Same time next week?”

“I’ll be here.”

Mar’s heart turns over, wanting to escape; only the comforting press of the binder keeps her heart in place. She leans in for a quick hug, tight and hard, because it’s easier than looking Jamie in the eye.

“Be good.” She brushes lips against his cheek.

At the door, Mar looks back. The angle of sunlight slanting through the barred windows washes out Jamie’s face. She steps outside, leaving her brother and the other faceless men in the prison behind.

A ghost dogs her footsteps across the parking lot, the echo of a gunshot. I didn’t do it, Mar. She’s never doubted him, but he still chose. He put the gun in his hand at some point; his fingerprints were on it. Val and Rico and Tommy’s fingerprints were on it, too, and none of them were fast enough when it came time to run. Mar hurries her footsteps, doing her best to outrun the ghosts, though she knows she’ll never be fast enough either.

At six and eight, Mar and Jamie are in the woods behind their house, running. Even this young, they understand their mother doesn’t care if or when they come home. They are hungry, not just because the groceries haven’t been bought for the week, and their mother forgot to leave money for a pizza before she went out. It’s a different kind of hunger, tied to the one in their bellies, but separate. They fill it with wild motion, the sleek burn of their muscles and the relentless pulse-beat of their footsteps in the dark.

In their future, Jamie will try cutting. Mar will be the one to find him, flimsy disposable razor in hand, blood plinking against the white curve of the sink. Later still, Mar will try starving, something she can control even though food is scarce. But with no one to see, and no one to care but each other, they will give up these things. They will revert to the knowledge they have now – that their hunger is deeper than skin or food, and they will learn different ways to cope.

But for now, at six and eight, they run. Tucked beneath the leaves and roots closest to the cul-de-sac where they live, there are rotting tires, broken bottles, worn-out porno magazines. Mar vaults over a fallen log, crossing a boundary where, if she looks back, she won’t be able to see the softly-glowing crescent of houses anymore.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the night shifts. The space between the trees thickens to blue-black, then the purple of a bruise. The trunks stretch taller, slender and silver smooth. Footsteps drum around her, a steady rain of shifting, fleet shadows.

Hooves and horns, wings and claws. Skin. Hybrid, impossible creatures. All running toward something Mar doesn’t understand, but wants so badly she can taste it, a salted sweetness on her tongue.

Then a flat crack, the sound of a branch breaking, draws her up short. Mar stumbles, knees barking leaf-rot and hands catching her fall. The shadows slipping past her fall to silence, leaving only the drum of her pulse in her ears. A shape moves ahead of her in the dark.

“Jamie?”

No answer. Light spills between tree trunks, outlining a tall, slender figure. Not Jamie. Not human? Mar doesn’t know how she knows this; the truth of it is simply down in her bones. A catch of breath and Mar realizes the figure is animal and human, bound in one flesh.

For a moment, her heart refuses to beat, and when it starts again, the tempo is strange. There are two hearts inside her skin, and for once, the hunger in her belly is still.

Mar stretches out a hand. Another crack, a bone-snapping sound of more branches breaking as Jamie blunders through the woods, calling her name.

“Mar?”

She can’t see her brother, only hear him wading through undergrowth, clumsy feet tangling in low branches, roots, and dead leaves. The impulse to shout go away rockets through her. The shadows seep back, retreating. She wants to beg them to stay, but Jamie is ruining everything. Her pulse rabbits, and a terrible thought strikes her. If Mar curls herself small, if she holds very still, Jamie won’t see her; she can stay and hide forever in this magical version of the woods that aren’t the woods she left behind.

“Mar?” Panic edges Jamie’s voice.

“I’m here.” Guilt twists and she jumps up, heart slamming back into its normal rhythm.

Jamie rushes toward her. The tall, thin figure is gone. All the shadows with their horns and hooves and feathers vanish. Cold seeps in around the edges of the night. Mar shivers, and Jamie throws an arm around her shoulders. He’s limping, and there’s a long gash on his shin.

“A branch. I tripped,” he says.

Mar lets him lean on her, despite being younger and shorter, taking his weight.

“Come on, let’s go home.”

