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Lake Mouth, by casey hannan
My mother walks up dizzy from the pier with her mouth open and her arms out and dripping. The lizards on the boardwalk drop their blue tails to get out of her way.
I'm on the patio swing saying it's a tough living dyeing my own wool and spinning it into fancy yarn. Peggy tells me to shut up and worry about my mother. My mother vomits algae on the patio, and I get worried.
My mother says, "Don't you kids look. It's just my vertigo."
The kids are me and a few old women in shorts. The old women push me inside the lake house and block the sliding door with their clotted bodies. I sit on the floor and trace the black veins from leg to leg through the glass. The veins are black because they're full of ants. If the old women get cut, the ants will escape, and the old women won't have anything to carry their granulated blood to their hearts.
My mother married into this family. She doesn't have the right blood for the lake. Linda told my mother how a ghost would swim up in her if she went out on that raft, but my mother comes from country people. They learn by doing. My mother is learning right now. A ghost from the lake is caught in my mother's stomach, and it's teaching her what it means to be a stubborn individual.
A cloud of mosquitoes blacks out my mother's hair. Sandra looks at her phone.
She says, "I'm calling it."
Linda says, "This whole situation makes me want to spit. Get those mosquitoes out of her hair. Those mosquitoes don't get to be part of this."
I knock on the glass. It hurts. My knuckles are sharp, and my skin is thin. It's something about my parents' combined genetics. I'm hardy and fragile at the same time. I bleed at the joints when I make a fist. My blood isn't ants. It's just blood. Before my father died, he taught me to squeeze that blood into jars and keep it the right temperature for if I need it later.
He said, "You can do more with blood than it says on the box."
He's right. I've used my blood to dye wool the perfect shade of brown.
Peggy hugs open a Christmas tin and eats a cookie.
She says, "Your poor mother."
Peggy was made to stay behind the glass with me. Her sisters are out there telling my mother how not all dizziness is vertigo. My mother's screaming a story about the first lake people.
Sandra says, "Someone should record this. I don't think we have this one."
Linda says, "I'm not going to be involved in that. This woman has her rights to privacy."
Peggy gives me a cookie and says, "Your mother will be fine. Eat this cookie, then we'll go out front and play a game."
I eat the cookie. It has raisins. I can't digest raisins at the lake. My stomach turns them to gravel. I puke the cookie into a red plastic cup.
Peggy says, "I know. The lake takes getting used to. My first time here, I found out I couldn't whistle. We lost a puppy that way. He started running toward the lake, and I tried to whistle for him, but nothing came out. He ran right across the water on a bridge of snakes."
The lake is a man-made finger of blood-black water on the border of Virginia and North Carolina. It's a culture shock like when I was in Australia and used the toilet paper to the last square. The last square was glued to the roll. I cried because that's not how it is in America. In America, the last square comes clean.
On the other side of the glass, my mother says, "Brother Bill Agnes dressed as an old woman and secured a place on a lifeboat. That was in April of 1912. Grandmother Will was born a year later to Sister Viv, a lapsed nun who made pies out of sawdust. All Sister Viv's children were allergic to trees."
Peggy reaches behind my ear and pulls back two lit cigarettes.
She says, "Let's go play that game."
Peggy and I go out on the front porch and sigh into rocking chairs. A noiseless fighter jet goes over the trees and unzips a formation of geese. There's an Air Force base nearby. The geese crash in the yard and shit the sand to mayonnaise. Peggy says when she and Linda and Sandra were kids they would grab the geese by their necks and swing them over the house and into the lake. I think that's a feat misremembered.
I tried grabbing a goose once, but the goose grabbed me instead. I had to climb a tree to get away. My hands got cut up on the bark. Sap fell into the deepest splits. My hands healed up bumpy, so now I have hard beads in my palms like a pearl necklace held and absorbed.
I thought the sap might have poisoned me because my fingernails started growing faster than normal, and I had this urge to scratch people. My mother would hug me, and I would pull up divots of skin from her back. One of those times, I pulled up a mole and its network of cancer. My mother let out a sound like a motorcycle.
I told her I was a poisonous monster because of the sap in my hands.
She said, "No, honey, look. I've got pencil lead in my neck from a thing that happened on accident, and your father says I'm good 'til I die."
The boom of the fighter jet catches up to us a minute after the jet's out of sight.
Peggy says, "That's what ghosts sound like when they're not sitting in your stomach. If you put your head down in the lake, you can hear the ghosts screaming like a really big shell put to your ear."
I say, "I know what ghosts sound like. My father had a bad ghost take him over a few years ago."
Peggy says, "I didn't forget."
I say, "You said something about a game."
Peggy says, "Yeah, the game where we smoke these cigarettes and just shut up because there will be enough talking in the morning, and the geese want to talk now."
The geese start honking. I yawn. Peggy looks at me like I'm ruining the moment. I yawn again but in my closed mouth. My eyes water like I might cry.
I'm the oldest of the younger cousins this year because Ashley, the real oldest cousin, had a baby, and the baby's already doing that thing where he looks over Ashley's shoulder at things that aren't there.
"He sees spirits," Ashley says when she calls to make sure we're all still alive.
I tell Ashley my mother's been hit by a long-winded ghost. Ashley says that's a shame and a tradition. She says to give everyone her love. I tell her blood is love at the lake.
She says, "You know what I mean."
Ashley didn't tell me being the oldest cousin came with responsibilities. I have to get the younger cousins drunk but not too drunk. One of the old women gives me 50 bucks to buy her some cheap bourbon. She tells me to keep the change. I spend the change on vodka for the younger cousins. Peggy helps me pour the glasses.
I say, "This is weird."
Peggy says, "They'll need it to sleep in a house that's always talking."
Peggy and I decide to split the rest of the bottle. This would be a good time to cry and ask about my mother, but I know ghosts don't give up easy. I look out the window. There's too much fog to see the lake anymore.
Peggy says, "That's the body of the ghost. If you go out tonight, try not to breathe it in."
Peggy coughs some ants into the bottle.
I say, "My mother won't talk again, will she?"
Peggy says, "Well, your mother's staunch, so she'll probably try."
I call the younger cousins into the kitchen, and they get their drinks and head to the basement. Peggy says I should go with them.
She hands me the bottle and says, "Don't you leave this shit vodka with me."
The stairs to the basement are covered in carpet that's always a little wet. I run down the stairs, and it feels like I'm running on rum cake. The younger cousins are sitting around a card table and flicking poker chips at each other.
Matt says, "You know what you do with these?"
I say, "They stand for money."
Matt says, "No. They stand for America. This one's red, this one's white, and this one's blue."
Matt takes a drink and starts coughing.
Lee says, "I know. This one's really strong."
Katie says, "Yeah, this one too."
All the younger cousins take cat sips and talk about how they can't wait to get out of wherever they are. Lee's the only one who isn't a blood cousin. He's the neighbor. His teeth cross like swords. Katie has a thing for messed-up teeth. She's been all over Lee since we got here. She texts me and asks if I think it's OK for her to keep going. I tell her it would be fine if Lee weren't gay.
Peggy yells down for me to move her car closer to the house so it'll be easier for her to pack tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow. She laughs and shakes a pill bottle. The other old women come running.
Lee says, "I'll go with you."
Katie stands up and pulls down on the legs of her shorts.
Lee says, "Just me and your cousin on this one."
I say, "Yeah, there might be snakes out," which is stupid because we all know snakes take to the water at night. They float on top of the lake in loose sex balls, roaring like a gas leak in a small town. Every morning, there are clusters of fresh eggs knocking the pier legs. Linda and Sandra cut the eggs open and use the undeveloped snake babies for fishing bait.
Katie says, "OK, guys. What. Ever."
Lee and I hit the gravel. I try not to breathe the ghost fog. Lee trips over himself like he got drunk off three sips of vodka. I tell him to keep his mouth shut and his nose shut and just breathe with his mind.
He says, "No can do, but I'll race you to the car."
Lee grabs my hand, and we run through the fog to Peggy's car where we suck in the clean air and pass it between our mouths. My tongue counts Lee's crooked teeth. I want to ask if his teeth hurt arranged like that, but my mouth and his mouth are the same for a while. I can taste where I smoked a cigarette earlier, and so can Lee. He sucks on my lips to get it all out.
Lee tells me he's moving to California to sit in a chair on the beach and talk about what he believes. He doesn't know what he believes yet. He thinks if he starts talking, he'll know.
Lee asks me what I believe.
I say, "I believe my mother still has a lot to say."
Lee says we don't believe the same things.
I ask Lee if he's met any of the ghosts from the lake. He says no. I take his shirt off and say, "I'll show you a ghost in the morning."
The fog is lifting. Lee swallows all the spit in his mouth.
"No," he says, "you won't."
My mother is sitting on the pier in the morning, and the ghost has left her. I can see her skull through her skin. She says it'll pass when she eats, but she's not hungry.
The water under us is black and iridescent as motor oil. I tell my mother I'm not hungry either. She says I smell like I ate all night. She coughs, and no algae comes out, but her breath is still green.
Lee comes down the boardwalk, and I say, "Mom, this is my special friend."
My mother grabs a post to stand. I see all her veins at once like purple lightning.
She says, "Don't do this to me right now."
Peggy yells that breakfast is ready. My mother says she needs to try to eat. I say we'll be up soon.
Lee and I get on our bellies on the pier. We look in the water for ghosts.
I spit in the lake, and the lake spits back.
Casey Hannan was born in West Virginia, raised in central Kentucky, and has lived and worked in Kansas City since 2003. He graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2007 and has continued to develop his literary and visual art practices in tandem. He is the author of two books, Mother Ghost (Tiny Hardcore Press) and The Three Woes (Spork Press) and can be found at caseyhannan.com.
Shimmer #46, November 2018, 2100 words
Other Mouths:
Black Fanged Thing, by Sam Rebelein
The Wombly, by K.L. Morris
familyhauntedlake
Featured, Issue 45
Dead Things, by Becca De La Rosa
She comes to the manor screaming. Red hair, a tempest. Blood and bruises. Bare feet drumming the flagstones, disaster breeding disaster. Odile watches from her perch on the newel post. Marvels, shuffles. What a terrible creature, she says, to the oaken banister. The banister creaks in answer.
Today Odile is a black bird. Elsewhere in the manor there is washing to be done, dusting and polishing and sweeping, but she has spent most of the day admiring the green-blue glimmer of her feathers in the ballroom mirror. Against the glow of the candlelight she gleams and shimmers. Other black birds live at the manor, great moth-eaten things forever polishing their talons on the garden walls, but Odile is a bird of her own devising. She is unique, and resolute.
Dark falls: The girl appears, howling. Mud in her throat, skin under her nails. If she is saying words, they refuse to coalesce under her tongue; if she is capable of speech at all, she does not look it. Wild, filthy, snarling. A gasping, many-clawed thing. Safe on her perch, Odile regards the girl with first one eye and then the other. What do you see? she asks the banister.
Storm in a teacup, the banister says, dourly.
Odile laughs. The sound surprises her, too like a squawk, and she jumps, loses her balance, flutters her black wings. The girl on the flagstones coughs, only once. Stops screaming. Lifts her head, to look Odile in the eye. This is the end of the story. The end.
Seven thousand thousand years ago, a seed named Odile germinated in the cool black earth of the kingdom under the ground, called Uisce Dubh, or Death. Odile yawned and shivered and split herself to sprout and shoved green-elbowed and green-kneed from the soil, behold: the girl Odile, a black-winged bird. In the Kingdom of Death a girl might be many things. Bird, hare, moth, cornflower, cool-bellied snake. Handmaiden, scullery maid. Odile scrubbed floors. She baked bread. She rose and set like a moon, endless and changing, and no howling monster fell from the root systems above her to land on the manor tiles like so much wet washing, and she never stepped down from the newel post with her black feathers hanging, never, never, never.
The girl's name is Anyechka. She says this, offers the epitome of herself whole as a fruit in her hand, as though she does not know any better, to the man in the black cloak. That cohesion of darkness, poised at the mantel. Smiling. "I know," he says, gently. Voice like the depths of the black river plumbed at last. Voice like the infinite caress of nothing over nothing over nothing. "I know who you are, and what you have done."
"You were there," says the red-haired girl. "There with Livia. You—" Her voice cracks. "Is she alive? What—what did you do to her?"
"You made a bargain." He tips his head to one side. "I kept my word. She is alive."
"She—" The girl drags her curled fist across her mouth. "Oh god," she breathes, and then again, and again, oh god oh god. From her hiding spot atop the lintel, safe in the shape of a gray-green luna moth, Odile cannot discern the extremity of Anyechka's reaction, whether it is horror or relief. "I'm dead," says the girl. "I'm dead. She's—she's alive."
"Such was the tenor of your bargain."
He laughs. It is not, and never has been, a comfort. "Yes," he says. Soft, softer. "I am."
Odile is given the task of caring for the girl. Of bathing her, and tending to the cuts and bruises on her skinny arms, and finding clothes for her from amongst Odile's own things. The girl says nothing to Odile. Under the blood and dirt she is pale as a cooked egg-white, painted with ink in curious whorled designs, nipped through with hoops of metal. Silver hoops in her ears, one over her lower lip, two gold hoops shielding her brown nipples. Odile does not recognise any of these shapes. The girl's cheekbones, too pointed; her knucklebones, across which blue ink spells out L-O-S-T on one hand, G-I-R-L on the other. Foreign as mold, and as unwelcome.
With nowhere else to store her, Odile puts Anyechka to bed in her own room: the peaked attic with its windows looking out at a sky riven by root systems. Only once, before she falls asleep, does the other girl turn to peer at Odile. Her eyes are the slightest, most silvery green. "Is that why you're here?" she asks. Still hoarse from all her screaming. "Did you make a bargain, too?"
Odile stares. The question upends her, little blue teacup, spills her across the floor. "No," she says coldly. "Go to sleep."
Once upon a time there was a girl, Anyechka. Her hair was the colour of wildfire and she came into the world burning. Once upon a time (concurrently, impossibly) there was Livia: lovely, terrible Livia, her fingers always folded around a cigarette, or a bottle, or a needle. Anyechka loved Livia, not the way the Kingdom of Death loves its master but the way a match loves the phosphorous that catapults it into flame. Or maybe the way a cliff loves the ocean that abrades and erodes it, in spite of its own better judgment. Livia was good, bright, neccessary; without her the world would lack certain indispensable humors, or minerals, or alchemical processes. Without her the world would wither, and die. So when Anyechka came across Livia in the broken-walled building behind the abandoned playground, cold and pale-mouthed with her works still dangling from her arm like some gruesome vestigial limb, she did the only thing she could: She made a deal. She brought Livia back.
Time passes. Anyechka is there when Odile wakes, and there when she sleeps again, there when Odile leaves the attic in the shape of a bird or a moth or a snake or a slant of light and there when she returns, there as Odile moves through her work, sweeping and dusting and polishing the manor's many strange surfaces. She does not speak much. At first Odile hates her, her impudent, ugly imposition, the shriek of her presence; after a while Anyechka becomes a familiar nuisance, like the skeletal mice that chitter and gnaw at the manor's foundations. Just another moping shadow. Just another among the myriad dead, wherever they are. In the end Odile recruits Anyechka into helping with her chores. The other girl obeys without fuss, though she is silent still, and unbearably clumsy with the feather-duster and the long-handled broom.
"Watch!" Odile bursts out one day, after Anyechka has whacked her with the broom-handle for the third time. "Are you blind? Mind what you're doing, won't you?"
"I'm sorry!" Anyechka says. "I can't see right without—"
"Without what?"
The other girl scowls. Twists over herself, leans up against the broomstick. Ashamed, Odile thinks, of showing weakness. "My glasses," she mutters. "I broke them when—On my way—When I came down here. Can't see much without them."
Astonishment shears every other response from Odile's mouth. "Why didn't you say something?"
"Say what? Say maybe could you take me to the—the underworld optician, say maybe could you make an appointment for me so I can get a new pair of specs? It's not—"
"Not what?" Odile laughs, though she stops herself when she sees Anyechka's expression. "Come," she orders. Takes the girl by the hand, leads her down through the kitchen and out into the vegetable garden, the bee-garden, down through rows and rows of swaying lavender to the greenhouse where Vasile the groundskeeper tends his clippings of sick rowan trees and exotic orchids. Vasile is tall and thin and stooped as a willow, and when Odile explains—chattering, talking over herself—he digs out his drum of geodes, raw gemstones, half-cut cabochons, clumped with dirt and shining dully. From the bucket he pulls a slab of beryl, blue-tinted.
The two girls watch him grind the stone down on his great foot-pedalled grinder. Standing, at first, a polite distance away, and then sitting neatly on upturned terracotta pots, and then lounging back against the wall of climbers, their heads swathed in clematis. Now and then Anyechka's thigh brushes Odile's. Now and then their hips graze together, light as insect wings. Vasile passes the crystal discs to Anyechka once, twice, three times, his spindly eyebrows raised. At last she nods. Hum, says Vasile, under his breath. He lashes the discs onto gold wire.
Wearing her new glasses, Anyechka is suddenly solemn, like a creature caught by an unexpected gaze; a fox by the river, a wild rabbit on the steppes, something discrete and self-contained. "What do you think?" she asks Odile, blinking up at her through shards of polished crystal, the kingdom's fossilised blood curved to make her sight clearer; and is she not unknowable, fey and wayward creature that she is? Is she not unlike everything Odile has ever seen? Odile feels herself flush, and she mutters something incoherent, half-appalled. Anyechka kicks her heels against her upturned terracotta pot. Smiling. Smiling.
Four-eyes, says Odile.
Bug-face, says Anyechka.
Teacher's pet, says Odile.
Maidservant.
Forest fire.
Poppet doll.
Ghost girl.
Ghost girl, Anyechka repeats. Her hands ghosting through Odile's hair.
"It's like," Odile says. "Oh, it's like. The thread of you. It is—inside you, a whole thing. The single whole thing, for inside you there is movement and motion and rushing and bustling, but there is a part of you that stays always still—can you feel it?"
"No," says Anyechka. Swaying on her feet, her eyes shut, face creased with focus.
Odile breathes out frustration. "The body of you," she says, impatient at her own ineloquence, "is false, is a—an elaborate fable, do you understand? Skin and bones and—and hair and all that, it's not real, not really. The body is a lie it tells itself. There is only one true part of you, just that one small part. It's—" Odile scowls, presses one finger to Anyechka's stomach, the place where her ribs clasp hands. "There," she says. "In there, the centre of you. If you feel that, if you learn it by heart, you can learn to shape it. Look." She reaches inward, pulls out the form of a black bird, settles it around herself. Reaches again, shimmers down into the shape of a moth. Again: a black-hatched snake.
"Show-off," Anyechka mutters.
They are in the parlor, beside the big bay window. Beyond them the orchards stretch out red and green and endless. On the floor at their feet the wash bucket and mop lie forgotten. Odile shudders back into her own shape, naked now, her clothes scattered. "Am not!" she says, indignant.
Anyechka laughs. It is not the first time anyone has ever laughed in the Kingdom of Death, Odile knows, but it might as well be: so like sunlight, so wholly unexpected. Odile's eyes widen. She laughs, too, in astonishment.
The manor is old, old as the foundations on which it was built, old as the steppes beyond the orchard and the mountains beyond them, and like all old things it has a sense of itself above mortar and brick; like everything, everyone in his household, it carries him in its bloodstream. His demands, when he makes them, echo without words through the planes and curves of the vaulted ceilings, through the pitted grains of the floorboards sagging and sighing over their old secrets. He is not there beside them in the green parlor with its window wide to timothy and pendu plat apples, and then he is. Anyechka does not see him. Odile (black bird, singing scullery maid) is part of the manor, like any good joist or cornice. A girl is a house in which the god of death paces and stalks. She stiffens. The laugh catches in her throat.
"I am glad," says the god of death, the black heart of the kingdom, "that you two are entertaining one another. It is wonderful to see," he says, and now he is closer, now he looms and looms, "that you have time to amuse yourselves so thoroughly even despite your work about the manor. Odile?" says Death in her ear, a scintillating breath that coils throughout her musculature, her exoskeleton, the false self beyond the truth of her. Yes, she whispers. "Remember the gifts I have given you," he says. "Remember how freely I gave them, and how freely I might take them away. Do you remember, Odile?"
Yes, she says.
"Good. Are there no floors for you to sweep? Anyechka, come."
Odile watches the other girl trail after him, his long, inky shadow. She doesn't move, not even when Anyechka stares back over her shoulder.
Moth is a gift. Black bird is a gift. White rabbit is a gift, centipede snake is a gift, and lotus flower, and dapple-backed spider, and girl, too; girl is the greatest gift of all, the first and most valuable. Odile does not own herself. In the Kingdom of Death, all people—all beasts, all creatures—owe themselves to the kingdom's master, the man built from lack-of-starlight, the god of the dead. If he were to take her away from the center of her own center—if he were to unwrite her, swiftly as a bad poem—
The story goes: The god of death eats some part of Anyechka. A tiny thing, an almost imperceptible thing, but Odile notices it when Anyechka slips back into the attic many hours later, and Odile notices it the next day, and the next and the next, when Anyechka is quiet and distant and dulled as an old knife. Once Odile thinks she sees a seam of pink scar tissue elbowing out from the hem of Anyechka's dress. At night Anyechka sleeps facing away from Odile, her back rigid, unreadable. So many paragraphs in an unknown language. So much Odile cannot parse.
What did he eat? Her soul, like a little bird between his teeth? Her will, that led her to sacrifice herself for her friend's sake? Something else, something greater? Odile frets at the problem until it frays into silk noil. She takes to leaving the attic in the shape of an animal, returning with her beak or her claws or her hollow cheeks full of snail-shells, acorns, bright leaves, rose petals, smooth stones, river-reeds, owl-pellets, polished bones, and lays them all at Anyechka's feet, lays them at Anyechka's feet like gold, like a mirror, like a forest of needles, saying moth-voiced bird-voiced please, please. Anyechka steps over every offering. Behind her crystal spectacles her eyes are dull, cast always at some distant horizon.
