“Because I Held His Name Like a Key” © 2025 by Catarina João

When I met the young Mr. Turing, I had not yet ascended as Autumn’s King. Nowadays it has become fashionable for the sons and daughters of the lesser fey gentry to improve their position in the shifting hierarchy of the Courts by virtue of intrigue, scandal, and the naked blade; but in those times, it was the custom to advance one’s position through the collection of human bagatelles. Poets, polymaths, politicians—all manner of mortal myrmidons who flourished, in turn, during their time under the butterfly-bright attention of this Court or that one.

A changeling, of course, affords the best expectation of loyalty, but I have never had the patience for cultivating a companion from scratch; nor have I ever seen reason to abandon the comforts of the Courts to scrounge through cradles low and high. Instead, I opened doors. Anyone worth having would come to me. To ride searching and screaming over the worlds—that is the purview of the Wild Hunt, and my taste for flesh has never been of a kind with theirs.

On what was for me a quiet morning, he jogged into my Fellforest parlor through a door I’d tossed—in a fit of pique or boredom—at a musty potato cave in Dorsetshire. A few mortals had wandered through it before, as well they might; but never yet one wearing sodden-wet running shorts and trainers. (Indeed, the most recent visitor to use that door had done so some hundred years before running shorts had come into fashion.) He turned from me at once to survey the door through which he’d come. On the other side, rain pattered down through bud-tipped branches. Yes, he said, I thought as much; and he nodded with satisfaction in a hypothesis duly supported.

Visitors have most commonly responded with awe, or fear, or simple confusion, when they first arrive, through my intervention, in Elfhame; there are those, too, who step across my threshold a-shiver, with simple hope or elaborate greed, that they will find among the Lords of Faerie such things as they have been denied in their own world. To be met instead with this supple curiosity presented me the rare gift of novelty, and I could only laugh, for I knew that such a creature would be the envy of all the Courts.

At the sound, his shadow moved first—realizing for the first time, perhaps, that it was not bound to him in the same ways, not in the sunless light of Elfhame—and it strained toward mine where it lay on the carpet of dry leaves at my feet. Alan himself turned to me and offered a rueful smile and his apologies for entering uninvited, and without any sort of decent greeting besides. Still a youth, then, tripping around the rim of manhood and waiting to tumble into his majority. When he spoke, steam billowed from his mouth, to match what rose from his rain-dampened shoulders: good afternoon, sir, or—He paused there, taking account of the wan light that streamed down through the woven branches of the parlor roof, before he continued: or perhaps I ought to say good morning.

I passed the correspondence with which I had been occupied to a waiting raven and stood, so that my shadow slid across my visitor’s. He seemed entirely unconcerned by his sudden arrival, and I said as much; to which he replied that there was little enough utility in being disturbed by the unconventional method of transport. I’m here now, in any case, he said, and he smiled again, and asked me how my door worked.

While our shadows cavorted, playing a coy hide-and-seek in the patches of darkness beneath the branches, I showed him the runes I had drawn upon the trees that formed the doorframe: those markings which guided the path he’d traveled and other like-minded routes from his realm to mine; those which bound world to world and held them fast against one another. He scratched his head, and said that he’d hoped for a stronger basis in the natural laws with which he was familiar, though he confessed that he wasn’t much of a physicist. And he craned his neck for a better look into the Fellforest and asked me if I might show him around.

That carried us into the disappointment of familiar terrain: lacking true power of their own, mortals grasped instinctively at any they saw. Even now, as Autumn King, I watch my human petitioners stare up into my face, seeking nothing deeper than some glimmer of their own reflection. I had already indulged him in one curiosity, and I reminded him, velvet politesse draped over the blade of meaning, that nothing in Elfhame was freely given—even if you did not know the cost, it would come to be reckoned in its course.

He protested then, with a hint of abashment, that he had not brought his billfold nor anything worth trading on his long jogging route, and at that I laughed again, and suggested that we might exchange something beyond mere material goods.

Time can be a gift, he said, one not always fully appreciated when it is given. And his eyes went to the wooden chessboard that rested in its place of honor atop a polished stump, its rows of rooks and redcaps, queens and courtiers.

Time, yes, a passable euphemism. But to ensure my intent did not slip past him, I allowed my shadow enough rein to rise from the rough earth—my visitor had not learned the game of control over his own, not in his realm where a man’s shadow bends unthinkingly to his every whim, and his followed mine into the air. As speech is not in the nature of a shadow, these silhouettes told each other of their desires without words, and in doing so, they also told Mr. Turing of mine. We slipped out of our clothing and our shadows alike, so that we and they might couple privately and like unto like.