She looks back one more time, but the light between the trees is only gray now; dishwater-dirty, touched orange by the city’s glow burning through pollution. Headlights sweep by beyond the trees, and the woods are finite again, bounded by the neighborhood on three sides. No mystical shadows pace them in the dark, no two-hearted creature waits for Mar to take its hand.

With her arm around Jamie’s waist, and the weight of his body against hers, they walk slowly home.

The line outside the club inches forward. Mar jams her hands into her armpits, trying not to shiver. The men around her – and it is mostly men – are under-dressed. They breathe steam in the cold night air. She imagines them stamping hooves. Bulls. Minotaurs. Ready to run.

skin2

She’s packing tonight, but the strut isn’t there. She keeps thinking of Jamie, lost and falling behind, his face washed out by the sun in the prison visitation room. She fingers the outline of her phone in her jacket pocket. There’s an unanswered message from her boss, trying to change Mar’s mind. Before she left work on Friday, he offered her a new position, a transfer, with a higher salary and relocation costs paid.

Mar turned it down, hunger gnawing in her belly as she did. A new city, a new life, but it would mean leaving Jamie behind. A half a dozen times tonight, she’s pulled out her phone to erase the message. A half dozen times she’s been poised to call her boss and turn in her resignation. She’s been sick, her mind running around it in circles. Tonight, she doesn’t want to think about anything at all.

A fug of cigarette smoke and pot hangs in the air. Light from the club’s neon sign tints the bodies around her cool blue. It highlights the bulk of shoulders, the line of jaws. Looking at them stamps an ache into Mar’s skin. At the same time, she can’t stop herself from scanning the crowd for someone she recognizes, but doesn’t know. Someone like her who isn’t just one thing, but everything. Someone who will understand.

Mar reaches the front of the line, fumbling bills into the bouncer’s hand with chilled fingers. Inside, lights strobe, shocking her blind. Then everything kicks loose all at once. Bodies pack tight, sweat-sheened and writhing. Heat pulses from Mar’s groin to her throat; the bass thumps inside her ribs, replacing her breath and heartbeat. She’s un-fleshed, her whole body a raw nerve, open to the night.

She doesn’t bother with a drink. She flings herself into the fray. It’s as good as running. The only important parts of her body are the muscle and sinew moving her limbs, her feet pounding hard against the floor. She doesn’t have to care about moving forward, or turning back, making a choice. There’s only here and now.

The bass-thump moves her blood to mirror her feet flying over the forest floor, over fallen logs, dodging roots, showing her teeth to the night. She’s not looking behind to see Jamie’s eyes, wide in the mirror, blood plinking against white porcelain. There’s no ink on his skin, and she doesn’t have to ask how he suddenly has extra cash to buy a car that isn’t a piece of shit, get her new clothes – tight layers, sports bras doubled up, one backward one forward, bandages, and finally the binder, anything to change the curve of her body. There’s only running, and if she’s fast enough, the gunshot sound will never come. She’ll outrun it this time. Outrun the stricken look in her brother’s eyes, wordlessly saying I need you, help me, please don’t leave me behind.

A hand touches Mar’s arm. She whirls, lips peeled back from feral teeth. The man flashes teeth in turn, mistaking her expression for a smile.

“Buy you a drink?”

She has to lip-read the words for the ear-shattering music. Mar crashes back into her own too-human skin, dizzy. The hand on her arm becomes a steadying one, holding her up.

“You look like you really need one.” He screams the words next to her ear.

Without waiting for her answer, the man guides her to the bar. Mar sips the blue-sugar sweetness pressed into her hand. It steadies her long enough to take in a square jaw, frosted hair, eyes that would still be blue even out from beneath the flashing lights.

Mar forces herself to smile. It’s only slightly quieter away from the dance floor. They shout an exchange of names. Chad – at least she can put a word to her regret, if it comes to that. A second drink, one she doesn’t remember asking for, and more, continually finding their way into her hand. Alcohol blurs the edges of the night; she forgets to be afraid.

The reassuring bulge between her legs makes her widen her stance, broaden and square her shoulders. In the flickering light, she can believe she is the wild, changeable thing she wants to be. Narrow hips, sharp cheekbones, a creature straddling two worlds. Chad’s hand strays to the small of her back. His lips find her ear.

“Wanna get out of here?” His breath raises hairs on the back of her neck.