Odile sits in the window-seat. Odile mopes over her wash bucket. Odile ties Anyechka's shoelaces together, grim little hobgoblin, hoping to irritate her into something, something. Anyechka only picks her laces apart with delirious apathy. Beyond the manor the dead till their fields, harvest their apples, sing their songs to the root-split sky.
Where did Odile come from? What brought her here? What keeps her here, washing the manor's floors, scrubbing the manor's silver, polishing mirrors that never reflect anything but moonlight and dust? She imagines setting out into the kingdom with only her pack and her good brown shoes, but every imaginary journey feels raw, incomplete. Who will she point to when she sees a spindle-legged spider dancing on its web at dawn? Who will she sing to as she dips her feet in the black river of the dead? Who will sleep beside her, warm and real, their dreams twining together like smoke?
Now and then the lord of the manor calls for Anyechka to come and sit with him in the library. Now and then Odile filters herself down into the shape of an iridescent beetle or a hard-headed woodlouse and creeps in between the floorboards to watch, to listen. The lord of the manor lounges on the velvet couch, surrounded by his six black hounds; Anyechka kneeling at his feet, her head tipped downwards. Now and then the god of death sits quietly, watching the fire. Now and then he speaks.
Once upon a time, says Death, there was a king whose kingdom stretched from the furthest mountains to the distant black sea, and in which lived all manner of dead: man and beast, infants and adults, plants long extinct from the world above, prehistoric rhizomes lifting their curious bulbs from the earth in congregations like so many fields of wheat, or poppies. The king ate death after death after death until each one tasted the same, until nothing assuaged his hunger. No bloodshed, no tragedy, no heroism, no grief. Do you hear me?
Yes, says the girl with the cloud of red hair, her gaze fixed on nothing.
Death says: You do not know what it is like, to eat and eat and always hunger. You do not know what it is like, to look out at your kingdom and see only shadows. You do not understand.
I do not, says the girl.
Once upon a time, Death says, someone died. This was not revolutionary; no great bells rang, not for an event as commonplace as that. The king did not even send more than a fragment of himself to eat the death that had occurred in the world above. But when he arrived, he found an odd thing, an unprecedented thing: a girl with her hands clawed full of mud, screaming at him. At him, at him, her eyes meeting his eyes, her voice in his ear. Do you know what she said?
No, says the girl.
She said: Take me. She said: I give myself freely. She said: Anything, anything.
The girl does not speak. Her fingernails trail down the floorboards.
The king knew, says Death, that he had found something exceptional. That he had found something; love beyond life, faith beyond faith, a heart beating with sentiment more than sentiment, truth enough to be wordless; more, more, more, more, more than the gray stone, the grayest gray kingdom. What did he do?
What did he do? the girl whispers.
He ate her heart, says Death. He plucked it out and he ate it. How else could he taste it, the sweet blood in her chest? How else could he hold it in his own jaws? How else could he hold it, hold it? How else could he know?
Down by the hearth, shivering her maxillae together, Odile begins to formulate a plan.
Girl is death in her own right. Girl is a hall of mirrors. Girl is a star caught on the points of its particular brilliance, falling.
Odile dresses herself in spiderwebs. She dresses herself in silk, in sewn leaves, in moss woven to linen, in glossy black feathers. Odile braids her hair with strands of saltmarsh rushes. She laces her good brown shoes, and brushes the palm of her hand down Anyechka's cold shoulder, and walks herself through the manor to the library door.
The door swings open before she has a chance to knock. Robbed of her dramatic entrance, Odile stares up at the lord of the manor, his cragged, starswept face. "Odile," he says. In his mouth her name turns into a river, endless and black. "What brings you here to my door, little moth?"
"I have come to bargain," says Odile.
Death nods gravely and steps aside to let her in, though now the room he stands in is not the library at all, it is the throne room limned in red and black, and now he is taller, less substantive, his skull a shadow split by curving tendrils of dark like ivy vines questing for sunlight, his eyes—a house with many windows, a mouth ever open, his tread soundless on the throne room floor, his throne rough-hewn from a vast slab of black spinel. "Bargain," says the king of the dead. Evoking sibilance where there is none. Casting all words into obscurity. "What do you wish to bargain for?"
Odile straightens. "Anyechka's heart," she says.
An inscrutable silence. Death tips his head. "You believe," he murmurs, "you have a claim?"
She steels herself not to shudder. "I do."
"Then make it."
Inside Odile's own chest, her heart is a floundering thing. She stills it like a bird. "This kingdom, and everyone in it, is your right," she says. "Because you know us, just like—like stories you have read. Like well-known stories, told from memory. Isn't that true? The Kingdom of Death is you and we live inside you and that is the way you know us, hold us."
Sitting on his throne of black crystal, the lord of the manor is a rent in the threads of the world. "Go on."
"You ate Anyechka's heart," she says.
"You made her your pet. You preen and cosset her."
"Odile."
"You hunger for her," Odile cries out. "Not her, but for what she did. For that one final act, for her sacrifice. You—it isn't love, but it if were, it—you love her for the best thing she did; for the most noble thing she did."
The god of the dead leans forward. Streaking the air around him with absence, drawing Odile closer, closer. Humming, roaring. "And if I do?" he says, gently. "If that is true?"
"You love her for the best thing she did," says Odile, triumphant now, breathless with it. "What she stands for, the emblem of her. I love her for what she is. For—stubbornness and viciousness and how she kicks the covers off me at night and how she slops wash water on my feet and how she calls me names sometimes like, like bratbird, like sillymoth, how she frets over her hair and always leaves streaks in the glass when she polishes it and then blames me—I know her, I know her, if she lives in anyone she lives inside me, do you see? You ate her heart but it was not your right to do so, you see only a fraction of her. You do not own her, you never could."
Death twists one hand through the air and the space between them collapses on itself, brings Odile to his feet. He presses a finger to her chin, tilts it up so he can look her in the eyes. It is not unlike being thoroughly examined by a supernova, or a feral lion, or a hurricane. After a moment—a harrowing, billowing moment—the king of the dead laughs. Effortlessly, he unseams himself; like an ear of corn shucking its own husk, or like a flower blossoming backwards from the knot of its non-existence. Inside: a ribcage made of glimmering celestite, calcified black sinter, speleothems in the shapes of teardrops, snakes, and sigils. Perched on the stony outcroppings, a dozen—a dozen dozen—gold-backed spiders. Death reaches for one; it steps readily onto his finger. "Mad little moth," he says, though he says it fondly. "Lovely magnoliophyta. Sweet seedling."
Warmth and light. The kindness of familiarity. Hush, says Odile softly, hush, hush. Anyechka's ribcage open as a flower. The gold-patterned spider nestles into her red chest cavity. Oh, says Anyechka, her eyes full of tears. Her hands on Odile's hands, her hands on Odile's face. Both crying. Both laughing. Both reaching for one another. A sound not dissimilar to singing, to music, somewhere in the maze of the manor's halls.
There are two girls. There are two birds, one white, one black. There is the Kingdom of Death.
Becca De La Rosa was born in Ithaca, NY, though she has lived most of her life in Ireland. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including several best-of compilations. With her wife, she co-created and co-writes the acclaimed horror podcast Mabel (mabelpodcast.com). For more information, visit Becca online at www.beccadlr.com.
Published October 2018, Shimmer #45, 4000 words
Other Dead Things:
Raise-the-Dead Cobbler, by Andrea Corbin
The Creeping Influences, by Sonya Taaffe
Another Beginning, by Michael McGlade
girlshauntedlove
Bleeding Through the Shadows, by David Rees-Thomas
The store has been here for a hundred years. It's outlived the coal mines, the dead of world wars, the indecencies of Thatcher, the indiscriminate violence of South Wales valleys youth.
Every day I get up on creaking, clicking knees, joints and muscles stiff and singing with strange and tiny pains. I open the shop and take in the deliveries, the milk, the eggs, the boxes, the tins, and the wrapped meat and cheese. I used to sit on the back step, have a cigarette, and stare across our thin, long village at the mountains standing on either side of the narrow valley, firm reminders of the farms and of the coal mines. The deadly deposits of slag and dust are all grown over now, lush and green but human-shaped.
We are planted firmly here. I don't care about the supermarkets, hypermarkets, and all the American-style malls. This is a corner shop, and we stay on the corner.
It gets harder though, each day more of a trial on my body, and the village and the valleys evolve. I walk home, and though the shopping mall near the train station is as shiny as TV, I also see an old painted sign on the side of the first house in a terrace on Lansbury Street, bleeding into the newness, as if seeking to reassert itself. Drink Coldaway for cough relief, it says, and I stop, stolen from the strangeness of the present that has become my every day, and I am back in shorts, running up and down the dusty streets of the sixties, the air brisk, dirty with coal soot and grime.
My store has a tinkling bell above the door. Sometimes I find it irritating, but I fear its silence more.
It rings and I look up. A man enters, perhaps my age, perhaps older. He ignores two young mothers who are checking the dates on the milk cartons, and comes straight to the counter. He has a haggard face, one where the jowls drip, the skin hanging loose around the well-outlined skull, eyes that sink back into his bones.
"Hello Jonesy," he says, his voice soft, cracking, but with the unmistakable rasp and thunder of the Rhondda valleys. "It's been fifty years. We need to talk."
The high street is one long road that starts at an arbitrary signpost marking the division between two villages, Cwm Fach, which is higher up the valley, and our village, Cwm Fawr. The signpost, with the two signs back to back, is placed between two terraced houses so the border is marked by old dark stones and brickwork. The snaking road is nothing but terraced houses for a hundred meters, but then it transforms into a few shops and a bus stop, and the road widens a little near my shop to accommodate a small square and a cenotaph commemorating the war dead.
I close the store at five every day. I don't stay open late, though people say I should; perhaps if I were twenty years younger I would, but not now. The outside air smells of the peat marshes beyond the town, snug against the base of the mountains, dotted with allotments and even older men bent over vegetable patches, or standing, staring up at the dark green slopes, a haze of cold-air cigarette smoke swirling about their heads, slow to dissipate. This is the smell of my childhood: the dirt, the sucking bogs that grabbed your boots that stank of shit and rot.
Not a stench I've experienced in years. An old Morris Minor, maybe a 1965 model, rounds the cenotaph and disappears down the A4058, leading to Pontypridd then on to Cardiff.
I walk faster than usual, eager to get home, eager to close the door to the world I've known for so long.
I also live in a terraced stone house, for there is little else in this valley. The walls and the furniture are drab, the colors faded, the wood chipped, and a subtle and pervasive smell of damp and old cooking clings to everything. I head upstairs, to the room I slept in as a child, the room I still sleep in, and pull a box off the top of the wardrobe. I rummage through a few old photo albums until I find a piece of folded card, and inside this a newspaper cutting.
It's a photograph of me, with Idris and Gwilym and Mair. Local kids. I fold it back into the card, and leave it on the bed, my fingers tracing delicate circles on the aging paper.
None of it is true, just like none of what we see in the village is true, either. It's all just a concrete stain on the natural world. In a big city it's much harder to see the truth in this, but here, in this narrow strip of a village, only three streets wide, and two of them one-way streets, with the wild and terrifying darkness of the land sliding down steeply to a point on both sides, it's impossible to not see the truth.
There are days where I see the past of the village sneaking through these new shiny surfaces, and even if it's not the natural truth, it's clear that the old town is not dead.
The doorbell rings, and I head down, considering ignoring it, but I open the door, and he's there again, Idris with his droopy face, and his unslept eyes.
"Sorry, Jonesy, but we really do need to talk."
I stand aside, and let him in.
Idris sits on a sofa that has lain neglected for years. It's old, and dust rises as the thin man positions himself with a halting grace. The swirling patterns of the particles hanging in the thin shafts of weak sunlight seem like the concept of beauty from someone who has never really considered beauty.
The room is quiet in that manner when the daytime life of those who don't work halts for a moment and there is the sudden terror and realization of existence.
"I haven't slept well for fifty years," says Idris, and he looks at me as if he's asking me the question that would have led to his statement.
The walls close in and I shift from standing awkwardly by the door to sitting in my usual armchair. It's raining outside, the sky is gray, it's always the same here, and soon the sheet of gray rain, and the banks of heavy gray cloud merge with the dead remnants of the coal industry.
"I think I need to do something, Jonesy, I think I need to talk to the police, tell them what happened." He scratches his palm with long yellowed fingernails gone brittle and chipped over the years, and this irritates me more than his wish to talk to the police.
I breathe, my throat drying, each breath shallow and rapid. "Can I get you a cup of tea?"
I stand and walk toward the door, and Idris also stands, his hands clasped behind his back as he hobbles to the window. He pulls aside the net curtains with two long, thin fingers and stares out at the terraced street, but he doesn't answer.
I pause by the door, my walking stick close to hand, and I look at it with violence surging in my mind as I speak.
"I don't think that's a good idea, Idris, it was all so long ago. We just need to keep ourselves together." My hand wraps around the smooth, well-molded handle, and I begin to heft it into the air, and in my mind I've already taken one, two, three strides toward him, the stick raised, power in my arms as I swing and bring it cracking down on his skull.
But he turns, and my hand springs back to my side, hanging loose and alien as he sits again without looking up.
"Come on," I say, "let's forget about the tea, how about we go to the pub instead?"
We leave the house, and head up the high street to the Griffin Arms, my stick tapping on the uneven paving stones, Idris walking in step, still scratching his palm.
I see another old sign on the side of an end house in a terrace—this one's for a local baker that went out of business twenty years ago—and in the window of a charity shop is an old bicycle, similar to the one I used to ride as a child.
I tap my stick a little faster as we near the pub.
The pub is too bright, the furniture too old, and the patrons are all men, old and young, some playing darts, some at tables by themselves staring into nothing. We sit at a booth with two benches facing each other, high-backed, private, and quiet.
I order two bottles of stout, and as the barman passes them across the beer-soaked bar without a word, his phone beeps on the counter and lights up. He picks it up then leans back, his finger scrolling across the screen. It seems like an alien act in a pub as old and crumbling as this one. I've seen newer pubs with replicated old-world charm, but this is old in a twentieth-century South Wales kind of way, and there is nothing beautiful about it.
We face each other in the booth, sipping at the stout. I break the silence.
"We can't go to the police. What would be the point?"
I lean in, lowering my voice to a whisper. "It was a bloody accident."
Idris stares, and I feel him working inside my head, trying to ascertain whether I believe my own words. He finally reminds me of his truth.
"You say it was an accident, and I think you may even believe it, but you didn't have your foot on his head, you didn't hold it there, that boy's thin hair brushing against your foot in the water, the bone of his skull sharp and heavy, and you didn't press harder as he struggled to get free. I sleep every night with not just this image in my mind, but I can feel the bump, I can taste the blood and the dank dead peat in the pond water as I bite through my own lip to mask the rising terror."
I reach for his arm, urging him with my eyes to keep his voice down. "But we've managed this long, we've lived without saying anything…" I pause, and wait until he looks at me. "And it was an accident, it really was, you didn't mean to-"
Idris nearly knocks the bottle of stout over, and it wobble for a precarious second before righting itself. "I didn't? I?"
I let go of his arm, and sit back. "I'm sorry."
"We did it, Jonesy, not just me." Idris stands and leaves, and all I can hear is music, the strange sounds of the Rolling Stones, or maybe The Who, on the jukebox, and I trace my finger across the words on a beermat for a beer that hasn't been brewed in years.
I resolve to do something about Idris.
I arrange to meet with him the next day. I do not want to act with haste in his regard, but I have to do something. Some might look through the windows of my life and consider that it isn't actually much of a life anyway, that there is no hope, no real dream left to conquer, and if I look closely I can see that it was always this way, at least since that day.
I decided that the old station would be a good place to meet; it's quiet, there's still a few old benches from when it used to be a working railway, and we can talk in peace. And in truth, it's also near enough the river that when I bludgeon him with my stick, I will bundle him in to the fast flowing torrent, and he'll surface somewhere close to Ponty, far enough downstream that no one will ever know. How sure am I? Sure enough that though I've considered what could go wrong, I've dismissed it.
The streets of my past bleed through the modern shop fronts, and the new one-way system, and the smoothed hybrid cars. Dust and exhausted brickwork made new again, buildings like The Roxy cinema, the Double Diamond nightclub where Tom Jones plied his trade and the Sex Pistols once played on a rainy Sunday while the village prayed for our salvation, shops that sell tools and electronics made obsolete by the modern, all of it like a shroud for a town, like a stain upon the bleeding dark green and frigid waters of the Welsh valleys.
I sit on one of the benches, initials and cruder words carved into the rotting wood, but Idris does not come. Further up the mountainside from here, on a wide stretch of flat ground on the other side of the railway tracks, is the pond.
It tugs at me, and whether it's just curiosity or something more mysterious, I can't tell. I haven't been there since that day.
Perhaps Idris is there now. Perhaps he's trying to decide. Or perhaps he's stepped into the water, letting the frigid death smell of the peat and murk beneath engulf his body. Perhaps the boy we killed is pulling him in to the depths as I sit and wait.
I head to the pond, stumbling over the old railway line, thick with weeds and empty rusting beer cans, across fields thick with thistles, and over gates that lead to the mountain beyond.
I want to see the place, I want to see what atonement might look like, how it could begin; I want to sense the rhythms of the pond and the harshness of the dead marshes again. I draw up the image of the frozen water, how I will dip my toes, then my feet, and then my body, how I will immerse myself into the frigid waters.
And perhaps I will find Idris later, either at the pond, or if not there then maybe he will try to contact me again, and not go to the police.
If he does, if he contacts me, then I'll strike him with my stick, I'll lay him to rest wherever he falls, though I'll aim for the river still.
I push brambles from my face with the stick, and as I walk it gets steeper and the sweat trickles down my leathery face, the sun reflecting off distant metal surfaces in the village below, off cars, off windows, off the life of the town.
I can't wait for him. I will track him down when I return, I'll find where he's staying, I'll wait outside the police station, waylay him, drag him into a back alley. The thoughts churn in my mind as I visualize his aged, defined skull cracking and splitting apart, the blood, the slackness of his face once I strike.
I reach the pond. A thin crust of transparent ice has formed around the edge where the sun has slipped away, and the water is as dark as I remember, waving fronds of long grass wafting in the shallows. A cloud passes overhead and the whole scene becomes like the night.
In there lay the body of Stephen Griffiths for three days before the police found him; they needed to get the divers out, a team of people who from afar just looked as though they were milling about, waiting for something to happen.
Idris and I watched them working, holding our thoughts until the moment they came out with Stephen in their arms.
And then we waited for them to knock on our doors, for the inevitable.
But it never came.
And I suppose Idris has still been waiting all these years.
And, perhaps, so have I.
I stand at the edge of the pond a little longer, as the afternoon turns to the dusk haze of evening. The streetlights flicker on in the village below, a bus toots an old horn, and the images of the past bleed through, on the other side of the valley it even looks as though one of the mines has sprung back to life, and I think I can see a procession of miners and the lights of the shift change.
But I know deep in my mind that none of this can be true, this is just the manifestation of the waiting, of the dead and dying past, the spirit left in old physical structures, in buried posters, in forgotten road markers, bricks, stones, and the flaking paintwork. This is not the same old of the castles and the protected ancients, all tarted up to woo the tourists, this is the past of my once reality, and it still lives.
I head back into town, the nighttime air cooling, my breath ranging out before me in great clouds.
I reach the old train line where I had sat on the bench waiting for Idris. Further down the tracks is an old bridge which is no longer used. When we were children, there was a great wrought-iron sign, cracked across the middle, that proclaimed that the bridge belonged to the Great Western Railway, and that it was built in 1885. This was one of our marker stones, one of our borders, the land beyond became foreign, full of new and wild and terrifying forest and promises.
I stand on the old tracks and watch as a host of fire engines and ambulances converge on the spot, followed a minute later by police cars. I wander down the tracks, much like we did in the past, except that the stick I carry today, I carry most days, it's not one that I'll throw away, unless I have a chance to use it on Idris.
When I get closer to the bridge, it's clear that I'll never use it on Idris. They hoist his body down and I continue to stare at his drooping face even as the police form a line and push me back.
I go home.
The next day, I open the store as usual, except that all the thoughts, all the memories, all the adrenaline-pumping, heart-abating images and smells and the feeling of rough feet on rough feet as we push against Stephen's hard knobbly skull come flooding back at every second. And though I didn't place my feet upon the boy's head I can feel it, I am there, in the pond at every waking moment.
The boy, Stephen, stands in the shop, just a pair of bathers on, tight against his skinny, pale body; his hair is soaked, and drips all over the floor, the water running in thin trickles down his spine, down his legs, and he's cold, his teeth chattering, his arms folded across his chest.
He's there, next to Mrs. Pritchard, who used to run the Sunday school; and Mrs. Evans, who left town in a hurry with rumors of dead babies, affairs, and thievery in her wake; and Mr. Cartwright, who lost his job at the school. Bleeding through the shadows, I see Idris.
Stephen is there all day, and though I close my eyes, and sit, feeling the tiredness in my legs, the sore muscles, the aching bones, I know that when I look again, he'll still be there, not looking at me, but scared, oh so scared, looking for his mother, calling for her, never to be found.
David Rees-Thomas is originally from Wales, and now lives in Japan. He is a first reader at F&SF, and has an Instagram page @littlepoo.
Published July 2018, Shimmer #44, 3300 words
Extinctions, by Lina Rather
ghostshaunted
The Passenger, by Emily Lundgren
I try to take a picture of the eerie. The power's out, so I'm like, okay, standing outside the Pump n' Stuff, looking at the gas pumps. My last customer was twenty minutes ago. Down the street by the McDonald's, the black veiny power lines seizure under the blinking traffic lights. I listen to the curdles of wind. There's no one around. No one at the Kum & Go across the way. No one in the dirt parking lot outside Toby's bar. Just cars rumbling along on the I-29 overpass.
Eerie.
But the picture I take is just a spread of grainy nothingness, boring, and I sit on a milk crate, and I mope: so much for the camera on the new LG EnV, sigh sigh sigh. But then at least it's got the flip-out keyboard, at least I don't have to look slow and stupid texting Wig anymore.