I found him eager but not desperate, attentive but not self-effacing, and not long after we had finished, with the lacework of sweat and semen drying on our skin, he stood up again and dusted away the bits of leaf and soil that clung to him, and he said he’d had a fine time but that he ought to finish his jog before it got much later.

Though this son of man towered over me, I did not trouble myself to rise. He still had no shadow to drape over me, with his and mine alike still elsewhere at their play. Cool air or English shame drove him quickly to dress himself, but, unbothered by either of those, I propped myself up on one elbow to watch him. Did he not, I wondered aloud, wish a proper introduction to my Court? Here, he would find pursuits that would put his time to better and more interesting use than trotting to and fro. Here, he would be understood and appreciated in a way he never would be there. Here, things were sweet and simple.

He brushed the leaf-litter out of his hair and told me that as he himself was neither sweet nor simple, he thought he would rather not stay. But he hesitated, and I knew then that I had adequately baited the hook after all. He would return in time—and what matters time, to the timeless?

If you like, I said carelessly. I warned him that he would not be able to use the same door twice, but told him, too, that there were others that would make themselves known to a watchful eye.

He nodded gravely, and said he hoped we would meet again, and as he turned to go, he said to me one more thing: My name is Alan, by the by. Alan Turing.

A true name freely given, without a thought as to how I might use or abuse it. I offered him something in turn, a figment of a name to call me by—the north wind’s passing fart, a grasshopper’s cough, and he smiled, and thanked me for it, and when he trotted off back into Dorset, rain quickly darkened the dry patches on his shirt.

He did return, as good as his word and better, without me ever having to yank on the chain of that true-given name. By his reckoning, some three years had passed, while I had seen the rise and fall of three would-be fey dynasties all in the course of a single evening’s ball. When we allowed ourselves the opportunity for closer examination, his body had changed in innumerable little ways, which was a profound curiosity to me; and mine had changed not in the least, which he found an impossible riddle.

He did not much appreciate my explanation that I was as old as my world itself, and also born anew with each falling leaf and encroaching early frost. A human mind is an incomplete thing, and I knew there was no way to express my nature to him in a sense that he could have understood, and yet he continued to desire all along that I try, and I cannot say that my explications were enhanced for his wishing me to speak with his fingers in my mouth. Among his faculties he did not count a capacity to let things rest in their native duality—he demanded a single phenomenon with unifying explanatory power.

Later, while our shadows played a well-matched game of chess, Alan sketched out a shape in the dirt between the roots of a yellow-leafed beech tree—a fortuitous choice, for the beech grove was young enough not to take offense at this forwardness, and this specimen in particular was too shy to interrupt Alan with questions about his thought experiment. There must be some means, he said to me, by which matter is processed—transformed—as it is moved from a realm with one set of physical laws to a domain with another set entirely. Imagine, then, a circle that exists on a flat plane, a plane of only two dimensions (and he indicated the shape in question where he had scratched it on the ground).

Easily enough done, I said, and having done so, I suggested that we move on to pursuits of a more challenging nature, be it intellectual or physical.

But he urged me to possess myself of a moment’s patience, and he placed a round acorn-cap atop the circle. Imagine again, he said, that the circle passes through a portal, or indeed a doorway, of some sort, into a world of three dimensions. And there, our circle finds that the shape it possesses in two dimensions represents a mere cross-section of the whole, and that only now, senses transformed, can it perceive itself in its entirety.

I laughed, and moved the acorn cap out of its circle. A circle altered by its passage into a greater world, I suggested, might well perceive new qualia outside its ken. But perception and ascension were two different things.

He looked at me then, out of the corner of one dark eye, and he got up to retrieve his things—not to depart, he said, but to offer a small gift: a handsome watch on a chain. Truly the gift he gave was the gift of labor, for he taught me how to wind it and asked me to do so regularly, and showed me a twinned timepiece that he kept in the pocket of his own waistcoat. When next he came, he said, he would compare the time that had passed between the two devices, and so develop his understanding of how our worlds aligned. He said, even a simple circle can grow into a third dimension, once he knows it is there.

I laughed and told him that talking in quite literal circles had grown tiresome, and offered him apple wine and roasted hazelnuts, and he ate of what I brought forth, and spoke with both his mouth and mind full and overflowing: of hypotheses and raw-cut first principles. Of experiments. Of proof—proof of natural law, he said, but what he truly meant to prove lay deeper than data.