The music steals her words, but she follows him, sweaty fingers tangled in his. They stumble into the alley behind the club. It’ll be okay, Mar promises herself, directing Chad’s hands carefully, her hips, her shoulders, her ass. Keeping him away from her shirt, the binder wrapped tight around her chest. Keeping him away from the front of her pants for any touch longer than the faintest, teasing brush of fingers against denim. Then she’s on her knees, his fingers in her hair as he groans, thrusting into her mouth. This is good, it’s safe, she can do this.

Then he says, “Wait.”

Mar’s stomach flips, sick with excitement. Chad’s eyes are liquid, unfocused. “I don’t want to come yet.”

The husk in his voice suggests otherwise, but with remarkable self-restraint, he pulls her up.

skin5 “I want to feel you.”

His fingers go for her fly, surer than hers, despite the drink. Mar’s whole body is a string, taut. She almost lets him. Because, oh god, she fucking wants this. Just bodies. Contact. Flesh against flesh. Pleasure the only definition between them, and no need for Mar to be this or that, to choose.

Her mouth crushes his – the taste an echo of too-sweet drinks and the memory of ash from a cigarette hours old. Mar wants to melt into him as his hands slide lower on her body, but panic slams adrenaline through her brain. The bulge in her pants feels wrong, not because it isn’t her, but because it is still a solid choice. It defines her and pins her when she wants to be liquid, quicksilver, wild and strange.

“No.” She slaps Chad’s hands away, shoves him hard.

His eyes widen in confusion. Mar wraps her arms around her body, holding herself in. Her jaw clenches tight, tensed for a strike. Whatever he thought he would find when he unwrapped her, she won’t give him the chance. If the disappointment of not knowing is too much for him, maybe she can define herself by pain instead. Bruised flesh is still flesh. Bones cracked in rage are only bones. Everyone is red on the inside, no matter their shape otherwise.

Chad shakes his head in disbelief, stuffing himself back into his jeans.

“Fuck you, then.” He slams her with his shoulder as he moves back into the club, but nothing more.

Mar sags against the wall, letting the bricks take her weight. The trembling starts at her feet, making its way up her body until she’s clenching her teeth against the enormity of it. As much as she wills them not to, tears come, and she’s a mess of salt, wiping at her face.

It’s a moment before she registers the scent of cigarette smoke. Not soon enough to brace herself against the soft voice that comes in its wake.

“What if you could have everything you wanted?”

Mar jumps, scrubbing her eyes until black spots burst behind them. The owner of the cigarette melts out of the shadows – tall, sharp-featured, and with gold eyes that must be a trick of the light.

“What?”

“Everything you want.” Two slender fingers, holding the cigarette and trailing smoke, point at Mar’s chest.

Mar’s breath stalls. Even though the club’s blue neon still shines on them, the stranger’s hair is shockingly red.

The ghost that has been dogging her since leaving the prison crashes into her. Mar is back in the woods, looking through blue twilight at an impossible figure, tall and thin, a flickering creature refusing to hold its shape. She blinks, shaking her head. Too much alcohol.

“Where did you come from?” Mar looks around, pulse skittering; was she being watched the whole time she was on her knees, the whole time she cried?

“I smelled your tears.”

The stranger closes the distance so smoothly, Mar doesn’t have time to step back. A tongue sweeps over the wetness of her cheeks like a dog licking her pain away. But the hands framing Mar’s face and holding it still are human.

“Honey,” the stranger says. “Your tears taste like honey.”

Mar shakes her head again, huffs a sound that isn’t quite a word. A hollow ache presses against the back of her eyes.

skin3 “I’m Fox.”

“Okay,” Mar says, voice squeezing up from the depths of her.

For the first time since she started wearing it, her binder crushes her. Or maybe it’s only her heart beating too hard in her chest, her lungs going haywire. It occurs to her, over the frantic drum of her body that she doesn’t know whether the stranger said ‘Fox’ or ‘a fox.’

“Okay,” she says again.

The drinks catch up with her and Mar turns away, dropping to her knees to be sick this time. A hand touches her back, comforting, or merely keeping her in place. After a moment, a napkin is offered. Mar wipes her face, cleans herself up as best she can, and climbs shakily to her feet.

“What do you want?” Mar asks.

“It’s what you want that’s the question. Do you know?”