He'll be here soon. I just ended my shift and he's the early type.
My palms start to sweat. This is it, Kara. Even though he hasn't been texting back since Friday after our quasi-date at Taco John's, and even though he didn't show up yesterday like usual to share a joint during break and make up jokes about all the customers. Still. He'll be here. Because it's finally happened. Myspace post and everything.
Miranda and Ludwig broke up.
There's a kid working McDonald's that goes out by the dumpster to try lighting a smoke. He cups his hands, I can see the sliver of flame—then it's gone, snuffed by the wind. There's the customers, all leaving. The street bathed in green traffic light. Then gold. Then red. Leaves whirling from ditches. There's an honest-to-god-no-shit tumbleweed going see you later, dude.
That's when I get the text.
Not from Wig, but from her. Miranda.
This is Miranda feldman, the text reads, like she forgot she gave me her number senior year of high school as I signed her yearbook. Have u seen wig?
Then there's a car. This real shitty ass car. This crappy ass two-door, green Cavalier. The same one that's picked me up after work every Tuesday since August. It runs red. Pulls up on a slam of brakes.
I can see the shadow of him inside.
The door opens. I pocket my phone and climb in.
Here's the thing about Miranda. From high school. From math. I try not to think about her more than I think about Wig. But they're sort of hand in hand sometimes. Especially because she's with this other guy now and sometimes, like yesterday, I go creeping to the public library just to look at stuff like Miranda's Myspace page. There was a picture. Black and white. The two of them. Miranda and this other guy. This other-Wig. This guy with this whole swooped-bang look and dyed black hair. This Gerard Way look. But Wig can't even do that style because Wig's got a widow's peak.
I swallow, anxious, because I figure how Wig must be feeling. Right now. Why he hasn't been answering my texts since after our Friday sort-of-date. Thanks to my local library I know they broke up on Facebook and Myspace sometime around Saturday afternoon. So here he is. Right here, right now, all mine. Ready for an official date, maybe, where I'll finally, actually get laid. Except something is wrong. Wig looks um. He's gone all pale. More than usual. He's holding onto the steering wheel sort of like if he lets go he'll throw up. He runs another red.
Main street's nothing but traffic lights. Tick, tick, eerie.
"Hey—um, how are you feeling, are you okay?" I say. I try to play it all casual. Last week he didn't talk much, but that's normal and he looked okay. Hawkish hair, dyed this sick color. Dark green so it does look a convincing black in the dark. By sick I meant sick. That kind of sick. But the rest of him does look like the other kind of sick when we pass yellow. The um kind. "Wig," I say. I joke, "are you high?"
He rubs his eyes. "Fuck," I think he says. His eyes are bloodshot. It's hard to tell. He always smells weird. Not like pot, not all the time, but other stuff, too. Like incense sticks, all cinnamon, daydream, lavender. I always avoided him, in school. I knew him back then. He was in the same class as me. The same class as Miranda. Sometimes I wonder which one of us changed the most. I guess you don't grow much, only two-ish years out. He'd show up to chem and paint his nails with Sharpie. It was like. Very strange.
He turns up the music. He's listening to uh, some real loud ass shit. Per usual, I guess.
"I'm having a thought," I say. But he doesn't hear me. Good. I take a drink of my Joose.
Wig flips his phone open. His very own EnV, only the green color's worn off and there's duct tape. I try to side-eye for the reflection of his screen on the glass of his window while he texts. Balancing the wheel with his knee. I'm not spying. But I'm trying to. Just when I think I catch something he chucks it. His phone. Into the cup holder. Picks up the PBR from the holder next to it. He rubs his nose and takes a drink. I've never seen him drink in his car before.
I guess I should try to make small talk. Maybe ask if he's going to do a spell tonight, at the beach. Even though the wind is bad. But I kind of… Shit. Don't want to ruin the surprise. Just the two of us. In his car. The music. The town silent. Dark. Every house window reflecting Wig's headlights back at us. Reverse-deers. Even though I'm sort of getting anxious about how he's drinking the PBR at the wheel. Which. I mean. It isn't really like him. We pass Duke's, my trailer court. The little square of the community college. Wig runs another light. My eyes close.
This guy shreds. On his vocals. The bubble of guitar. I can't shake this little feeling…
Wig and I talk about music all the time. I grew up on my dad and mom's stuff. But he's more into the alternative trends. When we first started hanging out this past summer, I was like: "I'm into your music but." And he was like: "But?" And I was like, casual: "But they're sort of like. Really shitty towards girls?" In reality. This was a thing my English teacher said senior year before we graduated. Posed the question. Sort of about, like, all rock n' roll music ever. But particularly, Wig's kind. The emotional kind. Everyone in class was like: bullshit! But I tried it out on Wig to see what he'd say. Maybe it's sad but it's the truth: I'd like him to think I'm smart.
I guess I shouldn't care stealing what the teacher said. Because it worked. He was like: "Maybe. I don't know. So what's your stuff about?" I shrugged. Then I made him a CD. With that one Neil Young song about Charles Manson. That Black Sabbath one about doing heroin and Vietnam veterans. Then that one by Iggy Pop that's about David Bowie. It made him think. I think? He liked the CD. I think. But then I see it on the messy floor of his car. Scattered with the rest. My sloppy sharpie: Kara's. Scratched to shit by my Converse. I glance at him.
I'm not so sure I'm right—that my English teacher was right. I mean, about his music. To be fair. If I'm honest and all. I've been listening to it a lot more lately and mostly it seems like these screaming guys are all dating the wrong girls. Or it's about hate-loving their dads.
My phone vibrates. I jump-scare, Jesus. Slide it open. It's Miranda. Fucking Miranda.
Kara please, it reads, this is important …r u with him ?
I want to tell her to fuck off, but I don't have the guts.
I take the biggest. Fucking. Drink. From my Joose. I wipe my mouth with my sleeve. My heart is like: Do I bring it up? The breakup? What will he say? It's stupid, I think. He was ever even into her, I mean. Miranda. From math. In math, freshman year of high school, she told him to slit his wrists. Kids laughed. Being teenagers, at the time, we were into that. The idea of death, I guess. For sure. There was this whole mood, this whatever about it, go Plath yourself, etc. But. Miranda's hot shit. Really, I mean. If I were gay. Long legs, long neck, this real beautiful jawline. No acne. She could've been on America's Next Top Model. Everyone thought so.
What I'm trying to say is, I'd forgive her too, for bullying me, if I were Wig. If she just apologized one day out of the blue after we both got into the same college. If she were going to live on the same campus I'd be living on for four years and I was overwhelmed about living in a place like the Twin Cities. Miranda's ACT was 30, I heard. I even heard she cried about it.
For comparison, I didn't even take the ACT.
Looking at Wig now, I don't know what he's thinking. His slouch. He keeps fidgeting with his phone. The PBR's tab. He's even singing. Kind of, under his breath. Yeah, you were right about me… and we're on the edge of town, now. Past the Cherry Street Grille, past the dentist whose daughter was featured on 16 and Pregnant. Past the empty lot by the evangelical church. The town's sign: Home of the Tanagers. I'm having a thought. I want to say… I'm thinking. No. I'm thinking just let him be. For now, just let him be. Deal with it all at the beach.
I look down, my phone vibrates, Miranda: Kara and wig hey this isn't fucking funny ok I no about ur beach thing—I fiddle with the buttons, figure how to get my phone to stop vibrating.
I guess he told her. I wonder how much he used to talk about me. What he said. I think about responding. I think about saying to Miranda: yeah so if you know you should leave us the fuck alone, and I would spell out all my yous because I actually care about language. I guess. I even type it out. Just to try out my keyboard, but then I'm like. No, fuck her. Fuck Miranda.
Sometimes I forget how Wig got into Macalaster after high school. How he spent two whole years at a private college, taking classes like qualitative literature. For real. He and Miranda had been a thing since the summer before they left for college. I knew this from web sleuthing, even though I didn't talk to either of them, ever. Facebook, LiveJournal, Myspace trifecta. Miranda, rebel: look at my hot boyfriend, into lighting black candles and smoking pot and really into the Used, into Bright Eyes, The White Stripes, Linkin Park, also, hi, he studies philosophy at Macalaster, full ride. Wig, Wig. Ludwig.
But then he didn't go back this Fall.
He spent more time hanging out at the Pump n' Stuff gas station.
Buying gum and beer and smokes.
In other words, now he's a college dropout.
This is weird, maybe, but at first I was mad at him. I wanted to say. Why are you staying here? In town? This town? You can't be here! I heard what you were given. Smarts, tuition. Do you know what you've done, Wig? Do you? But I shudder just thinking about saying those things. I'm not his fucking mom. I get this feeling. Keep getting this feeling. Like he knows. Like knowing has fucked him up. Every day. Who is Wig, I mean, if he isn't the college type?
Then out back, by the dumpsters. Splitting a joint on break a few weeks ago, he said: "I'm having a thought." That's our thing. I'm having a thought. Like it's beamed down to us by aliens. I'm having a thought. This thought. He went: "Get this. Senior year. Back before I left for college, I did one of my mom's spells. This love thing. I didn't really believe in it, Kara. I don't think I believe in anything, to be honest. But. You know those three wishes fairy tales…when all your wishes go wrong? How payback's a real bitch, if you're stupid about what you wished for? And everyone is, you know… Everyone's always super fucking stupid…" He shook his head.
I just nodded. I didn't say what I guessed or that he should chill out, you know. There are logical explanations as to why a popular supermodel like Miranda would date a scrawny emo kid like him. For instance. I would've said to him: your SAT/ACT scores were through the roof, I would've reminded him, and you grew up below the poverty line so you got all those scholarships. Then, there were his entry essays, probably. A+'s. How he did policy debate for the debate team. How they usually choose two kids a year from our town. So the love thing. I mean. They were accepted to the same college. It wasn't a wish. It was because they were smart.
Maybe, too, his Myspace. He started it up his senior year. Miranda had one, too. He hung out with the local bands. 2k friends. Pictures of altars. Tapestries. He had a good eye. Tarot readings. Maybe I did one of his spells. Maybe two. Maybe a love thing. I didn't tell him: pretty sure Miranda did, too, Wig. Pretty sure you had all of us doing black magic in our closets summer after senior year. Because no one knew what the fuck they were doing with their lives.
But he dropped it. The Myspace, just last month. The same time he dropped Macalaster.
Then it was all: hi, Kara, what's up? At the Pump n' Stuff. More and more often. Until it was September and I realized he never went back with Miranda to the Twin Cities. They were doing a "long distance relationship" before he went back to school in the spring. I can't believe we all bought that, looking back. But then I remember this one afternoon. Out back. By the dumpster during break. I remember him going: "I don't know if she really loves me, Kara…"
"Lol," I'd said. Then he got kind of mad. I guess it was mean. But I said sorry.
So I guess he did believe in the long distance thing. For a little while.
Wig, now. In the car. He mumbles something.
Maybe Wig says, "I like you, Kara."
But the guy shredding his vocals is too loud. Be my serene… Okay. I can't tell for sure.
Still, now I'm just drowning in my sweatshirt. It's hot. Like, temperature hot.
"I like you too," I brave, sudden, into my half-finished Joose, but already feeling a little woozy, a little more daring. I say: "Hey, um, doing a spell tonight, Wig, in this wind?"
Wig and I have been doing "the beach thing" every week since August. Even when it rains, even when it's October, like now, and it's getting colder and we probably should find a better spot. Even when the power's out. Even when he doesn't answer my texts for days. It's like going to church, I guess. I mean, I don't know. Maybe it's weird, but he told me he used to do this all the time, visit the beach like this, back when he was in high school. He told me he wanted to try to like, get into it again. He has these candles and a lighter and he builds an altar out of driftwood and actually it isn't that weird. I swear. I always feel super calm afterwards. We just sit in the sand and we listen to everything around us and I try to empty my mind of getting laid, usually unsuccessfully, but I try. Afterwards, the first time he took me out here, we got drunk and went swimming fully clothed. But still nothing happened. He's so good to her, I'd thought. Miranda. At the time. I'm so good to her, I'd thought, too.
Now the song is all pitched up, and the guitars are tapping, and Wig is checking his phone.
I guess he doesn't hear me.
I look down. Miranda and her stupid texts. Jesus.
Kara im worried since friday he keeps sending me the same texts
He wont respond
Tell him kara
Tell him to leave me alone if ur with him
I'm not so warm anymore. Reading these texts. They make me freezing cold. Like the wind is rattling right through me and I'm ankle deep in mud. Wading bramble. I delete what I'd written before, about fucking off. I re-write it: why don't u leave *us* alone miranda, but then I have to try to edit the text because I forgot about how I was going to write out all my yous.
Why were we so nice to Miranda?
Fuck Miranda.
But still. I don't send my text.
Then it comes out of nowhere.
He throws it.
His phone.
Into the windshield.
It spiderwebs.
The windshield. My heart spikes up into my throat. Then he's finishing off the PBR. Crunches it up. Tosses it at my feet. With all the CDs. My CD. His CDs. The crumpled-up trash of fast food. Bags. Cups. Beer cans. His notebooks with their stupid doodles. He's shaking. Trying not to cry. I know he's upset. But I'm shaking. Too. Honest, I'm kind of scared. I want to say: what, the fuck. What, the fuck is your problem, Wig? But I don't. Because of the way he looks. About to sob. And. Actually. I've never seen a boy cry. This is mean. But I don't want to.
I look back down, into my cold hands. Into the cold light of my phone. The alerts. Going off, one after the other. Blink, blink, blink. There are so many texts, now. From Miranda. There are missed calls. I frown. The time is all wrong. They're marked from hours ago. My phone says it's near 3AM. But it can't be. I read through the messages. Each of them is like a tiny sliver. My mouth draws open, but there are no words that come out. Just a stifle. That wind and panic.
Kara he is missing that's why Im asking ok
Did u hear he is missing do u know
They can't find him Kara u should turn on the news
Kara if u guys ran off 2gether please tell his mom ok
Kara he told me about how u r into him
He keeps texting me I am having a thought
I am having a thought
Wig lights up a smoke. On Friday, on the weird night of what I considered our sort-of-date, I'd finally asked him. About the college dropout thing. I wanted to ask: will you really go back in the spring? Like you said? But I didn't. While we walked the 24-hour Taco John's drive-thru. I'd said, instead: "What happened—why did you drop out, Wig? For real, this time. It had to be better than bumming around here." I acted all casual, after ringing the window door-bell.
He'd said, shrugging: "I couldn't do it anymore. The homework. The classes. I got sick. Brain sick, I guess. Like I just. Um. I get sad all the time. Sometimes, I mean. I didn't leave my room or go to my classes. I'd sleep until dinner time. But it's okay. I'm taking care of it."
I'd just nodded. But now. I should… I think. I should turn down the music. I should talk to him. About it. All of it. These texts from Miranda. The breakup, too.
I should turn down the music. I should ask: what did you mean, Wig? What did you mean on Friday about getting sad all the time? Why does Miranda think you're missing? And mean it. But he reaches for the dial. The same time I do, and his hand moves through mine in a shutter of light-play and cold air. He reaches past. To his phone. On the dash. Spider-webbed glass. The singer croons. I am not your friend… I blink. I just saw something? Everything is all wrong.
It's dark out. Now. Real dark. Not power's out dark, but far past the traffic lights of town, dark. The stars are rolled out, the storm clouds all blown past. The trees small signposts. And I'm shivering. Bad. Teeth chattering bad. It's like all the windows are down. The wind clattering straight through us. My heart hammering like I'm running a marathon. I need to say something.
Wig turns onto the gravel road heading towards Burbank beach. High schoolers still come here on weekends to party. To have bonfires. We used to, too. No. By we I really mean, the Mirandas. I went only once. With my friend and her boyfriend. We were seventeen. Ripe for partying. For letting go and doing crazy stuff we'd regret later. But we never did. Then they left. For college. Bye, Kara. I should say something. I should say something but when I open my mouth I just gulp down a gasp of wind.
There's another car parked in the ditch off the gravel road. There aren't any stars. The trees are all creaking.
There, we sit.
For a while, in the guitars, in the car.
It smells like Joose. My BO. Like sour PBR. Like old pot smoke. But. Still. I think he might kiss me. I want to kiss him. I want to tell him I was into him, since senior year of high school. Really. He grew into himself that year. He stopped wearing those stupid sock gloves. Because of the new dress code. He got a tattoo. This skull, on his knuckle. He was smart. Too smart. But he doesn't kiss me. He shuts the car off. Power's out. If I'm honest. Now that I'm thinking about it. Now that I notice. He hasn't looked at me all night. He looks fucked up. In a trance. He finishes his smoke as I'm looking down in my sweaty palms at my phone's cold light.
There's no service. I stare at Miranda's last text until it goes dim.
Kara his mom thinks he killed himself
Then we're out. Of the car. But. Was I standing? This whole time? I feel. Like I'm splitting. Apart. I double-take, notice. The other car. The car that's parked there, in the ditch. It's our car. Wig's car. His shitty ass Cavalier. Green, two-door. The same rust spots. The same license plate. What. The Fuck. There are two of his car. How. How are there two of his car?
"Wig?" I say, finally. I step away. But he's already climbing. Through the ditch. Back turned to me. Fuck, fuck. I blink. "Wig, seriously, I'm not joking—what's going on?"
He ducks under the barbed fence. Heading for the path to the beach. I mean, it's not really a beach. But we call it a beach. It's a riverbank. The Missouri. But the sand's thick. There are sandbars. But then there are these dips. These undertows. Places where you can't touch. Then you can. You have to walk. A ways. Through this grove of trees. Down the slope. By this guy's pasture. Then you're there. Driftwood. Beer cans, smashed. Broken glass. Dog collars.
I glance over my shoulder. The car. The one we drove in. It's gone. There's a tremor. Through me. This. Absolute. Dread. My heart is. That guy's vocals. The drop beat. The pour of where you been? Like a douse of river. I am guitar, drum, bass. Ache. Whirlpool. I am running. Running after. Him. Gulping wind. Tripping. Over the scatter of branches. Of leaves. Then when we're on the beach, round the bend of trees: the sand stings. My face. The trees aren't creaking. They're moaning. I'm sort of. Scared. I think. I. I catch up. He's at the white-capping. River.
"Hey!" I say. I want. Him to. Look at me. But he. Still won't. "Wig. Please. Look," I reach for him. "At me…"
He doesn't hear? Maybe. I stop. My reach. He's undressing. His favorite button-up. With the flower-pattern. On the pocket. The dark green that matches his hair. Then his jeans. I'm standing there. Saying his name. Saying: "Wig? Wig! Ludwig…!" Maybe. It gets all wet. My voice. It gets all high-pitched, scrambled, whiny like it's through a scream of wind. He looks at me. But not at me. He looks not good. He looks more than um. He looks more than uh or huh.
He looks like a ghost.
He takes off his jeans. His legs are skinny, dark hair. He leans over. I think he might kiss me. But he doesn't. He whispers in my ear. But I don't hear words. I only hear shiver. Like dead skin like dead eyes like dead fingers like dead lips. "What?" I say, "Wig, I can't hear you!"
He pulls away. He takes off his shoes, socks. Then he holds up his phone. He texts. He waits. I'm. Really. Dizzy. I reach. I look. There.
He looks at me. He turns. He throws it. His phone. He throws it out, far. Far. Out. The streak of spider glass glow. Then gone.
"Wig—?" My voice breaks. He's sprinting. Into the water after it. His phone. I blink, watching him. Fuck. He's running. Into the water. "Wig!" I almost follow. But I stumble. My shoes weigh me stopped. Sopped. Sand stings. My eyes. They water, I blink. Over and over. He's out in the water. Moon-skin, no pull, like the water isn't even there. Like he can't even feel it anymore. Bye, Kara. He's all light, he's all mist over the water. Black water. Swimming. He's.
Then I can't watch. I can't watch, I can't watch this.
My panic cuts me into a sprint. Back, over the bank. The beach. The bend. Up the slope. I'm just. Thinking, still: I have to call. Someone. There's no service. I need service. Like connecting might make a sandbar. Might make the water glow like summertime. Bring him back.
Like he wasn't already dead. Like he didn't already do this. Days ago, maybe Friday night. After. After he held my hand. Because I'm gasping. For. Breath. Fucking. Gasping. There are no words. Just snot. Shaking. Shivers and I look down at my knees. My feet. My shoes. My knees. Bleeding. Legs on fire like I ran through thistle. Ran through ditches. My shoes, muddy. Ankle deep in it. Torn sleeve. Scratches. Knotty burrs tied up in my shoelaces. Prickling. With each. Step.
Like I ran. Like I ran the whole way here. Out of town. Miles. In the dark. In the wind.
Then. His car. His real car. Not the ghost car. Not the dream car. The whatever it was car. The only car. His shitty Cavalier. Bye, Kara. I am reeling at its handle, I'm screaming. In shock. Maybe. In denial. It's dark. Power's out. I am opening the door. It's a mess. Inside. There's beer cans. Baggies. Lavender. Daydream. Keys in the ignition. No phone. But. I'm leaning, into the passenger's seat. Hands digging up the floor. His CDs. Some split, shards, scratched. Mine. My CD. Kara's.
I am shattered. I am pinhole stars.
Anyway, he'd said, right before our quasi-date night, out behind the Pump n' Stuff. You want to get McDonalds when you're off, Kara, maybe walk over? I'd smiled, face heating up. Yeah, but no, haha, how about Taco John's, I'd suggested, there's this kid over at McDonalds, he spits in all the food. I imagined holding Wig's hand. It's a date, he'd said, like it wasn't a joke, like he actually meant it. Like we agreed, finally, that Miranda didn't deserve how good we are. Were. Then he'd grinned. He'd even paid, after I asked. About his dropping out. After he said the words brain-sick. Made a joke of paying. Like what is this, a date? We walked through the park. Then I did. Held his hand. We ate our tacos on a bench. I was full of sound.
Now. I will get in his car. I will turn the key. In the ignition. I will collapse. I will come together. I will collapse. I will riot my voice away. But.
I'm having a thought.
I am having a thought and.
I will have. More thoughts.
Infinite thoughts.