And by then he had freely given his name, and freely eaten my food. Even when a flat shape perceives an added dimension, it may not always understand what it has been shown. When I next return, he had said, and I knew it for a certainty.

He spent three days in the mortal realm, searching all the while over a long holiday weekend for another door, before he strolled back into my parlor. Nearly all that while had I been drowning in the rot-and-honey oubliette of the Dawnsun Court (for my faintest of associations with the youngest principality, before his failed coup). Before I knew I would be captured, I had entrusted the watch to the care of the wisest pine marten in my parlor. Before she died, she had taught her daughter how to wind the wretched thing, and her daughter taught her own son in turn; and because they were good and loyal subjects all, the watch had known a fastidious custody across their generations.

And yet Alan was not best pleased when he re-examined it, for in his absence each of the numerals had become a small blinking eye, twelve in total, and when he went to wind it he found that the gears had turned into a maze of interlocked, white-enameled teeth (which still turned, and the hands on my watch’s newly vigilant face kept pace with the hands on his).

In sympathy—for he had exclaimed with great dismay over the predicament I had suffered—I offered to alter the watch in accordance with his wishes. What would he prefer it to say? How might I bring it more neatly in line with his expectations?

But he gave the watch back to me, keeping back, this time, the insistence on its care and feeding. I still believe the premise is sound, he said, and he put his mouth to mine as if searching for what honey might linger.

On that occasion he did stay long enough to accompany me to the Seaward Court, where he made exactly the impression that I had desired upon my fellows. The attention of a Tide is an enduring thing, waxing and waning but always present. All manner of watery fey came and went while Alan explicated his mortal mathematics. A fundamentally flawed system, as he described it, what he called the Entscheidungsproblem: incomplete, inconsistent, fumbling attempts to grope for a truth that was at its roots unknowable.

A cold-water Current with limpid blue eyes draped herself over Alan’s shoulders. A pitiful thing, she said solicitously, that there existed no power nor principality in the mortal realm who might address such inadequacies.

But, Alan protested, what was not complete did not inherently equate to what was not interesting. The greater significance of his findings lay, he went on, as the Current receded and was directly replaced by a Tropical Breeze, in the notion of a Universal Computing Machine. Another of his thought experiments, which he explained at length; a thought experiment that argued against its own very existence. And yet, Alan averred, a computing machine of less than universal capacity could, and would, still be achieved. Whatever computational capers a mortal might be capable of, this machine could reproduce, and yield an identical output. Such a computation machine would be governed by written rules to impose upon it the structure of mathematical law, to recapitulate the human capacity to memorize formulae and figures—differing chiefly, Alan noted, in its inability to deviate voluntarily from the structure imposed by those internal instructions. A computational golem, with a set of algorithms carved into its soul.

I wondered aloud whether that was any difference at all, for it seemed to me that a mortal mind found itself ruled in all things by the labyrinthine law engraved upon it by habit, by social custom, by biological demand. Any difference lay only in scale.

But what of free will? asked Alan, and he frowned at the eddy of laughter that spun around him.

Come now, I said gently, you are too old to believe in such a children’s tale as that. In your day-to-day life you must pretend yourself free to choose—to feel oneself an automaton should be intolerable—but in such exalted discussion as this, it is time to fold away your delusions until you need them again. You are more like your machine-computer than you are like to any of your present company.

Am I, he repeated.

Though he did not say this as if to argue the opposite, he spoke with a distance I did not appreciate, not while I still hoped to burnish my reputation with the careful application of his intellect. In my impatience, I said: It is very well to make a machine that behaves like a man. If you could contrive one that thinks like the fey, now, that would be something else entirely. And a deep-sea Current trilled a laugh, and a sea-devil asked on what sort of fuel this fey-machine would run, and as the wheels of conversation settled onto these new tracks, Alan excused himself and retrieved his shadow from beside the dessert arrangement.

It would be some time by both of our reckonings before he returned, and my circumstances and his were both much altered. The turn of his years had carried his world into war, while mine had elevated me into a position of power. When Alan first stepped into the Goldbower, he was much taken aback, and protested that he had never known I was the son of some great lord. I was no such thing, and before he could ask more than I wanted to tell, I said simply that a position had opened and that I had availed myself of it quickly.

Our shadows slunk off hand in hand—for their bond was possessed of a simplicity lacking in our own—while I showed Alan the rest of my new estate’s grounds. The Firstfrost Garden, the Hall of the Dying Sun, the acres of vineyards that tumbled down sloping hills and arbors whose leaves melted into every warm and welcoming color that light has ever touched. He said I had done well for myself, and I told him I could do well for him, too. He could be my royal mathematician, or an Architect Prince of the realm I had won. He could build for me a tower of flowers and calculus.