She’s about the say she wants to be left alone. The words are like her boss’s, still saved on her phone. What do you want, Mar? You need to think about your future, and what’s best for you. The world won’t wait for forever. Don’t let opportunity pass you by. Before Mar can say anything, Fox steps close again.

Lips graze Mar’s jaw, sharp teeth behind them. Fox’s cigarette vanishes, leaving hands free to roam. Mar braces for the panic, but it doesn’t come this time. Fox’s touch is gentle, a question Mar’s flesh shivers to answer. There’s a scent like fallen leaves, like earth, tucked just under the cigarette smoke. Beneath her clothes, Mar’s skin pulls taut, her bones shifting, her body hollowing and swelling in accordance with each movement Fox makes.

Mar catches her breath, an audible sound. Fox draws back, amusement shining in gold eyes, a half-smile resting upon lips. The shivery buzz recedes in the absence of Fox’s touch. A cigarette flicks back into place between long fingers, conjured from thin air.

“Shall we find out?” Fox asks.

Mar doesn’t trust herself with words, not yet. Instead, she follows; Fox leads. The streets twist away, the city becoming unfamiliar. In Mar’s peripheral vision, houses and buildings stretch tall into the sky, thinning into smooth trunks with branches and leaves lost deep among the stars. She stumbles over a tangle of roots, or her own feet. Streetlights blur in the afterglow of rain, making everything shine.

Through a door, up stairs, and through another door into a messy, close space smelling faintly of animal musk and juniper berries. Mar allows Fox to lay her down on a bed, push her into a nest of covers. She’s dizzy, but in a pleasant, dream-like way – past sickness and back to buzzed. The edges of everything are rounded and vague. Safe.

She lets Fox undress her. Fox sets the prosthetic aside. At least Mar thinks so; a ghost weight lingers beneath her legs, stirring to heat and proximity. Fox leaves the binder in place – even when everything else is stripped away – with a preternatural understanding that it is essential to Mar. It was her first act of defiance against the shape she was born into, her last line of defense against the world. This simple act leaves Mar shaking with gratitude. Gratitude and desire. The shaking doesn’t stop as Fox’s hands trace over her again. Tremors wrack her body, tiny earthquakes smoothed or awoken by Fox’s hands.

The world blurs further; not just the edges, but reality itself loses cohesion. Mar’s skin and bones are liquid honey, made soft by Fox’s touch. Malleable. Her flesh changes, solid one moment, rising to Fox’s hand, hard flesh to be grasped; concave the next, so Fox’s fingers sink into her and Mar answers with a shuddering gasp.

The only thing Mar is certain of is that Fox’s eyes are indeed gold; it wasn’t a trick of the light. Then Mar surrenders, ceases thinking at all. Nothing matters but muscle and blood. Like dancing. Like running. Pure motion. She lets her body talk, scream, and arch into Fox’s touch.

When the shuddering is done, Fox reaches for a pack of cigarettes, showing shocks of red hair sprouting from beneath armpits. Gold eyes assess Mar; Mar gazes back, blinks. Fox’s chest is smooth, but swelling slightly where breasts might be. Or not. Fox’s nipples are small, hard, dark like winter berries. Mar cups a hand over one, then runs her palm downward. Her breath snags, thrilling to find a whole line of equally hard bumps beneath her touch. Fox pushes her away, not unkind, but business-like.

“Now,” Fox says, breathing a stream of smoke. “Do you know what you want?”

“I…”

She wants to melt under hands that touch her the way Fox does. Always. She wants to feel her bones stretched like taffy, her whole being infinitely malleable and capable of remaking itself from one moment to the next. She wants to flicker and run and never have to choose.

“The world doesn’t work that way. Not quite.” Fox places a finger against Mar’s forehead, between her eyes, smiles sly.

Mar squeezes her eyes closed, lashes rimmed with tears harder than the ones she shed before. These are like frost, unfalling.

“Not choosing is still a choice, but every body has to take a path, sooner or later. Every choice comes with a cost, but if you don’t step onto the path, you run the risk of being dragged along it.”

It sounds like a fairy tale, but Mar knows that isn’t what Fox means. In the woods, she chose; she turned toward the city and a wild, strange thing slipped away from her. Jamie chose to put ink on his skin, a gun in his hand. It’s not as simple as trading the name of a child for straw spun into gold.