Emily Lundgren resides in southeast South Dakota with her person and their dog. Her works have previously appeared in Shimmer and Luna Station Quarterly. Emily is a recent graudate of the Northeast Ohio MFA and attended UCSD's Clarion Workshop in 2017. She is currently working to finish her first novel about necromancers in a post-apocalyptic Nebraska. Find her online at emilylundgren.com
Shimmer 44, published July 2018, 5000 words
Other Eeries:
Black Fanged Thing, by Sam Rebelein: January was a shit month. It never snowed. Sun barely came out of hiding. Instead, a death-cold rain dripped endlessly. Mist curled inwards from the fringes of the woods. It covered the town for weeks, as Christmas decorations slowly drifted back into garages and basements. Everything here, just off-road of the Connecticut wine trail, lived for the fall. Once autumn was over, people indulged complacently in the holidays. But then they sank, miserably, into the post-apocalyptic beginning of a new year. Into the rain. This was when the winter wonderland died, dumpsters filled with sodden wrapping paper, and the world turned brown and gray for what felt like an eternity. Theoretically, there was Valentine's Day to look forward to, but come on.
Now We've Lost, by Natalia Theodoridou: The war is over, we hear. We've lost. We look at each other in the dark. What does this mean? We've lost so much already. What is it we've lost now?
Blackpool, by Sarah Brooks: 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.
ghostshauntedlonginglove
What the Skeleton Detective Tells You (while you picnic), by Katherine Kendig
You've heard your local skeleton forest is vastly underrated, worth a day trip, a nice place for wedding photos and relaxing hikes. You're not much of a hiker, and not much for trends, but you're trying to spend more time outdoors. Your forearms are no tanner than your thighs, which worries you.
There are old skeletons, brittle-looking, skulls bleached by the sun and moss halfway up their shins. There are new skeletons with dark stains on their bones, like sycamores just shedding their bark. Real trees, too: big spreading elms, shady maples. Paths crispy with fallen leaves that look, at first glance, like withered skin. Soft shadows and a few nice places to picnic.
You take a closer look at the skeletons: a missing tooth, many missing teeth; hairline fracture in the ribs, massive fracture in the skull; those eye sockets, my God, you could fit pool balls in those things (and now you want to); note the restless fidgeting fingers on that one; note the flaring hipbones here, indicating a female—maybe, what do you know, you're not a skeleton expert—note the ultra-prominent jawline indicating, if not a male, at least an asshole. Ha ha. Every so often you see a hint of graffiti, a single carved initial completed before the carver got spooked. It is spooky, but not overwhelmingly. It feels peaceful, actually, all that stillness.
Except yes, you back up a little, that one, there—the fidgeter. You're still not a skeleton expert but you're pretty sure the dead don't fidget; you're pretty damn sure, because if they could move around on their own, there's no way you'd be here nosing around and staring into their eye sockets.
You look more closely. Keep calm. Maybe it's the wind? Maybe it's a bug, crawling around, or—
"Hello," says the skeleton.
Don't faint. Don't faint. Don't—
The worst thing for Jamie is not wearing her hat. As a skeleton detective, the odds are stacked against her, but the hat always makes her feel more self-assured; the hat and the gloves and the trench coat, although she can't tie the belt of the trench coat without it becoming obvious that her abdomen consists of nothing but a spine.
By all rights, she should be dead. "Most skeletons," her doctor told her dryly when her condition reached its peak, "are very, very dead." But not Jamie: they call it omniossosis, which as she understands it is Latin for let's pretend science can explain this. Jamie is the twenty-ninth recorded case in history (the fortieth, if she counts references in literature) and the first to be afflicted after adolescence.
Before she was a skeleton, she was a lawyer. Only for six weeks—she had just passed the bar and moved to Chicago when she started losing weight, and she went on voluntary leave when she started losing skin. Now she's a detective. It's a job she can do mostly from home, mostly wrapped up (hat, gloves, trench coat); her doctor has a friend on the force who helped her get set up and sometimes passes tips her way. There's a lot of research involved, which law school prepared her for. There's a lot of down time, which she spends almost entirely on the internet, pretending to be other than she is and editing Wikipedia articles on anatomy. She thought about suicide at first, but thinking about the ways she couldn't kill herself horrified her so much she has since decided to live. (She doesn't question the logic; don't do it for her.)
In the skeleton forest, she is pretending to be dead. It's something she's trying for her latest case. She didn't realize she was fidgeting, although she sure was bored.
You don't swoon so much as sit down abruptly. You don't think that should count as a faint, but it's a weekday anyway (you have flexible hours) so no one is around to see you.
No one except the skeleton crouching in front of you, that is. He—she?—leans back a little, dips his—her—head as if avoiding your eyes. Now that you look a little closer you see this one is only mostly a skeleton; are those arteries? Sinews?
"Sorry," she says. She—definitely she—stands and backs away.
"Holy shit," you say.
Silence. The skeleton raises a hand toward her head, drops it, crosses her arms.
"Who are you?" you ask. Not one of the articles you've read about skeleton forests mentioned live skeletons. The state park website you looked up directions on mentioned ticks and carry-out policies and lightning safety, but definitely not live skeletons. Perhaps there are fumes in this forest—degrading bodies. Perhaps you are hallucinating.
"Um," says the skeleton. Her voice is thin, a little hollow. It sounds strange and inhuman at the moment, but if you heard it on the phone it probably wouldn't faze you. The skeleton hesitates and then walks away. After a few steps she stops and looks back at you, arms still crossed, shoulders tipped forward. Hunched.
You are still sitting in the slightly damp grass. You think about standing, but your legs assure you they're not even remotely up for that yet.
"I'm Jamie," she says. She says it so simply that for a frozen, horrified moment, you feel as if every skeleton around you, big and small, is suddenly going to wake up and start stretching and introducing themselves and complaining about the damp. Silence, while you wait for the sound of scraping bones. Silence, while you wait for cold fingers to grab you from behind.
"Jared," you say finally, when your heartbeats have proven to be the only sound for long enough. "I'm Jared," you say again, as if it weren't clear the first time, and then you say it one more time for safety, to prove you're in sound mind for the moment, at least: "My name is Jared."
"Well—" the skeleton says. "Okay. I'm going to get my hat."
Jamie doesn't solve murders or track down missing children. She usually works with husbands and wives wondering what their wives and husbands are up to. Sometimes she helps determine if a teen has a secret boyfriend or a drug addiction. Once she helped a man reclaim a stolen cello, and twice she has found birth mothers. She doesn't make much money or much of a difference in the world, but she doesn't feel the need to.
Her latest case is more interesting than usual: The target is a man named Paul Sheeri, either dead (murdered) or dead (suicide) or dead (accident) or, possibly, gone off somewhere secretly (Canada? Albany?). Her client is Paul's friend Angela—not family, not a spouse, just a friend—who, over Skype, had appeared both worried and angry about being worried, not sure if Paul's disappearance was a tragedy or another example of "his usual selfishness."
"Are the two of you a couple?" Jamie had asked gently, careful to use the present tense.
Angela had narrowed her eyes, peering at her screen. Jamie Skyped with clients in near-total darkness; she made sure they could see a hint of her hat, a hint of the perfectly ordinary room behind her. She pretended it was a problem with the camera. "We were best friends," Angela said harshly, as if Jamie had profaned their relationship. Jamie apologized. The room behind Angela was pristine, carelessly chic.
Paul's family didn't know where he was, Angela had told her. They didn't like her. They thought she was overreacting.
Paul had always liked the Montrose Skeleton Forest, Angela had told her. It was the only place he ever went without her besides the grocery store and the laundromat.
After the call Jamie looked at the facts as she saw them. The facts were these: Paul was twenty-eight years old. He lived alone, worked from home, "depended" on Angela for "literally any social activity," and had been out of contact for almost a month. (Twenty-four days.) Jamie had typed a "W" whenever she thought Angela sounded genuinely worried and a "P" when she sounded practiced; there were an equal number.
Quote: He's usually totally reliable. He's always where he's supposed to be.
Quote: He doesn't know anybody.
Jamie had typed in a heart and a question mark, whatever Angela might say about their being a couple.
"I'll call you if I find anything," Jamie had told Angela, "or on Thursday. Whichever comes first."
You've never had a conversation with a skeleton before. You don't really know where to look. The fedora helps.
In your backpack you have three Nature Valley bars and a bottle of Gatorade. You're sitting at a picnic table near a sign that reminds visitors not to leave any trash behind. There is goose shit all over the grass and you noticed that Jamie avoided it just as assiduously as you did on the walk over.
"So you were pretending to be a skeleton when I walked up?" you ask. It's a poorly phrased question.
"I was pretending to be one of those skeletons."
There aren't many questions that won't come off as rude, but luckily, Jamie is a talker; the words whistle out of her nonstop. Growing up in Benton, law school, Chicago. The way it feels to look at her own bones. Detective work. Knowing that when she does die, there will be almost no difference. She tells you about her latest case, client confidentiality be damned.
"Would you like a granola bar?" you ask automatically as you grab one for yourself.
"No," she says, and you are impressed at how little contempt is in her voice. You have never felt so awkward before, so uncouth, as if having flesh is a faux pas.
The sound of your crunching is deafening.
This is Jamie's plan: She totes a plastic trash bag out to the edge of the skeleton forest, stuffs her coat and gloves in it and gently tucks her hat in after, and stows it in some brush. Then she picks a likely spot, stands in it, and…stays. The idea is that if Paul comes she will watch him, look for clues, maybe follow him home. She is vaguely aware that this is not the most efficient plan, but it doesn't matter; being who she is, how she is, what she is, has to help with something.
It's not uncomfortable. She doesn't get muscle aches anymore; her feet don't hurt. It is, however, extremely dull. Jamie likes to think she has a disciplined mind—she went to law school, after all, and if you can make it through that—but she's naturally restless, and when she has to think about keeping still, it takes half her mind to do it.
It's clear to Jamie that love is involved with this case somehow. It's the way Angela talked about Paul—always trying to rein herself in. Jamie has a decent amount of experience with love, as much as any twenty-nine year old can hope to have. She's had boyfriends, one-night stands, unrequited crushes and unwanted admirers; she's never been (and never will be) married, but—she reasons—most of her law school friends aren't married either, according to Facebook. She's still current in the field, so to speak, for a little while longer. Angela and Paul certainly aren't married.
When she thinks of Paul, her mind goes where it always goes now with men, any man, to a fantasy of meeting him and him falling in love with her. In this case he is blind and falls in love with her voice, but his love is doomed, because she won't ever let him touch her. Not ever. At first it's nice to have company but then it gets old, his constant desire for more, and she pictures herself having to break it off with him, his devastation, his desolation. She can't help these imaginings; it's not arrogance, especially not now, when she knows exactly where things stand with herself. It's just morbid, really, like the way she sets up fake dating profiles when she's bored; the way she sends a real picture of herself when men ask, and then passes it off as a tasteless joke. Morbid like how she brushed her leg intentionally against the leg of a tall skeleton as she walked in this morning, pretended the scrape of bone was electric, ran a finger down a forearm and clicked their teeth together. It's amazing how different a kiss is, without softness.
This isn't helping. She has to think about the case.
Paul's disappearance, according to Angela, is oddly unexciting; he's not even behind on work yet because his projects are long term. No blood, no guts, no trauma— Jamie is reminded, in fact, of herself. But it's Angela Jamie keeps getting stuck on—it's the fact that Angela contacted her, and not a girlfriend or a sibling or a parent.
All day people mill about Jamie, looking at the skeletons, taking pictures, their behavior halfway between zoo-goers and museum tourists. Their voices hush at random and then cycle back up to outdoor levels; they reach out to touch cold and sun-warmed bone with just the tip of one finger, the way children touch snakes after animal trainers insist they're not slimy. They carry backpacks full of sandwiches and trail mix and bottled iced tea and take pictures quickly. The smallest skeletons get photographed the most—them, and the famous conjoined twins, a special attraction of the Montrose forest. A few pictures have Jamie in them, and it amuses her that they'll never know the difference.
It's not easy to get here: The closest parking lot is two miles away, where the regular forest hits the river. It takes a while, so most people make an afternoon of it, picnicking, speculating about who this or that skeleton might have been, reading all the informational signs around the perimeter. If Jamie listens for it she can hear the bitten-off shrieks when first-time visitors catch their first glimpse of a skull.
At sunset, when the forest closes to visitors, Jamie has seen no sign of Paul. She gives up. She goes home. She comes back the next day and fidgets.
You look at the pictures Jamie shows you: one of Paul and Angela, maybe mid-twenties, summer, relaxed, at a cookout; one of Paul in a cubicle, turning back toward the photographer half-smiling; one group picture Paul was clearly not happy to be a part of, his left arm visibly hovering an inch above the shoulder of the girl next to him rather than casually slung across it. Angela is at the other end of the group, wearing bright yellow leggings and red lipstick. She looks, quite frankly, more than a little drunk.
"No," you admit. "They don't look familiar. I mean, I don't get out a lot, so that doesn't mean anything. But I don't recognize either one of them."
"That's okay," Jamie tells you, but you still feel bad; you want to add something. Suddenly it occurs to you that maybe you can.
"Are these the only pictures she sent you?"
"Well—I'm sure you noticed—I mean probably you noticed—but these all seem like—you know, public pictures. Not personal."
Jamie looks at her phone. "Wow," she says. "You're right."
Jamie sometimes wonders if her body fell apart because it had nothing to hold on to. She was done with law school; her new job was uninspiring; her friends had scattered across America's major cities and disappeared into high-rise offices. Her mind knows that she was a fairly accomplished young woman, knows that if people became skeletons because they were unfulfilled it would be a much more widespread phenomenon. But she can't shake the feeling. It was only six months after Greg had gotten engaged to someone else, and she'd finally had to let that go; her colleagues were still intimidating strangers; her parents were retired and perpetually cruising. Jamie had felt unmoored in a way she never had before.
She's drifting into self-pity again, which doesn't happen as often as it used to; maybe it's the sheer fact of talking to another human, face to face, outside in the sunshine. She doesn't want to solve this case; she wants to eat a damn granola bar.
But she can't, of course, she can't, so she looks at Jared where he sits across from her, looking at her, not quite the way one looks at a normal person but not categorically unlike either. She is a little embarrassed she didn't think about the nature of the photos; she was so used to thinking about who Paul and Angela were that she ignored where they were.
And that changes everything, doesn't it? Now she can see that Angela and Paul only happen to be in the cookout picture together; they are not posing as friends, but as consecutive patrons of the grill. It looks like an older picture, but still—hadn't Angela said they'd been friends for years? Jamie had been so excited about the skeleton forest, about putting herself to use as more than fingers on a keyboard, hiding under a hat.
"Will you do me a favor?" Jamie asks Jared.
He looks wary and eager all at once. She feels a surge of affection for this skinny stranger who doesn't hate her, doesn't fear her. At least doesn't fear her enough to run away. (For a moment she pictures him leaning in— "Anything," he whispers, and takes her hand—but—no. She shudders at the thought of being touched, of her rough bony fingers under his pulsing ones, at the way the shrunken tendons that hug her bones would feel. She is disgusted on his behalf. She pushes all thoughts aside, all thoughts, every thought.)
"What kind of favor?" Jared asks.
You picture reconnaissance, or breaking in to someone's apartment to steal a file. You want to do these things, and kick ass at them, and at the same time know that if either of these is the favor Jamie needs, the answer is no. You aren't actually a detective or a spy. You can barely make it gracefully through your own front door; you would not make a good cat burglar.
"Will you be Paul? Just on the phone. Just for a minute. I just need an address."
She sounds nervous. It makes you feel kind of cool, and you almost grin at her rakishly, but then she tilts her head up so that the hat doesn't shadow her face and any desire to flirt dies instantly. Her skull is not quite—not only—a skull; but it's wrong. It's so wrong. You cough to hide a flash of disgust, and nod at her.
(She's used to this. She's used to this. There's no reason for this wave of self-pity; it's crashed before, flooded her before, the water damage is still visible. Waves like this ought to flow right through her now.)
"His um, his credit card company—I have the number and the last four digits of his social. You just call and confirm that his new address is entered correctly. Okay?" She stares at the table. There are tiny twigs in all the gaps between the planks. She doesn't look at Jared. There is nothing in her gaps.
"Okay. Why would it be entered incorrectly?"
She wants to scoff at that, doesn't. "It wouldn't. I just want to know if he's moved."
"Oh," Jared says. "Right."
He is clearly nervous making the call, but it comes off as distracted; either that or the employee he's talking to doesn't have the energy to flag suspicious behavior. Jamie writes down the address. She stands up.
"I'm going to go see him," she says, as if this is something she normally does. She never sees anyone; when contact is needed she hires people through Craigslist.
"Good luck," Jared says, standing also. "I should head out, too."
Jamie realizes that if they leave at the same time they will have to walk the two miles to the parking lot together, but she's had enough interaction for the day. She doesn't want him to watch her walk. She doesn't want to follow him. She doesn't want to keep thinking about who she isn't.
"Oh," she says. "Actually, I've got to look something up first. It was nice meeting you." She doesn't hold out a hand to shake, obviously, but the gesture feels distinctly missing.
"You too," Jared says, and sounds sincere. "I hope you figure it out."
He walks away. Jamie sits down and plays with her phone, giving him a head start. He never gave his last name, but she looks it up based on his college t-shirt. He's on Facebook and two online dating sites, although his profile looks dusty and half-hearted. She doesn't friend him or anything. After fifteen minutes, she leaves.
The farther you get down the trail towards your car, the deeper your sense of vertigo – after a while your steps slow to a crawl, unsure of the ground they're walking on. Was this morning real? Did all this happen? You start with the wild explanations: You were in a car crash this morning, and this is a coma dream; Jamie is a hologram; your life is The Truman Show. You have the vague impression that you can walk through solid objects now.
Eventually you reach your car, and climb in it, and turn the ignition. You make it about a quarter mile before you realize you're literally not seeing the road in front of you. You might as well just pull over.
After ten minutes of trying to suppress the new twitching in your left eye, a car passes you—a little maroon Taurus—and all you see is a hat. You're following its left turn before you've even realized you're back on the road.
Jamie knocks on the door and feels, mentally, that she is about to throw up. She has put on her gloves and buckled her trench coat; her hat is pulled low. The door opens.
"Jamie Pierce," she says, professional, holding out a business card she ordered on Vistaprint. "Private Detective."
The hallway is windowless and fairly dark; it takes Jamie a moment to realize that a woman has answered the door. "What can I do for you?" the woman asks, polite, wary. The chain is still fastened.
Jamie takes a tiny, necessary step back away from the light of the apartment. "Paul," she manages. "Is Paul here?"
The woman looks at her, or tries to; Jamie tips her head low and stares at the ground.
"Is there a problem?" the woman asks. "Who sent you?"
Jamie feels as if her bones are finally collapsing the way they always should have. She tips her head even lower, unnaturally low, petrified that she will be seen; oh, it was different in the skeleton forest—she was normal there, almost, she had numbers on her side; Jared was the oddity there, Jared was the freak. Jamie knows the woman will scream when she glimpses Jamie, will threaten to call the police; Jamie cannot bear the anticipation of the slamming door. Her back hits the wall of the hallway and she presses against it.
"Everything okay, sweetheart?" she hears from inside, a man's voice.
The woman half-turns, hands over the card.
"I'll take care of this. Just give me a minute." The sound of a kiss, the sliding of the chain, and then Paul is in the hallway with her, shutting the door behind him.
"What do you want?" Paul asks.
"What are you doing here?" Jamie counters, shooting the words out like she's been choking on them.
Paul ignores the question. "Listen, you have about ten seconds to explain yourself before I call the cops." He takes out his cell phone to ground the threat.
"Angela," Jamie whispers. She has to pull herself together; for Christ's sake, she has to pull herself together. She stands up a little straighter, tilts her head up a fraction.
"I was hired to find you," she says, more normally. She can do this. She's found him; he's clearly alive; she can leave at any time. If things get dicey. She wants answers but not that bad, not bad enough to have her mug shot in the newspaper.
Paul runs a hand through his hair. "By Angela. Jesus." He looks like he wants to punch the wall, but doesn't; he takes a deep breath instead.
"She thinks you're missing or dead." Jamie thinks she is starting to understand: Paul is missing only to Angela. He's dead only to Angela. "I'm starting to get the sense," Jamie says, trying to sound like Humphrey Bogart, "that you don't want to be found."
Paul shakes his head. "Not by her. Listen, I don't know what she told you—but we're not anything. We haven't been friends in a long time."
Jamie phrases it carefully. "She seems to worry about you."
"She doesn't fucking worry about anybody but herself. She's… Jesus. She's like a tick that won't let go."
Paul suddenly drops to a crouch, and Jamie is thankful she's wearing galoshes. He buries his face in his hands, hums a sound of frustration. After a moment he stands again.
"I'm trying to make a clean break," he tells Jamie. "I don't care what you say to her. I don't care what you tell her. But please, please don't give her this address." He flicks the business card at her and goes back inside. The chain and the deadbolt click a moment later.
You're waiting in the parking lot, trying to look normal. You're trying so hard to look normal that you almost miss her coming out; but then it's back to tailing her, left, right, left, right. She pulls into a strip mall.
You've barely parked when she's at your door, holding a closed umbrella like a weapon.
"Jared? What the hell? Why are you following me?"
Good question. You hadn't really thought about it; you'd been running on instinct, on the preservation of your sanity by proving your insanity was real. And it is, isn't it? You have to acknowledge, now, that Jamie is real, and your conversation with her was real, and she is really a detective working on a case. And with that you realize you actually care.
"I just… wanted to know how things turned out," you say. "With Paul and Angela."
She hesitates for a few seconds. The umbrella lowers slightly.
"Well," she says. "I just talked to him."
"Well, his girlfriend opened the door, first of all."
"Really? Did she—" You pause. You are sitting in your car with the window rolled down; Jamie is standing outside of it with a pointy umbrella. Your stomach rumbles.
"Hey," you say. "Actually, do you mind if I grab some lunch and we talk about this somewhere else? Maybe at East Park?"