Perhaps he could, he allowed, but he had work already, of a sort that engaged him, and people dearly relying on its completion. And he refused to be convinced, and refused to be more than politely impressed by the Goldbower, and refused my advances when I pressed myself against him in the Crimson Gallery. Was there not somewhere more private, he protested, and gestured at the servants who hurried through, who watched us intently through a flimsy veil of indifference. He was not that kind of man.

But you could be, I said, this once, for me, and amid a flood of endearments and sweet words, he was, yes, just as I asked of him, he was. Yet he did not linger long before he made his excuses and dressed, saying moreover that with the war and his work, he was not sure whether or not he would be back again any time soon—or indeed at all. The bombings, you know, he said. Might get caught out by the Blitz any day now, or any night rather.

I freely confess that I did not like to hear that, and I offered him again titles, riches, attention, all of which he brushed aside. None of it would last; his mortal body would grow old, and—he said, with a rueful gesture at his face, not as smooth as it once had been, his belly, not as flat—youth’s blossoms had already faded.

And so what? Both my world and his would use him up in their course, but only one would love him first for who, for what, he was.

He stood with that in silence, listing as if against an unseen wind. Finally he said that an argument could be made in favor of open earnest cruelty over the shabby facade that had stood between him and every fey creature he had met in his time among my kind.

The temptation to wield his name rose within me, but I did not enjoy his company because of his tractability, and I knew—had traveled before upon—the compliant ruts that I would wear into him, should I rely too heavily on what I had been given. Instead I lay a last offer before him: If he stayed, I would grant him the power to invent a new arithmetic that would obey every command he set before it, as pliant as a pussycat. Not this nightmare of illogic that he must deal with in the mortal realm.

He smiled, and allowed that there were days where he would have enjoyed that. Do you know, he said, I sometimes imagine that a fey lord got his hands on mathematics before human beings had fully got their minds around it. And he clasped my hand, as if I were an old classmate or a coworker at Bletchley Park, playing his goodbyes in a key of formality to which he had never before tuned himself. He walked through the door and out of the Goldbower. Not for good, not forever, though it seemed so at the time. And because I held his name like a key, and because he had eaten of what I had offered, he left a part of himself behind, and did not notice what he lacked.

I nodded to his shadow where it shuddered on the carpet, unable to follow its master, and bade it make itself welcome.

In later days, mortals would whisper that it was fey magic that broke the machine’s stubborn code. They would say, too, that it was Alan’s time in Elfhame which bent his desire toward the attentions of other men: breathing our strange air, aping our strange customs. Human beings tell stories to understand what falls beyond their ken: wild-eyed mutterers squatted around a primeval campfire, reassuring one another that the raging thunder is the voice of the gods, that the sun soars and sets on the backs of winged horses. That these things are lies does not matter to them, so long as their fears are, for a moment, assuaged. But Alan remained as infuriatingly unmoved by his visits to my world as any man has ever managed to be. Nor did he ever carry his work with him. When he came, he came for an escape—albeit only ever a temporary one—and so he never offered an explanation of his code-machines to me, and I did not ask for one.

What he longed to explain was how things could be one way for me, and another for him. And what I asked was that he stay. And we were both ever disappointed.

Perhaps in the mortal world, hewing to mortal custom, our next meeting would be painted with the same formality: stiff brushstrokes of small talk, reminiscences, the steam rising over a cup of tea. Perhaps there, distasteful news could be received without taking on a life of its own. Certainly human beings have found innumerable ways to convince themselves to live with the intolerable—else they should have run themselves into madness long ago, and from madness into extinction. The wind-up toy, tracing its aimless circles, was not made to look back and understand the trajectory of its journey.

But he came, as he always had, to my realm, and his news trailed after him like a shadow should have done: a fiancée, a wedding date. If he had tried to hand me an invitation like some kind of unearned prize, I could not have held back my wrath. Bad enough that he told me, and then sat with the telling as if he thought I might be glad for him. Was he here, then, to post the banns, I wondered? Did he hope to dress his darling bride in fey-made lace, to make her the envy of mortal women?

Only then did he make note of my ire, and he dared to look put out about it. I had hoped—he began to say, but I did not let him finish, for I knew what he had hoped, and told him so: a human wife for daily wear, a lord of Elfhame for holidays and special occasions. I had killed men and fey alike for lesser insults.