Jamie sits behind her eyelids, small in his prison jumpsuit, shoulders curled inward and ink marking his skin – the image printed there like a bruise. It isn’t fair. Any choice she makes seems to leave Jamie behind. But if she doesn’t choose, if she stays here forever, then she’ll curl inward too. She will grow smaller and fainter every day until finally, she disappears.

“I don’t know.” Mar breathes out, opens her eyes.

Fox rolls slightly to face her, propped on one elbow.

“I could eat your heart.” The words are matter-of-fact. Mar stares as if the words will show in the curls of smoke circling Fox’s red, red hair, waiting for them to make sense.

“Think how much easier it would be to go through the world heartless.” Fingers trace the edges of Mar’s binder, but do nothing to pull it away.

Gold eyes watch Mar, unblinking. If any tears should taste like honey, they should be from those eyes, not Mar’s, but she can’t imagine Fox crying.

Is that what it means to be heartless? Never in danger of tears, but never in danger of love either? Mar studies Fox’s narrow face, the impossibly sharp cheekbones. A wild animal, a myth. Both. Neither.

The suddenness of Fox’s body over hers startles Mar. Fox’s teeth rest against the edge of her binder; gold eyes pin her in place.

“I could bite through,” Fox says, “and you wouldn’t feel a thing.”

“Before, or after?” Mar says.

She means the words as a joke, but they don’t sound like one.

A shadow flickers beneath the surface of Fox’s gaze. Hunger. Wanting. A space that can’t be filled devouring by hearts; an emptiness too big and complicated to name.

skin6 “Yes,” Fox says.

Mar’s pulse trips, insistent at her wrists, between her legs, in her throat. Fear, real, sweeter than any she’s felt before.

Her body responds. Heartless. Yes, she wants this. But she needs time to think, and right now, with Fox’s lips grazing her belly, and moving lower still, she doesn’t want to think at all.

“You look happier than I’ve seen you in a long time,” Jamie says.

The hard plastic seat cups her uncomfortably. A hum of voices surrounds them, a susurrus of conversations half-held, everyone saying too little and too much in the short window of time they’re allowed. Her cheeks warm.

“You finally meet someone?” Jamie’s grin is sly.

But there’s an edge to it; the corner of his mouth quivers. Guilt needles her. She hasn’t made a choice, but sitting here feels like a lie, like she’s hiding something good and secret when Jamie has nothing at all. Jamie runs a hand over the stubble field of his scalp. One leg bounces, restless, under the table.

“Are you okay?” Mar leans forward.

“You know me, I’m always okay.” The lines of Jamie’s smile dig deeper, determined, like he’s got something to prove. The stretch of his skin shows his skull. Mar’s heart cracks, her binder too tight again.

She reaches across the table, catching Jamie’s fidgeting hands.

“Jamie…”

Her voice fails. She can’t look him in the eye, not just because she’s afraid he’ll see the shadow of her leaving, the possibility that she’ll choose something that will pull their worlds apart. She’s afraid she’ll see a shadow in his eyes, too. Doubt. Guilt. And some sick part of her wants to see it there. She wants to know he chose, that some action led him here and not random chance, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Would it make it easier if Jamie confessed? Could she walk away with a clean conscience? No. Jamie would still be written on her heart, her brother, no matter what he did or didn’t do. If she lets Fox devour her heart, what happens to Jamie?

“Don’t,” Jamie says before she can even try to go further. “One of us should be happy, Mar.”

At the pressure of his fingers on hers, Mar can’t breathe. She closes her eyes. They’re running together in the dark. The smell of churned-up leaves, the trees lengthening around her, the light bruising to a new color. His legs are longer than hers, but hers carry her ahead. A branch cracks under his weight; Mar’s heart cracks. Jamie trips, tangles, and Mar is alone. At six and eight, a shadow comes for her, and Mar turns away, back toward home. And now? Her heart cracks again, fracturing beneath the binder, drawing a line through Jamie’s name.

“Just keep running,” Jamie says. “And don’t look back.”

The fact that he knows her so well, can read her thoughts even as Mar hides her eyes makes it hurt all the worse. She forces herself to look at him, she owes him that much.