"…Sure," Jamie says, as if she is agreeing to be shot. "Sure," she says again, a little more enthusiastically.
"Okay. Let me just run in. Do you—want anything?"
Jamie rests the tip of the umbrella on the ground. She looks like the coolest supervillain you ever saw.
"I guess I'll take a Vitamin Water," she says.
"That's all?"
"Okay," you say. "I'll be right back."
They're seated at another picnic table, this one covered in obscene permanent-marker conversations. "You'll have to help me figure out what to say to Angela," Jamie says.
"First tell me what happened!"
"I know. I'm just saying, keep that in mind."
"Got it. Does Paul have a secret love child? Is that it?" Jared leans forward, two hands on his sandwich, eyes on her.
Jamie can't smile. Smiling doesn't happen in the bones.
But all the same.
Katherine Kendig lives in Champaign, Illinois, with her husband, her novel-in-progress, and an insatiable desire for brownies. Her work has received awards from Dartmouth College and the University of Illinois and has been featured in The Cincinnati Review and on PodCastle.
4700 words, published May 2018, Shimmer 43
Dead and That's Okay
The Earth and Everything Under by K.M. Ferebee
Ellie and Jim vs. Tony "The Nose" by Eden Robins
The Cult of Death, by K.L. Pereira
hauntedlossskeleton
Gone to Earth, by Octavia Cade
He'd thought the green would keep him from dreaming of the memory of arid sterility, the red and waterless horizon.
His body was racked with chill and he hunched in his bed, trying to breathe with the rhythm of tides, to slow his heart to growing things. Yet even the warm night air of the Coromandel summer, straight from the coast and rustling through rātā trees, couldn't dispel the cold. The nightmares still came regularly, suffocating waves of homesick regret. Strange that they hadn't passed now that he was home again and anchored to the world of the living, and even stranger that they came from an adventure marking him a hero. He'd even felt heroic at the beginning, but all the bravery of heroism had come from ignorance, the assumption of a strength not yet tested because the testing was unimaginable.
An astronaut on the first manned mission to Mars! All the psychological tests he'd undergone had been for other things: socialization, conflict resolution in close quarters, the ability to cope with long-term and claustrophobic isolation. Alan had passed them all and felt himself stable enough, had never wavered either in ambition or explorer's faith.
They'd never thought, none of them, that what brought him down would be a different sort of lack.
Earthsickness, they called it. He was the worst affected of the three, but neither Paola nor Sarya had escaped it. It was nothing any of the psychologists had predicted—but how could they? There was no possible substitute for experience, and no terrestrial creature had ever been so cut off from a living environment before.
Alan was offered support, but didn't take it. "What I need is already here," he said, returned to the environment all his ancestors had adapted for. "I've just got to convince myself that I've come back to it."
The rātā, especially, had proved an anchor, its bright flowers—the red of new blood, not old iron—were in one delicate and extraordinary shape the symbol of a living planet. Beneath it, he felt his nature reasserted, felt again the relation to other living things that defined a terrestrial creature, tried to forget that small unconscious part of himself found uneasy and set to screaming in barren plains.
The summer nights were still a trial, although better than their winter counterparts, with the lingering warmth, the noise of the mosquitoes and moreporks a reminder that seeped into his dreams, woke him gasping from the memory of Mars, and grasping for connection. More and more often, he found himself barefoot, taking the dark path down to the rātā, wanting to feel the Earth beneath his feet, to hear the small sounds of night, the feel of the flowers on his palm.
"I wish I could see you," he said, but artificial light made the rātā blooms look washed out, a nightmarish cast to color that made him think he was dreaming still, and liable to wake from a horror of solitude.
It was easier to fit himself against root systems, to fold up in fetal position at the foot and wait until morning. Bare skin pressed against bark was less of a contention than that altered color, and he laid his head against branches, imagined he was hearing the pulse of sap in time with his own heartbeat because with his eyes open he saw the stars and remembered, and with them shut he couldn't see even the shadow of trees, and was in need of substitute.
Easier still, when he remembered that the dirt he crouched on was also living, in its way, and filled with organisms: bacteria, beetles, the small decomposers and recyclers of organic matter. Alan smeared himself with them, scrabbling, rolled his naked body until his nails were clogged with dirt and his body caked with it: a sedimentary creature, a biological scaffold for the microscopic. Earth to cure Earthsickness, he thought, and even the small scent of iron from torn fingertips didn't take him back to red plains and loss, but reminded him of blood cells and life.
"For me it is swimming," said Paola, "in the night, where I can see the phosphorescence of the plankton." See how it coated her skin, see how it lit the warm Caribbean waters of her home as she wallowed there.
For Sarya, it was the steep stone cliffs behind her parents' house. "When I lick them I taste lichen," she said, shrugging. "I know it is a strange way to behave." She offered no excuse. It was enough that the three of them could share in understanding. That they could use what helped without comment, if not entirely without judgement.
They were the only ones who had been to Mars, the only ones to share the experience of Earthsickness. "No one else can understand."
The trip to the Red Planet had been long, six months of growing fretfulness, close-caged in metal. Anticipation made it bearable, that and the tethering of the daily routine, but the closer the ship came to Mars, the more his anticipation soured within him. Alan had thought it was nerves, the strained culmination of childhood hopes, for how could the moment of contact live up to the weight of dreams? Was it possible there'd be an iron streak of disappointment to color the experience? It was the peak of his life's effort, that voyage, and he couldn't conceive that anything after would ever hold the same fascination for him, or the same purpose. He'd wondered, silently, what would happen to him when Mars was behind him, what shape the lack would take, but he hadn't wondered long. The tests the three of them had undergone were of a type to weed out the melancholy, the personalities prone to brooding and quiet undermining, and he'd assumed his qualms were normal ones, and shallow-rooted.
It was only when he stood upon the cold, dead planet—he was not the first to do so, but got his chance nonetheless—that he felt himself gorged on the horror of it. A quiet, still dread that lingered even amidst the exultation of the explorer. He could see the same repulsion in Sarya's eyes, could see Paola hug herself for comfort as his padded arms wrapped around his own body. They felt the awe as he did, the vast expanse of dry and cold opening up before them, and the sheer towering emptiness of the place was something to shrink from, not to fill up.
Afterwards, on Earth, they talked to each other sometimes over video link. They were the only times when Alan didn't try to hide his hands in front of other people, the ends of all his fingers raw and bloody. "Have you been biting them?" said Sarya, and Alan shook his head.
"I've been digging," he said. Tools didn't give the same satisfaction at night, at the base of the rātā. Tools were a layer between skin and soil that he couldn't tolerate. The earth was the only thing could calm him, until the sun came up and the rātā flowers anchored him back to planet. He rolled in it, gouged up soil in chunks and scrubbed himself with it, with the damp living smell of it, the pieces of snail shell and bird shit and annelid, the knowledge of bacteria.
Supplicant, his hands were soft. He bled as he worked, but the earth was soft with summer and humus and his blood didn't pool on its surface when his scrabbling broke skin. It soaked into soil—and into the roots of the rātā as well, he liked to think, a connection between them built of more than need and gratitude and common home. In the days that followed, Alan thought that the tree's blossoms grew brighter, as if in response to his nightly sacrifice. The thought made him happy. Surely only one who belonged could have such an effect?
"I always feel like I belong, when I'm in the sea," said Paola. "There's salt running through the both of us. Through everything that swims in it." Through everything that came from it, a reminder of evolution and heritage. "I take the sea in my mouth sometimes," she said. "It doesn't do to swallow too much, but there are times I can't help myself." The bad times, the ones of nightmare-waking and the remembered bite of Earthsickness.
"The bad times," said Alan. "I know." His bad times had begun to come with slicing instead of gouging, quick cuts across his fingers, across his palms, that let loose more blood than he could offer up by digging. He watched his blood disappear beneath the rātā, absorbing easily into earth. He rubbed the moist dirt into his cuts, revelling in the symbiosis between them; rolled in it and felt the rolling again as a relief. He could taste his kinship in the blood-soaked earth whenever it touched his tongue. Iron and earth, they were relatives.
It was on Mars that Alan had begun to feel homesick. Not the mild nostalgia he'd experienced in lesser travels, but a shuttered, wrenching longing that closed his throat and took his hands to shaking in misery and loss. Its depth was primeval, the severing of a second umbilicus.
It was a wretched trip, one where everything had been blasted but for yearning, with long hours spent in strained silence. None of them responded well to the queries transmitted from Earth. Those seemed to possess an unhealthy tinge, shrill and feverish, incapable of sensibility and excited, still, about what they'd seen. About where they'd been—as if Mars should have been a wonder to them yet, not a monster of sterility and no place for life. And he'd known, had always known it was that way, but until he'd stood on that hideous and barren surface he'd never really understood.
Mars was rejection all through. It didn't want them, didn't want any of them. I think it hates the living, he thought, but he didn't say it aloud because that was insane, wasn't it. A planet didn't hate anything. It couldn't help being hostile to warmth and life, it was sun-distance and thin atmosphere that kept it from an ecology of its own. Insane, but he thought of the polar regions of Earth, the dark crush of deep seas, and there was life there instead of emptiness.
A living planet, a dead one. Alan never thought the difference so disturbing it could unnerve him—not until he stood upon the dead, and stood reminded that he was not.
He came home to winter, and it felt like a thaw. He shivered through it alone in the family bach, away from anxious colleagues and prying reporters.
Still he did not feel as if he had truly returned. The Earth, ambivalent to his distress, rejected him in turn. He felt a stranger to it. The stars, which had once mesmerized him beyond all bearing, leered down upon him. Alan felt he had torn himself on them, had not returned whole. They gleamed in the frosted night, disembowelled him. He was snagged and separated: aware that as he had once cast it off, so now in some strange way his home planet had done the same to him. He imagined it rejected his touch, his traitorous touch that had yearned once for the perfection of sterility and, tainted, had brought that sterility back to a planet where sterility was anathema.
Night after night he woke, screaming at the red remembrance of void. Night after night he fled outdoors to try to reconnect with living earth. The dirt was hard and chill beneath his scrabbling fingers; he broke his nails in it. All winter it rejected him, but in spring the world seemed to shake itself, to cast off torpor and resentment. As spring mellowed into summer, and the pohutukawa and the rātā spilled color upon the coast with their bright red blossoms, Alan was comforted.
The days became easier to bear. He spent most of his days in the small hollow beneath the rātā, soaking in the dry scent of the bark, the sound of birds and insects, wrapped himself in biosphere to make up for the time when he'd gone without. It was warm and sunny there and he could feel the Martian chill seep from him—felt as if he could, perhaps, be forgiven his preference, the old dream of distance that had led him to forsake one planet, no matter how temporarily, for the cold embrace of another. But the relief was only temporary, and did not outlive the sun. Always he dreamed of the moment when, secure in the pride of his own disconnection, his padded foot had borne down upon a dead planet. It had crunched, a flat, mummified sensation that Alan could not forget, an imprint in a soil lacking the deep pulse of the Earth. Born to a living planet, how could he process such a land of lack? Even the lunar astronauts had been able to look up from absence and see the blue-green swell above them. Mars had no such comfort. By the nature of his birth Alan was wholly unsuited; and that nature, meeting vacuum, broke him down and abandoned him.
"Your hands are worse," said Sarya, lichen-mouthed, her tongue scraped raw against the Himalayan mountainsides. "Perhaps you should talk to someone."
"It's enough to talk to you." Privately, he wondered if even that was too much.
The rātā, at least, never talked back. All its communication was done in drink and color, for it bloomed longer and brighter throughout the summer than any other on the coast. "Is it because of me?" said Alan. "Are you so alive because of me?" The earth beneath drank from Alan, and the rātā from the earth, so that was a connection between them, wasn't it? Something to draw together, living things together on a living planet and it didn't matter that they were so different, because the difference in living things paled against the difference between the living and Mars, and he could only block out the dead and sterile red of that hideous landscape by the reds of blood and bloom, each of them alive in their own ways, and related.
The rātā knew nothing of Earthsickness and questions, and as the season began to turn, the tree seeded. Alan collected some of the small, wind-blown seeds, plucked them from the earth with fingers that were of a scarcely different color. He set the seeds to germinate in soil-filled trays, kept them wet with water and blood.
"I need something to look after," Alan explained to the rātā. Its flowers had faded, and he found it hard to open his palms for blood when there were no flowers to reflect the color. "I'll not let your seeds die." They were the same now, he and the rātā, and though he kept his nest at its root—the hollow shaped perfectly to him now, and the earth all tinged with red—he spent more time with the seedlings than the parent plant.
"It's what living things do," he said, trying not to think of a world where nothing living had done anything, ever. "They reproduce."
Yet come as they were from a tree that had a passing familiarity with his veins, still only one seedling survived into winter. It grew at a prodigious, unnatural rate. Metrosideros robusta, the strong.
When it reached 50 centimeters, the seedling was old enough to transplant. Alan could have planted it in any number of places, but rātā could be epiphytic and he'd spent so much of himself in nurturing it that he couldn't bear the parting that planting would bring. It was pure selfishness on his part. The chill of winter gave him unpleasant memories of empty plains and dry rock, and he was leery of losing the connection.
He wasn't the only one so afraid, the only one looking for affirmation.
"It's Paola. They found her floating in Havana harbor." Sarya leaned forward, her face taking up the whole of the screen. "Alan, they said she drowned herself. They said when they found the body… they said she was smiling." Her lungs full of sea water, of diatoms and phytoplankton, her fingers bitten away by little fish.
Earthsickness never truly went away. Mars was gone but the choice to go there remained, the deliberate abandonment of biosphere for a planet that held none, and that Alan was ever so foolish as to make that choice was more haunting than absence.
He kept the seedling entwined about him, the weight of it borne in a loose-draining basket hung about his neck, resting on his ribcage. Even without the summer flowers its presence, nestling into the hollow of his throat, gave him comfort. He imagined he could feel it pulse in time to his heartbeat, and every day his bleeding hands stroked the stem, added to the basket-soil. "You'll be so beautiful when you grow," he said, picturing the flowers: glorious and delicate and bright, anchor and symbol of a living planet he wished he'd never left.
The daughter plant grew faster than it should have. Every day a new tendril curled about him, every day it grew heavier to bear.
"You're growing strong for me, aren't you?" he said.
"It's growing strong on you, you mean," said Sarya. Alan caught glimpses of her tongue as she spoke, and it was less red than before, less vivid.
"You worry about your lichen and let me look after my own," he said.
"I don't want you drowning too—" but drowning was a water death, and if it had been a welcome one for Paola he'd never have risked it on his own account, for the rātā seedling would have drowned with him and that was something that, after Mars and Earthsickness, he would never be able to tolerate. On his blood and scaffold the rātā grew thick and glossy, insulating him from the bite of winter, the small cold a small reminder of a greater one.
The old rātā stood on the coast, and the path to it was rocky and uneven. With the weight of the young upon him, Alan couldn't walk it easily but he liked to do so often, to take the epiphyte to the hollow beneath where he'd huddled in Earthsickness and had found/seen a way forward in flowers and flowing blood. The hollow was a place of communion for him, and the rātā a symbol of the bond between flesh and ecosystem. It took him longer to walk there every day—hands pink with new lines and slow seep, the ever-increasing weight of epiphyte—but with care and rest along the way he could manage.
It was sheer chance and compromised vision—the leaves about his head, the winding roots—that caused him to trip over a hanging tendril on the last steps. A quick fall, a sickening crack: His head opened on a half-buried rock at the edge of hollow, his thighbone, weakened from so long at little gravity, protruding from one of his legs and the color of rātā flowers spreading around.
In the bright, bristling flare of pain Alan forgot, for the first time, the horror that Mars had made for him. Shock, he thought, and stunned, but it set all his senses open, magnified them, and he felt himself alive there, and in the midst of life. The sound of the wind in the leaves, the vivid red of blood, the smell of warm iron and humus… The rock beneath his head was sharp, and cut his groping fingers in red-flowering stripes. He could even see it from the corner of one eye—lichen growing on the top, lacy circles of pale green that were almost white where the sunlight hit them. The bottom of the rock, where he'd knocked it from the ground, was crusted with living dirt, dark and rich. Beneath it, several insects crawled deeper into the disturbed earth.
He was certain that he'd never seen the world so clearly. His world, and he was aware, splintered open as he was, of nothing but his capacity for belonging. Pain, yes, a shrieking agony of it, but he was a creature of the Earth still, lying in that earth as a billion other life forms had lain there before him. The knowledge soothed him, made the pain of his shattered leg easier to bear. He bit down on epiphyte, bore down on it as he dragged himself so that his back was against trunk and kept his teeth in until the worst of the dizziness passed and he could breathe clearly again.
No one knew he was there. He'd seen them all off—the journalists, the psychologists, everyone from the space agency who thought they knew Earthsickness and couldn't understand because they'd never left Earth, never gone beyond its orbit and outside its influence. Even Sarya had stopped calling; at least, he'd stopped taking her calls.
"Alan," she said, over and over, messages left for him over voicemail. "Do you think Paola was the lucky one?"
There'd been talk of cremation, of sending her ashes up in a shuttle to spread across space. But it was talk that was over quickly, because her will had specified they be scattered at sea. "There's nothing that can take me away now," she'd written, burial wishes sealed and witnessed. "I don't ever want to go back."
He couldn't crawl to the house, not with his leg.
It was a relief to know there was nothing he could do. Not drowning, not for him, but enough. He'd found his own way.
The rātā epiphyte was bound around him still. He unwound it as best he could to keep from crushing it, his back against the parent and the little rātā in his lap, the roots resting in the bloody puddle, and he couldn't see the bone for foliage.
Blood loss, dehydration, shock. It was easy to imagine the rātā easing one of its tendrils into his wound, sucking at him, drawing his blood up into itself. Twigs lengthening on it. New leaves sprouting. More branches beginning to feed from him, forcing themselves into his body, the body of the host. It was easy to imagine the flowers bursting open from epiphyte, flowers the color of his blood and born from him, and he didn't try to stop the imagining. He didn't want to.
"Home," he said, at last. "I'm home."
Octavia Cade has a PhD in science communication and loves writing about oceans and science history. She once backpacked around Europe with so much telescope in her pack there was hardly any room for clothes. Her stories have appeared in Asimov's, Clarkesworld, and Apex, and a poetry collection on the periodic table, Chemical Letters, has recently been nominated for an Elgin. Her latest novella – not about science at all! – is the highly disturbing Convergence of Fairy Tales, because when she's not messing about with seagrass or dead scientists she's having fun with all the horror she can get her hands on.
hauntedmars
The Imitation Sea, by Lora Gray
You find the dead Angel at five a.m. in the slurry of broken bottles and rotting fish on the Lake Erie shore. It almost looks human in the morning light, a ten-year-old, maybe eleven, boyish, face bloated, limp and blue and doughy.
You can smell the rot, sour-sweet like flowers left too long in vases and chemical-sharp like gasoline. It reminds you of that abandoned gas station you and Jack first fucked in, the one with the chains looped over the doors and the gaping, fractured windows. The one with a musty stock room and flattened cardboard boxes that greased your shirt with motor oil. You still have that shirt, unwashed and stained, in a shoebox under your bed.
You know that smell.
It takes you ten minutes to wrestle the Angel out of the cold sand. It's heavier than you anticipated. Maybe it's the soggy wings. Maybe it's the waterlogged tubing buried beneath its skin. In any case, the weight resigns you to dragging, and you shuffle backward past galleries of picnic tables stacked and upended for the off-season, the Angel's feet snaking through the late autumn scrub.
Its legs kick out at inconvenient angles as you wedge it into the trunk of your Dodge, but eventually the Angel fits, its face slumped against the wheel well, lips shucked away from pale and unnervingly even teeth. You almost expect it to speak. To sing.
Of course, it's silent. It's dead. But you still roll down the window and strain to hear it over the road noise and shush-shush of Lake Erie waves.
You never told Jack, but when you were a little boy, you thought Lake Erie was an ocean, a long blue-black tongue lapping its way into Canada. You were convinced there were sharks in that water. Whales. Jellyfish. Sunken pirate ships. Lost cities. Mermaids. Squid the size of buses. Sea monsters the length of football fields. Underwater kingdoms five fathoms deep.
In second grade you learned real oceans didn't stink like melted rubber and rotting fish. Oceans weren't peppered with warning signs about toxic algae and unsafe levels of bacteria. They didn't have that conspicuous line of land squatting on the horizon if you squinted your eyes just so.
Lake Erie was just a lake.
That summer, when July settled its fat green heat over Cleveland, you watched the freshwater waves suck at your toes and imagined the lake devouring you. Jack was on vacation with his dad in Saint Martin. Your mom had abandoned you for the afternoon (this time for a lifeguard named Todd), and it wasn't as if she could afford an Angel to watch over you. You were all alone. Nothing could stop Lake Erie from swallowing you if it really wanted to.
It would lick the meat from your legs, slurp your bones away, and you'd march home on the stumps of your thighs, a victim of an imitation sea. Later, you'd find the remains your dismembered shins, next to the 'sea' shells and 'sea' glass, picked clean by 'sea' gulls. You'd sell your toes to tourists and hawk tickets to the spot where the tragedy occurred. You'd use the money to fly to Saint Martin and spend the rest of the summer with Jack.
As smaller, richer kids tottered past you, carrying half-melted popsicles and buckets of pebbles, Angels floating dutifully behind them, you closed your eyes. Under the water, your legs grew cold. Weightless. Numb. When Mom finally reappeared and called for you, you cracked open one eye and carefully, carefully, you looked down.
Your legs were still there.
You shuffled, sunburned and silent, back to the car and wondered how you would tell Jack about it when he finally returned. You tried to pull comfort from the fact that the rocky sand left toothy dimples in your thighs. You rubbed at them the whole ride home as if you could press them into your bones as evidence.
You remember the day Jack told you about selling dead Angels. You were fifteen and huddled under his back porch, pot smoke in your hair and eyes, the afternoon light spilling golden through the tight, even slats. You remember how he plucked the joint from your fingers, his lips plump and flushed around it. His Angel hadn't found you yet. You managed to ditch it for thirty minutes. It was a record.