He protested at that—she was his best friend, he would build a plain and mortal existence atop that trustworthy foundation, he had not come to ask anything of me. But he had come, had he not, and the act seemed to me in itself a kind of petition. He had not asked, but I would give, and I gave him his true name and all the obligation it bore. Whether he knew or not that he was compelled, he could not help but follow the tug of the lead. And in the end, if he was in any way truly distressed, it was not to such a degree that he failed to enjoy the fullness of his pleasure.

I kept him for only three days. Three days of dancing, of a whirlwind tour through all the Courts that called me friend or ally, of every kind of congress. He ate what he was offered and slept beside me in the highest tower room of the Goldbower while a dozen Winds capered and sported outside our windows. On the fourth morning, I told him he might as well go back and see to his fiancée. He knew then where he belonged, I said, and I let go the lead.

When he felt his liberty return to him, he cocked his head, a hound listening for its master’s call—or for the thunder. He took my hand, before he left, and kissed my palm, and his lips were chapped and dry.

Three days, that was all, and that really only for show.

Imagine a Changeling, I said, once upon a different day, long before that. Sweep her out of her cradle and carry her to Elfhame and put her in a little room where she can read every book that has ever been written (and several that never will be), but let her never once hear the nightingale sing or the little breezes whistle. But now you must set her a task, and you will write the instructions on your little paper tapes and feed them through the letter-slot in the door of her room, and you may not sing to her when you do so. She will take up your instructions and, following them by rote, she will be able to convert a page of music from A-flat major to the key of the West Wind—if your rules are clearly written and if you have chosen a clever enough changeling. But. But! She will never be moved to tears by the symphony she has altered, because she does not know what music is, let alone that she can hold it in her hand. I can teach a caveworm to dance if he hears the word blue, but that does not mean he has ever seen the sky.

And Alan asked, neither laughing nor serious: And I am the caveworm in this scenario? And I laughed, and said, all over teasing, that he was the sky.

I am no craftsman by trade or calling, but I take pride in the masterwork I wrought from the raw material he left me. With fine hooks of thistle-burr, I reworked the fabric of Alan’s shadow, until it took on depth; with silver needles, I sewed it to shape. What resistance lay in the material worked itself out over long hours of kneading and steaming and pressing. When it was ready, when it was possessed of enough substance and structure to sit upright in a chair and hold a knife and fork, I fed it on all the best and most precious foods: every hair that Alan had shed under my roof, every eyelash that had remained behind on my pillow. Every color reflected in his eyes, or in the shine of his hair. And every word he had spoken aloud in my company, every thought to which he had given the gift of voice. I worried that the frame to which I had fitted this new creature would too swiftly be satiated, but I worried for naught. Though a shadow was never meant to eat, Alan’s—under my guidance—proved to be a hungry thing.

After Alan’s war had ended, I went looking for him. It took me longer than I would have liked to find him, for he had crossed the sea to the patchwork-quilt states that called themselves United, and I had never yet built a door to open onto that strange land. But many things may change in the course of time and necessity, and I did find him, and the light of victory was in his face, so I did not ask him about his little human wife. (Only later did I learn they never wed. Only later.)

In his absence, I had kept busy, and on my visit I was accompanied by the fruits of my labors. With his added dimension and depth, he had come in the course of my work to resemble a facsimile of the man himself—a charcoal drawing, a photographic negative, a shifting inkblot brought to life.

Alan took the introductions in stride. Perhaps he’d already noticed what he’d lost, or perhaps he’d simply come to grips with the matter with a ruthless practicality. The shadow was mine, and not his. I had made an artificial man, and he had not. These facts had been written and would not suffer to be altered. He asked what I called my new pet, and the shadow answered for himself: My name is Alan.

That collected a glimmer of interest from Alan. He studied the shadow up and down, and thought for a moment, and he nodded, and he asked, do you love the one who made you?

Puzzled, the shadow looked at me, but he found nothing in the set of my face—no answers, no explanations. But Alan interceded with an apology: I have put you on the spot, of course you cannot say. And he smiled at me, saying, again we are faced with the Entscheidungsproblem; still, it is a very good likeness.

I spoke his true name then, invoking its power without wielding it in full, and told him he could still return. He could still stay. His smile faded, and he said no. No, he did not believe that he could. And because I did not see any sense in keeping two shadows of the same man, without possessing the real thing, I took what I had and I went back to my own realm.