The smile sliding across his face is almost real this time, shadow-touched, sorrowing, like he understands. Jamie releases her hands, and it’s a moment before the world rights itself.

“Jamie.” Tears thicken the name in her throat. She doesn’t try to go further this time.

When the time is up, Mar hugs Jamie as hard as she can, feeling the bones move under his skin, letting the pressure of her touch say goodbye for her where the word itself refuses to form.

Mar doesn’t know where to find Fox, but she knows where to be in order for Fox to find her. The woods behind the house are a little more unkempt, the trees a little more ragged, a few more years of secrets and discarded things lodged among the roots. Empty bottles, cigarette packs, used condoms. The woods are where people come to test personalities, passions, and vices before they let the world see them.

“You’ve made a decision,” Fox says.

There’s no cigarette to herald the appearance this time. Fox is simply there in the space between two trunks, hands in the pocket of a long coat that nearly brushes the ground.

“What are you?” is what comes out of Mar’s mouth, a question instead of an answer.

“You already know.” Fox’s head tilts to one side.

Fox presses a hand against Mar’s chest. Mar’s pulse thumps beneath her binder and her skin. She imagines sharp teeth, biting through muscle, through bone. Fox promised she wouldn’t feel a thing.

“Are you ready?” Fox asks.

Mar nods. Fox takes her hand, leading her deeper, where the trees grow straighter, less ragged, where stranger secrets than sex and addiction are hidden between their roots and their leaves. There’s a hollow where the earth has been tamped down by the shape of a body curled nose to tail.

The sky is flat white above trees whose branches have been stripped for winter, but shadows still dapple Fox’s cheeks. Broken sunlight filters between the non-existent leaves and a wind warmer than the one Mar left behind stirs over them. The shadows in between the patches of light on Fox’s skin are the color of a bruise.

“Will you let me eat your heart?” Fox asks. “All your wanting, all your pain?”

Dark lashes lower over eyes the color of amber with insects trapped inside. Beneath those lowered lids, something shifts and flickers in the gold crescent of Fox’s eyes. Fragility, hope, love, fear. None of the words sit easy on Fox’s shoulders. They slide around, come back to Mar like a flutter in her belly. Not one thing, but all of them. Old and young, terrible and lovely. Human and not.

What would it mean to let Fox eat her heart? And what kind of creature would want such a thing? A dangerous one? Or simply a tired one, wanting to be hollow instead of full, soft instead of hard? Mar catches her breath. There’s another choice she can make, with a different cost attached to it.

She could eat Fox’s heart instead of offering up her own. It’s what she’s always wanted. Two hearts in one skin. Animal and human. Male and female. Both and neither. Melting and changing, swift and quicksilver and remaking herself at will.

But with the swiftness come the shadows. If she keeps running, she leaves Jamie behind. If he picks up the gun, there’s a flat crack, the world sundered and they can never go back again.

There is infinite patience in Fox’s honey-colored eyes. And impatience as well, jaws snapping at Mar’s heels.

Hunger. Wanting. Mar knows about hollow spaces that cutting and starving can’t fill. She knows that some desires go beyond skin.

She closes her eyes, breathes out. She conjures Jamie’s face, his voice calling to her through the dark of the forest, his eyes fixed on hers saying I didn’t do it, Mar. Lying curled small in the forest, wishing for the shadows to stay, it wasn’t only guilt that needled her to turn back home. It was love. Jamie is her brother, and he’s always known her. He will know her still, even in this skin. Her heart, beating strong and true beside a second heart, wild and strange. Together, they will be enough to fill her. She wants this. She is sure.

Mar opens her eyes.

She presses her lips against Fox’s mouth. She tastes salt and honey. Liquid gold, Fox’s heart melting on her tongue.

Far distant in the woods, there’s a flat sound – a gunshot, a branch breaking, Mar cracking wide. Breathless, she leans back, licking clean the last drops of salty sweetness with her tongue.

“Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing.”

end-of-story-nov

A.C. Wise’s short fiction can be found scattered around publications such as Uncanny, Apex, Shimmer, and the Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015, among other places. In addition to her fiction writing, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and contributes a regular Women to Read: Where to Start column to SF Signal. Her debut collection, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, was published by Lethe Press in 2015. Find her at www.acwise.net or on twitter as @ac_wise

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Speculative fiction for a miscreant world