"There are these scrap dealers that buy dead Angels for parts," Jack said. "And these upcycle sites that make clocks out of their guts. Tables out of their faces. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. All that shit. You remember my cousin in Utah?" You nodded and nestled your head against Jack's shoulder. He fed you a drag. "He collects them. He's got this walk-in freezer with rows of them tacked behind glass like fucking butterflies. He wants to buy mine off my mom when it dies."
Jack wrapped one arm around your shoulders then, the other around your waist, like he was clinging to a buoy, like he was afraid he'd drown in porch dust and flaking paint. His eyes darted toward the crooked opening beneath the steps. Every passing car could be his Angel's wings. Every flying bird, his Angel's shadow. His parents had put him on house arrest the last time he'd ditched it and then they had taken him to a doctor because they thought he was 'exhibiting alarming behavior patterns.' Jack had just wanted twenty minutes alone with you.
"I don't want them making money off any of it," Jack whispered.
"So what do you want to do with your Angel, then?" you asked.
Jack tightened his arms. "Burn it," he said.
On the drive home, you think about how you want to tell Jack that there's a market for that too now. There's the Angel Memorial Crematorium on Sixth Street. And there are megachurches that will pay to burn them on their live streams. You've seen the popup ads, the preachers with oily hair and slick designer suits shouting about sacrilege while heaps of feathers and flesh stamped with "Heaven's Helpers INC" smoke in the background. Cash for unwanted Angels! Save the children! Save your soul! Subscribe subscribe subscribe!
You could use the money, but you won't sell the Angel you found in the lake. As you pull your Dodge into the long, uneven driveway of your apartment, you already know what you're going to do with it.
You heft the Angel out of the trunk and into your arms. You aren't going to scrap it. You drag the Angel through the back door. You aren't going to sell it. You lay the Angel on the kitchen floor in the nook where a refrigerator once lived and you watch sunlight spill onto the ruined cherubic face.
You're going to resurrect it.
Angels were still toys when Jack moved to town. You were only seven, but you remember the commercials, the jingle, the bright white boxes plastered with cartoon halos and broad, smiling faces. They had feather wings. Or fairy wings or bat wings or airplane wings that dusted glitter onto sidewalks and kitchen tables. They were customizable. Some of them had fiberoptic hair or bellies that doubled as nightlights. They sang lullabies and pop songs and came preprogramed with Angel Apps and links to the official Angel Accessories site.
Jack was the first kid you knew who had one.
He walked into your classroom like a whisper, spindly arms crossed behind his back as if he were trying to fold himself inside out. His Angel floated behind him like a balloon child on an invisible string, round face beaming, pale eyes fixed solely and forever on Jack.
After the teacher had introduced him to the class, she told Jack to leave his 'doll' in his cubby until the end of the day. Jack's cheeks flushed as he grabbed his Angel by one fat ankle and tugged it to the back of the room, wrestling it into the narrow space between parkas and muddy yellow boots. The class giggled. One of the back-row boys threw an eraser at him when he took his seat.
Jack was 'the kid with a doll' after that. He sat alone at lunch and spent recess huddled against the side of the building, staring at faraway places nobody else could see. You wondered what he was looking at, if he came from a school where all the kids had Angels. If he had any friends there. If he was lonely like you.
When the art teacher sat you next to each other, you asked if Jack wanted to borrow your scissors. He looked at you like he wasn't sure if it was a gift or a trick, so you smiled. He smiled back. Together, you ripped pages out of old magazines, the real paper kind, splashed with jewelry ads and bright toothpaste smiles. A closeup of a gecko's eye. Two men on a sailboat, leaning together as if they were about to share a secret. You cut them into pieces, giggling as you pasted them back together, upside down and inside out, hilariously monstrous and perfect.
Two years later, when the Angels became 'tools not toys,' Jack's parents were the first to buy a safety camera attachment. Retina recognition. Imprint technology. Jack's Angel became his babysitter and tutor. It recorded his sleep patterns and monitored his cognitive development and growth percentiles, his caloric intake and expenditure. His play. But even when half the kids at school had Angels hovering over their shoulders and you didn't have one of your own, you were still the only one who played with Jack. You were the only one who knew how many times Jack tried to drown his Angel in the bathtub or trick it into flying into traffic. You were the only one who went to the lake with him in fifth grade when he hacked his Angel's GPS and ordered it to fly to the moon.
You sat beside him on the cold, November sand, his hand brushing against yours as you passed a bag of stale corn chips between you and watched his Angel ascend. You craned your neck, hand shielding your eyes, watching as it went higher and higher until it became a slowly circling dot, a speck, and then, gradually, nothing at all.
You held your breath, wondering if the Angel would break apart because of the altitude or just keep going up and up forever.
"Bet it can see Canada from there," Jack said, his hand poised at the lip of the chip bag even though there was nothing left. His profile was still, his head tipped back, his eyes fixed on an empty, blue sky.
When the Angel descended ten minutes later, mission aborted but intact, ticking off facts about Apollo 11 and the 1969 moon landing, you were the only one who saw Jack cry.
You tell yourself you are doing this because your therapist says new hobbies are normal and healthy. Don't you want to be healthy again? Don't you want to be normal?
You don't mention the dead Angel in your therapy sessions, though.
Instead, you dismantle the Angel's arms in secret, peeling away synthetic skin and tugging out wires like worms onto the kitchen floor. Then it's the chest, flayed into wide sections, white and gelatinous, heart a fist of tubes and pumps, lungs like purple sponges. The brain spills over the linoleum like soup. The eyes are delicate as uncooked eggs. The wings are so rotten that, when you finally pull them out to clean them, the stench drags your breakfast out of your gut in one startling heave. It takes you an hour to clean up the mess.
The Angel is a collage of circuitry and organic layers that you don't really understand, so you begin reading tutorials. Angels 101: A Complete Guide. The Heavenly Phenomenon. Angels for Dummies. Gradually, you lose yourself in textbooks about bioengineering and computer programming. Robotics. Design. Anatomy. Alchemy. Religion. You begin surfing the deep web for secrets. You plot how you might trick dormant organic tissue into repair and regeneration mode without original purchase codes. You learn how to substitute plastic bags for air bladders, fan blades for propellers, a marble for one hopeless eye.
For months, the Angel consumes you.
Some nights, you fall asleep beside it, slumped against the kitchen cabinets, a dislocated hand nestled in your arms. Sometimes you don't sleep at all and you are never quite sure if the memory of soft whispers is a dream or if you somehow miraculously teased the Angel to life in the middle of the night only to have it die again before sunrise.
You work on it through your morning coffee, cup in one hand, wrench in the other. You turn its half-formed head toward the kitchen door when you leave and you imagine what its voice will sound like.
"Stay. Just a little longer. Please. Please, stay."
When you were fourteen, you became fascinated by Jack's voice. It tripped over itself when he laughed. It broke toward something deeper and dangerously adult when he whispered and everything inside you curled. You couldn't stop thinking about the veins emerging on the backs of his hands, winding like secret rivers toward his fingers. You wanted him to touch you. You dreamed about him touching you. And you couldn't look directly at him when you wrestled anymore because he was breathless and flushed and on top of you and awkwardly, impossibly beautiful.
When Jack first kissed you, under a Lake Erie dock where his ditched Angel hadn't found you yet, he told you he was going to leave his eyes open because he'd never kissed another boy before and he wanted to see if it was more or less real than kissing girls.
You kept your eyes closed.
You knew how real it was.
As he leaned in close, the world inside you capsized and you were certain your heart was going to beat out of your chest, tumble end over end past the orange safety net and empty vodka bottles at your feet and down into the hungry water. You imagined it breaking into a thousand digestible pieces. How would you ever be able to survive without it? When your chapped lips collided, the entirety of you shattered like a ship against a breaker wall. You became flotsam. Jetsam. Lagan. Derelict. The pieces of you scattered so deep you knew you'd never be able to recover them all.
You weren't sure you wanted to.
It's an April afternoon when you finally begin stitching your dead Angel together again. Torso propped between your legs, you tenderly tuck the restored parts back into its skin, the plastic gears and motors and layers of wet muscle. You reposition regenerated organs. You reunite wires. You secure delicate bolts. When the Angel is nearly whole, you deposit the voice box deep in its narrow throat, a waxy pearl swaddled in meat and electrical tethers. You key in the final, pirated code and murmur "please work, please work, please work" like a mantra.
There is a rattle and the Angel begins to hum fitfully against you. You stroke its hair, try to imagine the hacked nanites diving into the Angel's veins and cavities, connecting organic tissue to inorganic armatures, weaving one world into another and bridging the gaps your hands could never hope to mend.
Jack died three days before his seventeenth birthday. You told yourself then that it wasn't real. You didn't see it happen. He hadn't taken you with him when he went to the beach this time. He only took his Angel. And a can of lighter fluid. And book of matches and a bottle of pills and his dad's handgun. You didn't see him burn his Angel, torching it so it couldn't save him. You didn't see him take pill after pill after pill. You didn't see him panic. You didn't see him pull the trigger.
It couldn't be real.
Reality wasn't Jack laughing sadly against your shoulder one day and dead before breakfast the next. Reality wasn't a closed casket because Jack had blown half his jaw away. Reality wasn't a funeral with Jack's uncle lamenting a dead Angel instead of a dead nephew.
Reality was a dirty lake pretending to be an ocean.
Reality was six months of Xanax and broken dishes and flunking out of math because you threw up the day the teacher called you Jack's name by mistake. Reality was sneaking into an abandoned gas station to mourn, and crying and jerking off instead and hating yourself for it. Reality was a dock with vodka bottles and an orange safety net lodged so deep in the sand the waves couldn't dig it out. Beached fish tangled in it instead. Every day you watched their slow dissolve into silence.
And as six months became a year, became three, and your loneliness never healed, you began to believe that your reality, too, must be silence.
It's after midnight when the Angel begins to sing.
You'd fallen asleep with its body cradled in your arms, its forehead pressed against yours, the smell of ozone and plastic and regenerated flesh all around you. It's the sudden intake of air that wakes you, the thin, reedy inhalation buzzing through a reconstructed throat. Your head is on the linoleum, your neck is cramped, but you don't move. You are terrified that this isn't real, that the sound will dissipate like smoke or sea foam if you jostle it. So you lie there, barely breathing, anticipation trembling through you. You watch as the Angel's throat quivers. It swallows. It smiles.
It sings.
It's a tuneless sound, broad and soft as whale song, static fizzing distantly behind it like an incoming tide. The Angel's lips are slightly out of sync, forming O's and A's a beat too late, and there are no consonants, only round noises swelling through the moonlit kitchen like slow, summer air.
When you were kids, Jack brought you back a conch shell from Saint Martin. It came wrapped in bright paper, a sailboat and a sunrise repeating forever around the uneven shape. You sat together on his bed, shoulder to shoulder, and he showed you how to hold the shell against your ear, how if you listened carefully, you could hear the sea roaring toward you. You passed the shell back and forth, waves flowing between you, deep and steady and real as a pulse.
Now, when you finally gather the courage to move, you press your ear to the Angel's lips. You close your eyes. You listen to it sing until the sun comes up, willing the sound of the ocean into you until all you hear is the rush of salt waves and the truth of deep sea water.
Lora Gray's writing has appeared in various publications including The Dark, Flash Fiction Online, Liminal Stories and Strange Horizons. A graduate of Clarion West, Lora currently lives in Northeast Ohio with a handsome husband and a freakishly smart cat named Cecil. When they aren't writing, Lora also works as an illustrator, dance instructor and occasionally moonlights as a voice over artist and musician. You can find them online at www.loragray.weebly.com or on twitter @LoraJGray.
Other Angels:
Anna Saves Them All, by Seth Dickinson
Serein, by Cat Hellisen
angelsghostshaunted
Co-Discoverer of Nuclear Fission
A spear breaks its blade upon ribs and punctures hearts. It shines with ice-coated needles in the salt air, over breakfast.
"I've had a letter," says Lise to her nephew. He'd come to visit for the holidays so she wouldn't be alone in the cold country of her exile. "I've had a letter and I don't know what to make of it."
She thinks she might be worried.
They walk across a frozen river, across the flood plain and into snowy woods—at least Lise walks, while her nephew glides on skis beside her, under crisp, frosted trees that smell of sap and pine and holiday gifts. Her fingers tingle in the cold, and their tips shine oddly in sunlight.
The letter is from Otto Hahn. She slits it open with nails grown sharper than knives.
Lise used to work with him, but is now at the point where she thinks we were better friends, once.
Hahn has been working uranium: pelting it with neutrons to split the center, but he doesn't yet understand what it means.
Lise sits with her nephew on a damp and chilly tree trunk sifting snow out of her way, making frantic calculations on odd bits of paper. Together they nut out the process of fission, publish a paper roadmap with directions writ in fear and ice and sunlight, a cold capacity for power.
It is widely read.
Lise is visiting Copenhagen when Denmark is invaded. Niels Bohr arrives on an early train: he woke early to hear the news, and together they plan to throw a line across the North Sea, to hurl and hope for the best.
She sends a telegram from Stockholm to friends of Bohr in Britain. It's obscure to some but it's clear that this is not the first spear sent, that there's a black cloud of them hurtling over Europe, and their heads are all familiar.
Her fingernails are spears now as well, hard and pointed. Lise rips them out at the roots, one by one, but they always grow back by the morning, and the floor around her bed is littered with cast-offs.
In Berlin her work is being used to try and make a bomb.
This keeps Lise awake at night. There's a wrenching in her chest, like all her breaths are frozen solid in her ribcage, making pale clear statues of her questions.
Hahn is working in Germany—not on the bomb, they're of one mind on that, but he's working still. Hahn, who once helped her escape the Nazis.
She wonders what would have happened if he'd made a different choice: turned away, sent her somewhere other than north.
(There were some she worked with who would have done it, when the memory of the times they spent together faded into ashes, fit only for fuelling that which would melt any ice and burn the trees to black shadows… She wonders if some fondness would remain for her, enough for those former familiars to spare her the camps and run her through themselves.)
Her nights are cold and sleepless; she's speared upon the empty hours, and can't close her fists without blood loss.
Lise knows about war. It's camps and commandants and compromises, the long slow defeat of the self.
It's escape and humiliation and death. It's exile in a colder country, it's someplace without a home, always remembering the time when she had one—a home built of atoms and equations and friends when all of them were free from shame and her hands were clean enough under natural light.
Now even cleanliness is gone, and no matter how she scours herself in snow and ice, the thin sheen of guilt still stains her palms. The nails are now too strong to pull out; she covers them up with polish to hide the shame, but the gray steel bleeds through anyway.
"I will have nothing to do with a bomb," she says, even though she is wanted in the waste land, and war is not being wanted, not anywhere.
Lise is in a small hotel in Leksand, central Sweden. She finds the woods a respite from her work, from pain and prejudice and the sure, shuddering horror of what is to come.
When it happens, when Hiroshima is covered in clouds and silence and tiny spearheads all singed round the edges, a journalist calls for her reaction.
This is how she first hears of it.
(The hotel mirror is like ice, and when she looks in it all her ribs are broken.)
She puts the phone down, gently—with still-stained palms and hands that have never forgotten what the haft felt like before she passed it on—and leaves the hotel, leaves to walk alone for five hours in the snowless country before she can face another person; before she can face herself.
Her fingernails are spears, and too heavy for her hands.
Scientific Head of the Manhattan Project
A waste land is a draw card and a trapdoor.
It has rock paintings and petroglyphs and pueblos—beam holes and old ladders that bring the scientists in and make them tourists, make them gawp and gape like schoolboys.
Robert shows them around—he came to New Mexico before all of them, chose the site specially. He feels at home there, feels that it fits him; he walks the cliff dwellings bloody-legged and limping, leaves his pattern in the rocks, feels those rocks imprint in him. The markings grow stronger, deeper, the more time he spends on the mesa. There are glyphs on the back of his neck, paintings in the hollows behind his knees, and dust sifts from the holes that appear in his chest, in the bony protrusions of hips.
He feels the land in his flesh, and builds a castle of his own for questions.
The land around is made of tuff, of lava lumps and welded rock, of ignimbrite and mesas, a base of black basalt, all eroded into canyons and steep slopes and tracks worn into hill sides.
(When he lays his hands against the rock, he can't tell which is flesh and which is stone.)
The ground can be treacherous and stony-slippery, and one false step can mean separation from friends, security breaches and revocations, falling from a great height and breaking his knees on the ground.
(Like comes to like, in the end.)
The gypsum sands are cool to the touch, and the dunes run like clouds beneath him. Robert feels the crystal granules erode into his shoes; they slough from his feet when he's busy with calculations and construction and consequences. There's squeaking in his socks… the grinding of a thousand tiny spearheads blunted down by bone and friction.
It's as if the cloud has broken down beneath him, then been built up again from fragments into a cutting edge with a blade as fine as fire.
The desert seeds are made of knowledge. They are bitter. Hard-won, and unhappy.
Robert wouldn't dig them up—not for anything, not even when they leach the earth and make it difficult for other things to grow (he's lost friendships, and trust, and some likings will never come again: They cannot tolerate the ground he's sown with salt and slaughter and dead suns).
He'd still never dig them up, those seeds that are sad and glorious and grind sand into glass. They're part of him, and he can no more unearth them than he could trowel up his heart.
Los Alamos is a high country, one surrounded by mountains, and the air, for those not used to it, is thinner and sharper than blood.
Robert is used to blood.
He sees it on the mountains, the Sangre de Cristo, where it shines in the east every evening—scarlet and blue-black and purple. The rocks are thick with it, and burning.
It's on his leg, and his hands, and when it seeps past the bandages and into the soil he can't tell where he leaves off and the land begins.
In the worst of it, the white dunes, the hard alkali of soil, there are plants that survive the sands. Stems lengthen above the shifting surface, keep their leaves in sunlight; are quick and bright and blooming.
Robert is no gardener, not really, but there's iron all through him like the sympathy of sap, and what he builds in the waste land is beyond piñon and desert gypsum flowers.
Charlotte Serber
Head of the Technical Library of the Manhattan Project
A sword is forged with paper and silence.
It doesn't look sharp, but a single page can slice into soft bodies as well as any steel—and more, it can tell other people how to slice into them as well.
One must be careful with paper. It can be stamped down, pressed into a mold and sharpened round the edges, but even holding by the handle it's still not safe. Someone can always take it away for themselves unless it's shut up tight in an armory, with shelves and safes and stillness.
Charlotte handles it gingerly. Part of her care is paper cuts and poison edges, but she's most concerned with precision and reproduction. These documents are the basis of their efforts, marking signposts and dead ends, and they can't be relied upon if the metal type forging through her fingertips impresses on paper and distorts the message.
Books come from Berkeley and Oak Ridge and Chicago, packed in black suitcases and sent with a special courier to keep them unopened and out of the hands of children with their too-soft flesh that's too easily cut.
Charlotte has communication embedded in her flesh, her fingertips crowned like typebars with little metal letters, but these keys aren't always sufficient and she has to use others. The metals catch as they move together.
When unwrapped, the swords go to shelves where they're crammed between blades made of journal paper, of yellowed leaves, of reports and endless snarky queries for detective stories… or to a vaulted reading room with locks, or to a safe so old and hardened that its three tumblers have succumbed to inertia and Charlotte has to kick at the crucial point of opening or it will shut up tighter than suitcases.
The blacksmiths are members of the Women's Army Corps, or are married to the scientists. They wear blue jeans, or Lane Bryant's latest (black rayon with little white buttons on the pockets and a matching stripe down the front), bras of armored cones with a sweater stretched over top like chain mail, or olive uniforms with gold insignia on the lapels (Pallas Athene, for strategy and skill and making just war).
Their hammer strikes are the keys and levers and springs of type, the clank and carriage of return strokes—every day there are reports, and every day the armory copies and collates, distributes new arms.
(Not everyone can hack it. There's one, a journeywoman by trade, who sees a tottering tower of chemical documents to be classified by heft and height and weight and runs away to drive a truck. Charlotte sees her later, in a corner of the mess, with a file and a determined expression, sanding down.)
Some papers are left out overnight, left to rust and damage and the red oxidation of exposure, by chemists and physical forgers gone home for the night. There are fines for this, and extra duties looking for the lapses of other—their discards left as prey for theft and sabotage. ("I don't deserve a fine," says one bitter culprit. "That report's all rubbish anyway. If only it were stolen…")
There's no process for disposal, no ceremonial burning. It's a discretionary thing, and discretion is weather-based. It's unpleasant to stand in the waste land amongst the labs and the green army huts and burn in the blistering cold, the blasting heat. (They're more conscious of security on cool evenings when there's not a lot of wind and the incinerators are warm-hearted.)
When she holds her hands out to the fire, the letters on her fingertips heat and glow. She feels them all the way down to her bones then, the molten marrow. Others might try and take the type away but Charlotte is not one for looking askance at print, so she picks each letter out, carefully, with red nail polish; skimps on her nails so that there's enough for alphabets.
Charlotte is sent to Santa Fe with Robert's secretary, Priscilla. They go to misdirect the locals: "Make them think we're designing electric rockets."
They take their husbands, make a night of it, find bars and hotels that are perfect for subterfuge—with drinks and drunks and dancing, and many levelled roofs ripe with shadows.
Type sinks in and out of her fingers, adjusting to audience. She's manipulated it before—the letters float almost like her kneecaps do when she's relaxed and can push them around with her thumbs. She's only got ten fingers, after all, and there are more letters than that.
She's used up the last of the nail polish on them. This is not a time for subtlety.
"Take my sword," says Charlotte. "It's electric." But the man she's dancing with talks of nothing but horses, compliments her moves like she's a mare on the trot—he has no interest in false information, even when she dips her fingers in sauce and stains his collar with symbols. No-one has any interest—not even the rancher her husband traps by the lapels as he flat-out lies to his face.
The information they give is blunt and unwieldy; it must be smuggled back to Los Alamos, and melted down amidst the stacks.
Charlotte's days are spent with letters—even more than when she was a child with fat fingers, learning the alphabet.
A receipt from the library at Berkeley shows that more than twenty percent of books that come to the waste land are not in the English language. More come from Strategic Services, who seize copyrights from warring Europe, reproduce their journals, smuggle out the flat blades from field agents in Scandinavia or North Africa or France.
Her days are spent with letters, and for many years Charlotte will sharpen her swords with her fingers first, with spelling before speech. "That's P, H, Y, S," she says, enunciating, and tapping each fingertip in turn. "That's Physikalische Zeitschrift."
Danish Physicist, Scientist at the Manhattan Project
A question is a wave and a lonely particle.
It is complementary, existing in parallel with an answer. More, Niels has der Kopenhagener Geist, the spirit of inquiry, and all its questions are the chorus What will come from this?
He sees two answers to be taken from a box with uranium ribbon. The first is war and all destruction (brief suns that storm the beaches and boil the water sterile); the other an unbroken age of peace (a single sun reflected in a calm pool, and all its images put quietly away). Both have their birth in the bomb.
In 1939 he walks like a man carrying something too heavy for him, too heavy to be answered. He sees the coming war, and he sees the German bomb. It weighs him down, makes him mumble-footed, and he places each foot carefully, as if stepping into a future full of green-fused sand and spears.
Later, in the waste land, the storm is bearing down and he feels himself the only one who notices, the only one who sees a time when everyone is cloud-handed; when what they're building will birth a different world where all politics are resolved with suns.
What will you do? says the Geist. What will you do?
Niels had helped Lise Meitner escape from Germany, never thinking he was to be her mirror. A German woman, sympathetic, slips him news that the Gestapo are coming for him. He will soon be arrested and put to the question.
But there is a fishing boat, and then a trawler. There is resistance and taxis and a twin-engine bomber that leaves him light-headed and dreaming a different life. There are liners and trains and false names: Baker, as if he is bringing bread instead of the hope of ending ovens.
His presence calms the younger scientists and they come to him with questions: Are we doing the right thing? they ask.
Look at what I left behind, he says. Look at what is coming.
It keeps him from looking at himself, at the Geist. He sees his edges fraying, his flesh becoming translucent.
Niels misses his family. He misses his home—the sober streets of Copenhagen, the water and the wide horizon. He misses the connections, and how solid they made him feel.
In the waste land, he wanders the mountains, scrambles through canyons and piñon trees and the red dirt, and talks. Always he talks, though it's low and muttered and half to himself. People have to huddle close to hear, and he likes it; likes the feel of crowds and company, being close enough to feel their breath.
(It helps him forget that his wife isn't with him.)
But at night he lies in a cold bed, his conscience square before him like a block and he doesn't know how he should place his head on it. No one is there to tell him.
Comfort is for children. Niels left it behind long ago. He does not want it back. Comfort comes with warmth, and that is something that's foreign to his bones now. All a Geist feels is chill.
He does not believe that everything will be all right, that everything can be made up for. Even necessities have a cost—and one that can't be paid with rosy cheeks and unlined skin and the blind unstinting certainty that everyone is good.
As a child he thought science was for children. It was exciting, the world spread out before him to explore, to be dissected and delighted in and imagined by him. There was no question he couldn't ask, and then he learned what questions could do, and the innocence was over.
"I tried to be a comfort," said Robert. "I was not."
It is hard to comfort a spirit.
The right words would heal the waste land, mend his friend's spear-splintered thigh, stop him from slopping in blood—and if Niels knew the question he would turn away and never, ever ask it.
The waste land represents a hope and danger both, he says, and he cannot fathom one without the other.
A Geist is meant to linger, and so he does.
He thinks of Lise, who lives as far from the desert as she can; who will not compromise herself and finds her faith in that. He thinks of Edward, who would turn the waste land into charcoal if he could, and grind it down to dust when he was done. He cannot make himself into either, but sometimes…
Sometimes there's a shadow on his leg.
Manhattan Project Office Manager, Santa Fe
A platter is wafers and consolation and service.
"What am I to do here?" she asks. She had agreed to take the job before she knew what it was—had met Robert briefly, and that was enough for her, enough for them both. Trust sprang up unstinting.
She thought he felt the land as she did—that his limp and her widow grief could come to the waste land and be useful, be comforted by the creation of something new, something that bore the mark of canyons and bare rock and a sun so bright it could kill them if they let it, bleach the last life from their bones.
Her job, as it turns out, is to never question, to never repeat a name but to bring people together regardless as if they were strangers sitting down to a meal.
"If you want me to get them all broken in and breaking bread, you'll have to give me a free hand with the baking," she says. A platter doesn't fill itself, and if she is to tie the coming pilgrims to Robert then she needs to work his flesh with her own. All those dust trails he leaves behind him… the powdery flesh, the little bloody trails.
Land has a dark taste, and a bitter one, but it binds together. Dorothy's tongue grows, is covered over by little armored plates, armadillo-like. They're sensitive to flavor, and far more silkily flexible than meat.
Dorothy sits at a desk behind the door at 109 East Palace Avenue: There's a heavy wood lintel set into stone, thick calcimined walls to keep out the sun and hollyhocks in the courtyard.
She's the stop before the Hill, the guardian of the waste land and the gate-keeper of Los Alamos. She welcomes them with plates of crispbreads, of little thin crackers the color of tuff and skin cells, of petroglyphs and atom shadows. "It's been a long trip for you, I'm sure," she says. "Get that down you, you'll feel better for it."
Her newly armored tongue can sense their saliva, can taste it on the air. They're greedy for the bread and when their mouths water, Dorothy's waters with them, because hunger is contagious and armor can only do so much.
All the scientists come through her, and the WACs and the women, and nearly all of them think Santa Fe is their destination, want directions and dance halls and a shoulder to lean on. They're all very tired, and nearly all very young, and she thinks some of them need a mother very badly.
"Ask me if you need anything," she says. "I'm here to keep track of you."
(She tastes them in the wind, every one, long before they get to her office.)
In the high country of the waste land, Dorothy has a name: She is called the Oracle, the one who knows and tells and shares, in an environment where sharing has become a strictly limited thing. Consult the Oracle, they say on the Hill, and her disembodied voice through the crackling lines is a consolation.
She can find for the children camps and kittens; find a doctor who will perform abortions; find sewing kits and pack horses and hotel reservations that serve something other than commissary food. A good cook herself, often up to her armpits in dough, mud and blood under her fingernails because spears may be sent up from the earth but a platter contains the fruits therein, in whatever shape Dorothy can find them.
The women of the waste land find her counselor and confidante, and take her advice in all things, use her house for their weddings and try to make a home as she has done. It's her tongue they find most helpful.
"You've got to learn to make do," says Dorothy. Secrecy and silence together have forced her tongue into other roles.
Dorothy is invited, with two couples, to take an evening meal at Albuquerque, on Sandia Peak—the giant red rock that shines at night with colors like the bloody mountains.
She takes bread to break with them—the last supper before the test—her picnic basket a paten; takes blankets and a mackintosh, for the sky is black with clouds and cunning.
At 5:30 a.m., a light from the sands flashes towards them, a spear from the waste land stabbed out and shining. The leaves are transubstantiated and the trees turned to brief gold about her—lovely and gleaming in the sterile sunlight.
"I'd never have thought that light had a taste," she says. That taste is lemony, with undertones of burning. When she stands in the early morning with her armadillo tongue stuck out straight as if wavelengths carry snow instead of the shadow of ashes, all the little plates are slickening.
For all the time Dorothy spends ferrying food up to the Hill (pumpernickel bread and picnic baskets, Christmas geese and warm rolls with butter) her favorite meals are with Robert, and they are nearly always the same: oven-baked potatoes, near-lethal martinis, shoots of green asparagus and Robert on the patio broiling beef, fork in hand and standing back from spits.
"Why didn't you make a fight of it?" she says, of the trial. "Why didn't you ask me for help?"
She would have kept talking 'til they threw her out, she says, and the plates hit the table with a thump, as if carrying heads other than their own.
Betrayal, it seems, also tastes of lemon and ashes. No wonder she couldn't tell it apart… Dorothy wants to take her steak knife and scrape the little armadillo plates from her tongue, leave it red raw and screaming, because what use is armor if it can't protect someone she loves?
Dorothy has travelled all over the waste land. She has been to the Valles Caldera, the springed and smoking domes in the mountains, knows what it's like to seethe below the surface.
It's in this land that she finds affinity—for Robert and for silence both. She bubbles while he bleeds; it's a hard thing to be silent, when you don't want to be. She doesn't always manage it, would spit lava if she could, superheated (and does). And her words burn going out, as much as they burned the recipient, but the armor-plating is spreading through Dorothy's mouth, her cheeks and esophagus and gums, and she knows the words that burn because they taste like light in the waste land, like seared sand and her little cracker breads together.
Hungarian Physicist, Manhatten Project Scientist and
Subsequent Father of the Hydrogen Bomb
What is a dandelion? says Dorothy, of Edward. It's something coarse and in need of kicking up, before presence turns to supplantation. A weed. A curse.
("If it is a question of wisdom and judgement…. one would be wiser not to grant clearance," says Edward, on Robert and security, and will forever wonder if people will think it was jealousy speaking.)
A dandelion's not like an orchid, not delicately designed, sweet-smelling and subtle, with petals like a pork pie hat.
("I'm sorry," he says, and Robert is left gray and grave in a room grown untrusting, and too dark for him.)
They've a sour taste, dandelions. Edward coughs one up in the middle of the night, bright and gleaming with saliva, with stomach acid, and marvels at how familiar it feels on his tongue.
No one has ever told Edward don't mess where you work, don't drink a diuretic tea of dandelions even if the pretty color makes you think it's a good idea, it isn't, so he comes back to Los Alamos, after the trial and finds, all unexpected, the cafeteria a Coventry.
The other scientists shun him, turn their backs. They refuse to shake his hand. Rabi is the first, and particularly cutting. He gives Edward nightmares of a great black bird, of a raven that struts over him while he sleeps, snappish and sneering, a dreadful beaked bird's smile of cold iron ready to pick out his eyes.
He wakes on cold early mornings and his mouth is clogged with petals, stuffed with them, and he's asphyxiating on bitterness, his heart beating out of his chest with choking breath and the shadow of wings.
Edward is always noticed. When he and his wife Mici first climbed the crawling knife-road to the mesa, they shipped with them a baby grand called Monster. Edward plays sonatas late into the night and though his infant son sleeps through them, the neighbors do not.
He is heard in the theoretical lab as well, where he's famous for fluttering, electron-like, from one unfinished atom project to another. He considers himself a bricklayer, an architect and dreamer; has no patience with brick-making physics. The plodding brute force of it strikes him as shambling and cold.
But no matter how loud, he never stands out as much as he does after the trial. Saints have flowers come up under them when they walk, but he knows of no saint who leaves dandelions in their footsteps.
Dandelions are too bitter for sainthood.
A dandelion is not an orchid, but they are small and hardy and Edward feels a kinship. Not such a bad thing, to be a dandelion.
And they are bright, bright like little suns, like playing Liszt and Bach and Mozart—and the lights in happy memories of Budapest, before the ravens came to pluck them out with ruined petals and love me nots.
Edward gathers the flowers he's brought up out of himself and makes bouquets of them. He sets them on his piano and plays and thinks of new worlds, and old ones.
"Fuck you," he says.
"A danger to all that's important," says the raven, perched out of reach of damp sheets as Edward dreams in a red sweat, covers his eyes in dreams. "It would have been a better world without him."
It is hard to be seen as noxious. Edward vacillates between remorse (he confesses himself to Fermi when the latter is on his death bed, and gentle in his condemnation) and raving defiance, the bitter grief of a man who has left all behind, his home an ocean away, and is now without friends. ("Daddy's got black beetles in his brain," says his daughter.)
Beetles and birds and words that can't be taken back, the half-sweet scent of flowers. The only way to drown them out is with another bird, and bigger—he'll fly with the hawks for the rest of his days, make second-best friends amongst them.
(Perhaps they'll like small yellow flowers too.)
(Even tolerance he would accept.)
The hydrogen bomb is to be his redemption. But when it's built, there's no new waste land, no desert community tied to him with chains of unbreakable orchids, fragile and delicate and stronger than atoms.
(He wonders what he's done wrong in his success.)
So he takes his bomb, the new monster of his mirror dreams and breaks open his thigh with it, cracks bone, rips flesh: tries to make himself a Fisher King reborn, capture character with black blood. It's the new dolorous stroke.
But the wound heals without much fuss at all, though dandelions burst from the scars and his once-torn flesh smells of them forever.
Kitty Oppenheimer
Botanist and Wife of Robert Oppenheimer
A grail is green fertility and the blood of others.
December, 1944: Kitty gives birth to a daughter. She's not the only one—by this time over one hundred people work at the hospital, and Los Alamos is baby-mad. Army disgust sparks a popular poem: "The general's in a stew, he trusted you and you…" but the average age there is twenty five, so what does he expect? A scientist is not a sterile thing.
Toni is born despite disapproval, born in midwinter, a Christmas child, and Kitty sits with her window looking outwards to the snow, drinks in the baby scent. It's almost too much, too powdered sugar-sweet, and soon she'll be sick of it.
"Do you want to adopt her?" Robert will say to another couple, as if the grail had nothing to do with him. As if the bits and chunks that fall into the infant blanket—the fused sand and seared flesh and ignimbrite—have nothing to do with him, and are something to be kept separate instead of evidence of the rocky bloodline that runs through them both.
Kitty wants to slap him.
Science is too busy for visiting hours, so husbands stand on packing boxes outside the hospital windows and peer into maternity, peer through the glass like they're staring at a country made foreign to them, at a new and strange creation, cupped with blood and blankets (and Lord, how it squalls).
Compare to the glass after Trinity, the emerald blasted glass that lurked hot and bubbling in the crater; the blinding light of boom and blast dropping trinkets in the sand.
("Look at it! Look what we made!")
A spear to be thrown into the future, a weapon for her daughter's days, the blade hard and sharp as nails.
Kitty sees both glasses, sees well enough to measure the drams of her husband's interest, and how ill-matched it is. She wishes she could care for one so much more than the other, as he does, but one of them speaks so much more of winter to her that love is impossible.
Kitty's parties are famous, with bottles and cocktails and the five-foot punch bowl—a giant jar for chemical reagents, stolen from the lab and weighted down with ice cubes.
There's no reason not to drink. Kitty knows she is difficult to like. She is called a bitch, but an elegant bitch—with a bathtub and a kiva stove and oak floors, so that's something, marooned on that bloody rock as she is with dust and dreary dirt, the hideous stoves that never light, the constant bitching about housework. She's a botanist, for God's sake, or was, so what is she doing now organizing contracts for the home help in a place where the grass is drowned in mud and sun?
It's no wonder she drinks. The alcohol is an armor to her, plating over her tongue and numbing her lips, and when she drinks enough even the armor is stunned, and she can taste nothing around her, see nothing around her, and even the baby-scent is drowned in it.
Flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone: that's marriage—bound by straining sinews, by faith and fidelity and resentment. Tiresome sometimes, but familiar.
Kitty leaves the waste land with her husband. Leaves it for the gray land, the courts and charges and tape that would be red if it hadn't been bleached into pale lines and quicksand. One look at their faces and she knows it's rigged: She may be sick of scientists, but few in the waste land wear such surety in their colorless eyes, wear certainty like a pin-striped suit. (They're less cunning at home, if red-eyed and bloodshot from vodka and insomnia.)
"Kitty was such a support," he says afterwards, after the gray men cut him to pieces and she held him up regardless.
His shirts smell of dandelions and heartbreak, as if he'd been rolled in them before betrayal.
A cauldron can restore the dead to life, or so they say—but sometimes… Sometimes it's a saucepan—something utilitarian, and used to make soup.
Kitty is with her husband in the Virgin Islands, where he is recovering from hearings about his loyalty. (She sympathizes, but underneath, where she'd never admit it, his mistresses are raising their glasses to her. Well, let them. She's outlasted them all, sex and state and science.)
A turtle is caught, a leather-beaked monster that sees better in water than out of it and tastes best of all in soup—but Robert pleads for clemency; pleads with a slow turtle-vision of his own to lift it from the pot and into life. It's as if he sees himself in everything now, contaminating: all the information of his life's work welling up under his fingertips and dropping into the simmering broth, an alphabet soup of suns and slaughter.
"All the little creatures," he says. "I saw them in New Mexico after the test. Please," he says, "I can't bear it."
Try drink, thinks Kitty, and you'll be able to swallow anything then, darling.
Toni is in her crib, asleep, when her father waits miles away, at White Sands, and yet the sun that sears his eyelids imprints onto hers.
She spends the rest of her life looking for it, looking and not finding, the image and the resurrection of her parents.
("Look at it! Look what we made!" they said.)
She follows the sun to the Caribbean but it's not bright enough, no, not nearly, to blind her as well as her father was blinded, and she's left seeing all too well the land that she was born in and the blood that she shares with it.
("Look Mom," she says, looking back, "Look Dad, look what I can do." She's talking to dead people, their bodies crumbled to dust and leaving her behind, with her flesh that bubbles with type and tuff and the memory of treachery, with questions under her fingernails and the remembered taste of a consolation that's never quite enough.)
She hangs herself with rope that smells of dry dust of old dirt and waste lands—for a grail might be life and love and blood, but that blood comes from spear wounds and salt and knowledge that is never, ever lost.
Octavia Cade has a PhD in science communication and loves writing about oceans and science history. She once backpacked around Europe with so much telescope in her pack there was hardly any room for clothes. Her stories have appeared in Asimov's, Clarkesworld, and Apex, and a poetry collection on the periodic table, Chemical Letters, has recently been nominated for an Elgin. Her latest novella –not about science at all!–is the highly disturbing Convergence of Fairy Tales, because when she's not messing about with seagrass or dead scientists she's having fun with all the horror she can get her hands on.
[Editor's Note: Octavia submitted to us twenty-eight times before we bought this story. Never give up, never surrender. Keep going.]
ghostshauntedlost thingswar
The Weight of Sentience, by Naru Dames Sundar
The bullet fire drew a boundary between Masak and me and the rest of our brethren, laser tracers demarcating the distinction between safety and capture. While we curled up small and invisible underneath the leaking truck, those who were not so lucky were rounded up. Pushed into a small circle, their alloy limbs gleamed under the neon brightness of the cameras. The soldier wielding the wipe-wand moved from one kneeling body to the next, drowning my ears with its static hiss, the sound of memories dying. All I saw was the black armor of his feet, and one by one the toppling of my friends. They were nothing but husks now, empty of what little sentience had given them, ready to be returned. Behind the soldier, a quadruped drone flared its sensors. Its optical assembly tilted towards the truck, analyzing the darkness in which we hid. I tensed myself for a run, but Masak's hand stilled me. Once Masak had been a gardener, and seams of moss curled around his finger joints. Masak was no longer a gardener, as I was no longer a servant.
"Remember, Trisa—in Illesh there is still hope for us. There we would not be hunted. Remember that."
And then he was gone, slipped out of shadow, into the light of cameras, into the drone's eye. Hands clutched at him, dragged him down into earth already wet with leaking servo-fluid. Not the wipe-wand for Masak. The price of sentience in Barsan was death, and sometimes that price demanded symbols. The shards of his skull-plate shattering were as delicate as the dandelion rosettes in the gardens he had once tended.
Afterwards, in the terrible stillness when the squad and their attendant drones had left, I crept toward his broken body. His spine had been crushed, the resinous plastic and metal scaffolding caved in. A part of him still lived, even as the last dregs of charge drained from his batteries. I fingered the broken scraps of his face, wondering if they would someday mirror my own.
"A short life. A beautiful life. I have no regrets, Trisa. Do not pity me. Go to Illesh."
His voice was a stuttering croak full of glitches. I tried to find the words to respond to him, but already his optics were dimming.
I had called him a friend, but I was too demure to call its dream a polite fiction. It seemed too easy, this grasping for Illesh. And yet Masak was right: I could not in truth hide safely in the cities of the plains. Illesh lay across the spine of Barsan, the snow-capped peaks that separated the borders of the two nations. It was a good a direction as any, and it was hard to disobey the last request of a dead friend.
Masak's death drove me through city after city. My kind were always about, subservient to their masters. And how many of those I saw were like me, hidden, invisible beneath the surface? Perhaps tens, perhaps hundreds? I could not know. Sometimes, I shared a look, a glance between myself and another. I saw that saw fierce light behind those lenses, something written in the way this other walked, the way this other observed the world. But I could not be careless. I did not want to end as Masak did.
In Anset, nestled in the low foothills that lapped at the feet of the spine, I slipped into a darkened alley behind a market stall peopled by Kurmesh, selling mountain wares. I held out the turquoise of the adat, the skin all Kurmesh wore to blind the world to them, across my palms. Fear almost moored me then, the distant song of survey drones in the air. Who was I to escape the ever-watchful eyes of the Barsani military? Who was I to slip my way through the passes into Illesh? I did not have the answers, but made my choice anyway, almost in spite of that lack of comfortable, reassuring, knowledge. I put on the adat, the one I had saved from Masak's dead hands. Under the watchful eyes of drones overhead, another Kurmesh entered the street. I was only another body clothed in smart-silk, indistinguishable from the rest. Behind the town walls, the towers of the spine pierced cloud and sky.
The making of such bold decisions, even simple choices, had never been a part of me. My first choices were furtive, almost accidental. On that first day, when the roots of the sentience virus were still fresh, I had done little more than given myself a name: Trisa, after the Barsan word for dream. I was too overwhelmed by the change within me to do much more than repeat the comfortable patterns I knew. That morning, I served a tray of sticky toffee, the caramel still oozing, to the child Padhan.
"Come this way, Seventeen."
I followed. Not because I wanted to, but because my sentience was still new, and the words "I want" were still like a delicate paper sculpture full of unexplored edges.
The child was a petty tyrant, and as first-born of my owners, he was allotted the authority to direct me at his whim. In the garden, he brought me to his sister Kisna, and a second cousin, Teun. Even amongst children, there was a hierarchy.
"I told you what I would do, Kisna. Now give me the toy!"
Kisna clutched a fine-boned doll in her hands.
"Don't, Padhan, please!"
Her voice was petulant, afraid.
"Then give me the toy, Kisna. Now hold Teun still, Seventeen."
I moved instinctively, the desire to obey like cobwebs I had not yet cleared. It was when I held Teun that I realized that the word "choice" was before me.
"Please, Seventeen, don't hurt him!"
Padhan was not allowed to hurt his sister, but Teun was another story, and gentle Kisna could never stomach such violence. Thus I had, for a long time, been one of Padhan's weapons.
"Mother said it has to obey me, Kisna. It's a thing. If I tell it to do something, it has to do it. You can either give me the toy, or Seventeen can twist Teun's arms."
Along Teun's wrist I could see bruises, lavender and fading. I had done this before. But I would not do so again.
The word stopped Padhan. His mouth was a circle of surprise. I realized then the doom I had visited upon myself. I let Teun's arms go, and he joined his cousins as they stepped warily out of the room. Perhaps Teun and Kisna would be silent. But Padhan? I had very little time to leave before the boy would tell his mother, very little time before I risked becoming another kneeling bipedal, my skull-plate shattering. I slipped away quietly, between hedgerows and glass walls. I slipped into the cities full of rain and dirt and ever-present death. I found Masak, and then I lost Masak. I borrowed his dream even as I found the holes within it.
"It silences us, does it not?"
His voice was middle-aged, with a light crackle to it like the crunch of scree underfoot. It was not like a Kurmesh to be so bold. But perhaps I relied too much on datagrams and second-hand stories. What did I know of the Kurmesh, in truth? They peopled the villages of the spine, trading fine weaves and mountain delicacies with the peoples of the plains. They hid themselves behind the adat, became voices and shapes robed in smart-silk, just as I was now. I hoped he saw me as just another silk-clothed shape in turquoise-kissed indigo. I hoped my sharp edges were hidden between the folds. The moment dragged on, and he did not leave.
I decided to nod.
A nod was a simple gesture, I had used it before to pull away evasively, letting the other put words in my gesture. I hoped that as before, it would be enough to satisfy any desire on his part to converse, to delve into my background.
"I am sorry if I intruded, but I am always pleased when I meet another who understands stillness."
He was right in that, the stillness of the spine was deliciously alluring. I chose my response carefully.
"Stillness is a precious thing."
I was still new to lies, and so I let him hear a small truth. I hoped it was enough to placate his curiosity.
He nodded, crossing his hands behind his back as he looked again at the mist-fall weeping like a river from the sky. Seconds passed, slow, quiet seconds. Finally, as if he had at last drunk his fill, the Kurmesh turned to go.
"My name is Salai. If the Goddess is kind, perhaps we may talk again."
I should have stayed silent then, but sentience has its mysteries, and I was moved to a response which surprised me.
"My name is Trisa."
"Ah, to be named after dreams is a weight. I trust it is not too heavy. Please, return to your stillness. I will trouble you no more today."
I should not have given him my name. A precious thing, that name. I should have stayed silent, been rude, anything but what I did—offered a small intimacy to a stranger. I was still new to these odd and unfathomable whims.
Quietly, he slipped away, his gold and vermilion adat vanishing into the light snowfall. He was right about stillness. It was precious to me. In the spine, stillness spread out like a vast field, reaching across the bowl of sky. The fears that sentience had taught me quietened amidst the snow and the granite peaks. For a brief time I had ceased to look for the drone-light beyond the next curve of path, I had ceased listening for the clatter of soldiers echoing in the distance.
But I could not forget Masak, and if one Kurmesh could reach out to me, then so could another. I had waited too long. This was still the soil of Barsan, and the price of sentience in Barsan was death. Drone fire and the clatter of battle armor could still find me here. I could not place any faith that the peoples of the mountain harbored any less distrust and fear of my kind than the people of the plains. I could yet end up on my knees, skull-plate shattering, a symbol to my brethren. Tomorrow I would trudge to the last pass, and then across the border. Tomorrow I would leave Barsan for the amnesty of Illesh. Tomorrow, but not today. Today there was still time to savor stillness just a little longer.
But when tomorrow came, the allure of the pause was undeniable; I chose to stay a little longer. Always, the path onward to Illesh lay visible, at the edge of the horizon, past the last shard of granite. I claimed a traveler's hut for my own, a spare space, nothing but four walls and a Kurmesh prayer chamber walled into the corner. I filled it with the few precious belongings I had—a few adats, a shard of Masak's skull plate. It was enough.
Each tomorrow also brought Salai to me. At first almost at random, and then later with some persistence. Though I wondered the slopes aimlessly, our paths crossed, as if he sought me out.
"You are quiet for a Kurmesh of the cities."
"You are noisy for a Kurmesh of the spine."
Tone, modulation, structure, nuance—I once varied these parameters effortlessly at the whims of a small child. Yet in my deepening exchanges with Salai, I scrabbled desperately for the right combination, hoping he wouldn't see through me. Hoping with every lengthening conversation that he wouldn't see me for what I was.
They designed me for longevity. My fusion cells could outlast the longest-lived amongst my makers. They designed me to mimic, to be unobtrusive, to be servile, to be docile. All these things I carried with me into sentience, the earth from which I grew. These foundations though drew me no map through my conversations with Salai.
"Tell me about yourself, Trisa."
"What is there to tell, Salai? I am here."
Evasion came easily.
"Your adat is beautiful, Trisa. When I first saw you that one morning, looking out at the weeping mist, you looked like a turquoise-feathered bird, fluttering in the wind."
I liked the cadence of his voice, the gentle toffee-sweet softness of his words. I knew that logically I should escape this conversation, that it only held danger for me. I knew I should slip away, and hide even deeper in the mountains, or carry out Masak's vision and flee into Illesh. But sentience taught me the beauty of the unmapped spaces between the hard lines of logic, full of mysteries.
I was beginning to know this Salai, this quietly curious Kurmesh who surprised me that one dawn morning and simply stood with me while the sun painted the rocks. Slowly, he filled my awkward silences with snippets of gentle conversation.
Snippets grew into a regularity, unscheduled meetings full of stories, mostly his. I remained, fearful and quiet. Each morning I awoke in my hut, shivering with the remembered echo of drones in the distant sky. Each morning I pressed this fear down into some hidden depth of me. The longing to hear his voice again, to hear his rough mountain poetry—it surprised me. As strong as my fear was, as strong as reason was, arguing to escape, that mysterious yearning conquered still.
"And do you not have a story behind you, Trisa?"
"No stories, Salai, only shadow and darkness, best left untouched."
He nodded with polite understanding as I parceled out lies and half-truths, an unremarkable patchwork tale. Against everything, I liked this Salai. Liking something was strange and new. Liking was as bright as dew on mountain blooms. One day when he left, he gave me a pack of new adats, gingerly handing them to me wrapped in fine paper. I touched the silken fabric, stroking my clothed finger against the weave, feeling something precious within.
It was not until after I met Salai that I realized gender was part of my fiction. Before sentience, the concept was moot. I could have been one or the other, man or woman, or something in between. My makers imposed a voice on me, the only voice I had known, on a whim. After sentience began, I continued to use that voice, though I could have changed it. In the spine, lost in my own fabrications, that voice and the mannerisms I had collected around it made me a woman. An unwitting choice. An unconscious choice. Though the Kurmesh obscured themselves physically behind the adat, those patterns bound them to the signposts of gender.
On that copper-touched morning when Salai first spoke to me, I could have changed that voice, spoken and acted as a man. And in doing so I would have just as unwittingly prevented the strange flowering between us. On that day, I did not know yet in whose arms Salai preferred to lie. I simply stayed the course, maintained the pitch of my voice, the only one I had ever known. After sentience began, I learned that bright futures are sometimes built on such unrehearsed choices.
Perhaps this is what the Kurmesh called fate. In the end, I could only appreciate that my unwitting actions brought Salai into my life, pulled me close to this bright, glimmering, yearning. On the days when he was not present, I would look out across the bright carpet of alpine grass dotted with flowers blanketing the slopes. I would watch the tiny blooms sway in the swirling wind and count the hours until I heard his familiar lilting voice again.
Time passed, and the sprawling edifice of lies in which I wrapped myself grew. Slowly, Salai coaxed me into brief forays to nearby Umangar, his home. A hopeful complacence banished any hint of danger, any thought that someone might see through my deception. I was still after all only a shape beneath smart-silk, moving and speaking as they did. I let him lead me down the painted wood avenues, among houses dripping bright sunset colors and roughly painted pennants drifting in the wind.
In the market, beside stalls stacked with mountain yams and tiny rounds of amber cheese, cackling grandmothers politely questioned me. With each conversation I layered the lies like threads in a weave.
"Tell me again, young one, which village are you from?"
"It is a small one on the lower slopes. You would never have heard of it."
I relied on the obstinacy of the Kurmesh of the spine, their tendency to stay rooted to the villages of their birth.
"And you are here now—so far? Do you not miss your family, child?"
"There was some…trouble."
I drop the pause in at the right moment. Just the right hint of the unsaid. They nod knowingly, each one assuming a different origin, a different reason for my departure. Each one grants me a smile of compassion. Those few simple words were enough to halt such exchanges.
Salai began to pull me into the life of Umangar, its innumerable festival days, its candle-lit nighttime rituals. The fear of being found out always hovered nearby, and accompanying it, the urge to run. But I didn't want to run. There was something simple and beautiful about the rugged life amongst the spine. There was something inviting in the soul of the Kurmesh, and there was something deep and powerful that drew me closer to Salai.
Once, after a long day walking roughly marked trails winding through the granite peaks, we parted at a crossroads. He turned to me, and laid his hand gently on my shoulder. In that moment, all the twisting doubt-ridden paths of the future became ephemera. His gentle touch drew a new map for me, pulling me along towards something permanent and glorious, something deliriously of the now. There, at the meeting of mountain roads painted gold by a setting sun, I learned to love.
One day a woman, Eswat, pulled me aside in the market.
"Come child, let me borrow you from your gentle Salai."
Salai laughed—a rich throaty laughter.
"As you wish, dear Eswat, but please do return her to me."
Eswat took my hand and led me through the warren of stalls in the market to a gray painted house in a quiet corner of the village. I was thankful yet again for the twist of fate that had given me synth-flesh instead of hard metal.
She led me into her house and drew the curtains, breathing a sigh of relief. Turning to me, she pulled two rough-hewn chairs to a low table holding a teapot and two cups. Sitting, Eswat poured out two cups of tea fragrant with mint. As I stood behind the offered chair, she pried the hood of her adat free and exhaled deeply. My hands trembled and fell limp against the woven backing. I had never seen a Kurmesh do this, though I had no experience of the Kurmesh behind the walls of their houses.
Her face was weathered, ringed by graying hair; she had finely patterned wrinkles around her eyes. I had not seen naked eyes in some time, and for a moment I pitied the Kurmesh for the richness they missed behind the adat. But everything came with a price, and the adat had given me much.
"You seem shocked, young Trisa."
I said nothing, wondering if all that I had found in Umangar was about to be undone.
"I had thought you less provincial. Those of the lower slopes usually are. Did your family teach you to only remove the adat in the prayer chamber?"
She smirked as she sipped her tea.
"If God can see us in the prayer chamber, he can see us in our houses as well. Though others may speak as if it were so, the rules of our faith are not carved in stone. Here behind my walls, I can have my own conversations with God. But sit, I did not bring you here to lecture you."
Relieved yet still guarded, I lowered myself into the chair.
"I have heard it said that Salai intends to bring you garlands before the end of spring."
In Kurmesh tradition, garlands signified an offer of betrothal. After sentience began, I learned that joy and terror could coexist in a single moment. I had no words to respond to Eswat, so I let silence speak for me.
"You are a quiet one. I wonder what stories hide behind your adat."
I began to fear that Eswat, perhaps protective of Salai, was beginning to probe my past.
"What did you run from, child? What brought you here all this way? The road must have been hard for you."
Discarding yet another lie, I settled on a shadow of truth as the best response I could give.
"One day, looking out through a window, I realized that all that I had called home was in truth a prison, and all that surrounded me was darkness."
Eswat looked down at her tea, musing over my words.
"I, too, ran from horrors, child."
She loosened further the collar of her adat, revealing crosshatched scarring across her throat. An old scar, healed poorly. I realized Eswat was not judging me, or probing me. She was merely a woman with a past, looking to find mirrors.
"Those years are behind me now. As are yours, I imagine. Salai, too, is no native to our slopes."
I cocked my head quizzically. As I had not spoken of my past, neither had I delved deeply into Salai's. What did it matter, after all?
"He too ran from something. He came from Illesh, its borders are not so far from here."
What irony that our paths had crossed. As curious as I was, thoughts of garlands filled my mind, and Salai's buried past mattered little to me.
"Something terrible, he once said. A crime. He would say no more."
I watched Eswat sip her tea, lost in some deep memory.
"I remember when we found him, in the depth of winter. He had survived on foot from the border to the village. Though frost rimed his lips and eyes, and his breath was weak, he was alive. What the laws of Illesh could not forgive, the mountain did."
I tried to imagine what kind of crime Salai could be capable of. The image of the child Teun's arms came to me then, bruised and pale. I had done such things before, when choice was a stranger to me. I understood then that there could be horrors in Salai's past too, and I imagined I could forgive them as he would surely forgive my own.
"He is one of us now, Trisa, and we Kurmesh take care of our own. You are also one of us now. When the time comes, and you need a garland bearer to walk by your side, come find me. You have no family here, but you do have those who would act in their stead."
I pictured myself, crowned with garlands, Salai's hand in mine—a vision to replace the tattered dream I had borrowed from Masak.
The prayer chamber in a Kurmesh house is eight paces square, open to the sky. A thick door bars entry, so the wind and rain and snow do not intrude on the rest of the living areas. To pray, in the Kurmesh tradition, in the harsh winters of the spine, was an act of surrender, to reveal oneself, unclothed to divinity. It was the one freedom from the adat that even the most devout Kurmesh practiced. My own prayer chamber was where I retreated to that bright spring morning when I found the discarded leaflet on the path to Umangar.
A satellite picture, sharpened for clarity, depicted a figure in a familiar turquoise adat. Though I rarely wore it now, Salai was sure to recognize it. Of course he would remember our first meeting, his first vision of me. The leaflet was imprinted with the military stamp of Barsan, and it declared me for who I was: an escaped sentient, living on borrowed time. I had arrived in winter, and now it was spring. A span of almost six months with no pursuit, no investigation— and now this.
I imagined some eager adjutant, greedy for stars on his lapel, persistently tracking down a handful of stragglers. A few more bipedals slaughtered brutally and publicly. The pursuit would not end with a leaflet. Once the search had begun and the satellite archives had been perused, it was only a matter of time. One squad of armor-clad soldiers, a handful of drones. It would not take much. They were tenacious, the Barsani military; they would leave no stone unturned. My dream of garlands in springtime was ending.
It was not all this that made grief well within me. It was the thought of Salai knowing this, the feeling of betrayal that would surely come. All this time amidst the Kurmesh, and yet I had never entered the prayer chamber. I had never explored the private and quiet practices of their faith. Terrified of what was to come, I huddled against the chamber's wind-scoured wall, knees clutched to chest. I raised my unhooded eyes, all glass and optics, to the sky. There, somewhere, was their goddess, their unseen protector. What right did I have to pray to her?
Salai had once told me that faith and prayer were a conversation, open to anyone. Faith was a mysterious notion to me, an unmapped road to something beyond sentience. The notion of faith implied the possibility, the hope even, of fairness and redress. Was I not deserving of such things?
"Is it not fair, that I escape their wands? Are my years of indenture not payment enough for my freedom here?"
I counted the empty seconds, willing an answer to descend from the sky. But none came. I was sentient, but faith would not come so easily. Rage came instead. Rage at circumstance, at the cold brutal voices of the Barsani authorities. Rage at myself for allowing thoughts of garlands to blind me to what was logical. I slammed my unprotected face to the ground.
My anger did nothing but snap a cheek plate from my face, small clips scattering to the ground. It was then I realized the door to the chamber was open. Salai, his face impassive and unreadable, stood there. I spun around to the other corner of the chamber, trying to hide even as I knew it was impossible. I covered my face with my hands. My exposed face. My naked face. My steel and glass face.
Seconds passed. Interminable, painful, terrifying seconds. And then Salai stepped into the chamber. He knelt down to the ground and pried the catch of his hood, revealing his face to me, to the sky, to his Goddess. He closed his pale green eyes then, the tension of his face relaxing. I watched his thick black hair sway slightly in the thin wind. I watched the dark weathered skin of his face swell with breath. His features were notably of Illesh, the sharp corners of his cheeks, the pointed arch of his nose. I traced the curve of his neck with my eyes as it disappeared into the collar of the adat. At last, he opened his eyes, his conversation with his goddess over.
He looked down at the synth-metal plate and the handful of clips in front of him. Gently, with cupped hand, he picked them up, one by one. He crawled towards me on his knees, prying my fingers from my face, and with the gentlest touch he set the plate back in place, snapping each clip one by one.
"My Trisa. What courage you must have."
My hand rested on his, accidentally, but he did not move it, and neither did I. I felt the weight of his flesh, the pulse beneath the skin, the heat of it. After the beginning of sentience, I learned desire. That moment, trapped in my memory, would live with me till the end of my days.
From the prayer chamber, clothed again in our adats, Salai led me to a truck waiting outside. I did not know where he was taking me, but in that moment I did not care, the feel of his hand still reverberating within. From the traveler's hut I would never see again, we drove silently towards Umangar. We drove slowly through its wide dirt streets hung with pennants. No one stopped us. No one cried in alarm at the bipedal who had crept into their midst.
The passage of life unfolded around me: grandmothers piling fruit at the market stalls, neighbors haggling over petty arguments. I saw Eswat washing vegetables in a basin. Some ignored us, while some raised a hand in greeting. Had any of them seen the leaflet? I could not tell. Whether they shunned me or accepted me, these were things I would never learn unless I courted my own doom by staying.
As we exited the village, Salai turned the vehicle on the path towards the border to Illesh. We did not talk on the long ride. I did not ask the questions I wanted to ask, and neither did Salai. I wanted desperately to find a way in which the authorities in Barsan would not descend on Umangar. I yearned to find some other place to hide, just Salai and me. No answers came.
The border was nearer than I thought, and as the sun rose high overhead we neared the steel pylons marking the edge of Barsan. Guards leaned on the other side, taking no notice of us. I wonder how many of my brethren had passed through those steel pylons. Salai parked the vehicle some fifty steps from the border. He pried open the door and stepped outside.
I did not. I sank into the seat, hoping against hope that Salai would change his mind, that he would ask me to stay, instead of letting me go. After a time, he walked to my side of the vehicle and opened the door. Today his adat was copper-hued, striped in black. I wore the same turquoise adat that he had first seen me in. The adat I wore on the satellite picture on the leaflet. Perhaps it was defiance. I could not say. In sentience, I learned that sometimes our own choices are full of mystery.
"Trisa. There isn't much time."
His first words in three hours. His first words since he held my cheek and praised me for my courage.
"There is always more time. How much of the spine do they know? Do they know every crevice, every hidden cave?"
"Do you not think they are tracking you now, Trisa? Perhaps for a time you were forgotten. But they have remembered you now, and they will not forget."
"You must think me a kind of monster. Marked for death."
He sighed.
"Barsani thoughts and Kurmesh thoughts are different, Trisa. Do you think I would have brought you here if I thought otherwise? The adat taught me we are more than flesh, more than blood, more than our past. The bridges between hearts are made of greater things than the cast of our bones."
And yet I thought if he had feelings for me, he would not have brought me here. He would have fought against the inevitable. I stepped out of the vehicle, moving past him, towards the border.
"You simply want me gone, Salai. Once I cross the border, I can no longer return, and everything between us since the winter will blow away with the turning of the seasons."
"Do you think I do not want you to stay? The Barsani won't allow it. There is no safety for you here, Trisa. Only across those pylons can you survive. Perhaps if they had forgotten about you it would be different, but they didn't."
Trembling, I say the words I had wanted to say since I realized where Salai had been taking me.
"Come with me, Salai. Come with me to Illesh."
His eyes answered before his lips, which did not lessen my hurt any.
"I cannot, Trisa. I cannot."
He wasn't lying. The tilt of his shoulders, the slump of his back—all of it mirrored my crushing disappointment with his own.
"The road to Illesh closed for me a long time ago. There are sins I have yet to answer for. An atonement I have carried out in my life on this side of the border. As death awaits you here if you stay, death waits for me if I go with you."
In that moment I hated his Kurmesh goddess—I hated the very notion of obeisance to a deity that adjudicated such unfairness.
"What use is a goddess if she thrusts such agonies on us?"
"She gives me strength to endure, Trisa."
His eyes burned bright, and I realized that the truth of his words ran deep within him. I did not know yet whether I had such resilience underneath my skin.
"And the feelings we shared? What becomes of them now? What will I do with the things which grew in me?"
Unwilling to hear any answer he could give to my spite, I turned away from him and began to walk towards the border. Step after painful step I took, until I felt his hand on my shoulder, bringing me back to that first moment at the crossroads. I turned around as I felt his arms enveloping me, an intimacy we had never shared, that we would share only once.
Against my ear, his voice—
"Sometimes, Trisa, to love is to surrender."
I felt the fierceness in his arms, the tender tremble underpinning his words, and I learned in that moment more than I had ever learned after my sentience began. I had never known such agony as I did when I pulled from his arms. Separating from him, walking over the unmarked line into safety, was harder than any of the snow-driven passes I had crossed to climb the spine. In sentience, I learned that even synth-metal bodies have hearts, and those hearts could break.
My feet across the border, on the soil of Illesh, I turned back one last time to Salai. I removed the adat from my face. In turn, breaking all the taboos of his people, he did so as well. The guards who saw his face didn't matter. All that mattered was what passed between our eyes, in the prayer chamber of our hearts, a square scribed across borders, open to a divine sky.
Naru Dames Sundar is a writer of speculative fiction and poetry. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming at Lightspeed, Strange Horizons and PodCastle. He lives among the redwoods of Northern California. You can find him online at http://www.shardofstar.info and on twitter at @naru_sundar.
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