I think sometimes that it was the loss of his shadow that kept him from returning to Elfhame for help, for solace. For revenge. Or then again perhaps it was simple vanity. The punishment they fitted him with softened his body, stole the vigor from his flesh. A normal course of aging had annoyed him enough, in the face of my immortality. Or else perhaps—

No, we had made our goodbyes, such as they were. He could not have hoped that I would return yet again, to see what they had made of him and to demand redress. He would—

Perhaps there can be no single unifying principle. Some equations refuse to be reconciled.

But if he had asked, I would have roused the Wild Hunt and set it upon Misters Wills and Rimmer, the grubby detectives who charged him with what they called indecency. Or upon the court of his country—have I not gone to war with fey Courts, for reasons worse and more whimsical?—or indeed upon that Queen herself whom they styled Regina when they set her authority against Alan’s good name. I would have scourged England from the Channel to the North Sea, I would have salted her rivers and burned her fields. I would have toppled every standing stone raised in honor of me and mine, I would have rained destruction down on London until she cried out for the mercy of the Blitz.

When I think of his death, alone, in a body forced upon him, the taste of summer’s apples in his mouth—sometimes I think I still will.

His shadow-self remains beside me, and that one remembers all that we have shared—the stories, the embraces, the conversations that led us nowhere except back to bed. So that it will not be lost. So that I will not be left alone in loss. For a time, he made for a popular dinner-guest among the Courts, but it was not long before many ambitious young fey collected their own. Balls and hunts and skating-parties are a hopeless jumble now, all manner of solicitous and well-mannered shadows following in the wake of each fey lord or lady.

Imagine a circle, his shadow, my shadow, sometimes says. Imagine a changeling child.

Imagine something else, I say back. Imagine a sunbeam that knows you are watching it. Imagine an adding-machine that could write its own symphony, and indeed longs to. Imagine for me a different world, for this one has outlived its pleasures.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this story was made possible by a gift from Norah Woodsey during our annual Kickstarter. Publication of the artwork for this story was made possible by a gift from Kim Kuzuri during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Austin Dewar

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“The Last Time Gladys Howled At the Moon” © 2025 by Duds Saldanha

Gladys was approaching her first heat when she shed her fur and lost her tail. The transformation was unintentional, and unwanted. When she awoke in her new form, smelling of skin and sweat, she wailed for her pack in a voice that scraped her throat raw. None of them answered. They’d abandoned her in the night, leaving her to find her way out of the forest and into the world of humans. In that moment, as rocks and branches bit into her tender feet, she wished that they’d eaten her instead.

It took some time for Gladys to learn how to make her way through the world with her dull teeth and nails, balancing on two shod feet instead of letting four supple pads caress the soil. As a wolf, she’d scented prey from miles away, and her ears twitched with the slightest rustle of the underbrush. Now, her ears settled on the sides of her head rather than perched on top, and they and her nose became sleepy and stupid rather than quick and alert. Without her thick fur, she needed clothing to ward off the winter chill; even when the sun baked the land, she learned the hard way that clothes were still necessary to cover the areas humans considered “private.”

But, though she did not choose this life, she did her best to live it well. She washed herself with a bar of soap every night, scrubbed her absurd square teeth with paste, and pulled her combed hair neatly back from her face. At night, she closed the windows to shut out the night air; if her pack still howled for her by the light of the moon, she did not hear it. And if she sometimes sniffed the air and smelled snow, if she on occasion walked outside barefoot and dreamed of running into the woods like a shadow, she told no one but herself.

When she reached an age when such things were seemly, Gladys took a husband, a schoolteacher named Harold. He was a fine man, and together they reared three children that Gladys loved as fiercely as she ever loved her wolfish kin. But oh! How she worried over them, with their tender, rosy skin, so easily bruised, and the blood so quick beneath the surface. Her human teeth and claws were worthless—ornamental, really—so she developed other ways and wiles to protect her children.

Gladys did not forget what it felt like to be a wolf. To tumble with littermates through snow and grass and water. To lick oneself in public, and to bare teeth when provoked. To sleep with one’s pack in a warm, furry, breathing heap beneath the watchful eye of the moon. But she reminded herself that she had a new pack, this small family, and no one could say she wanted for anything.

Years flew by like a wolf over forgiving ground. One by one, Gladys’s children left home to walk their own paths. The house was quiet without their running feet and laughing mouths; Gladys and Harold ate their meals in companionable silence. And then, one night, Harold sat back in his overstuffed chair, sighed, said, “I’m ready now, darling,” and let out his final exhalation. Gladys mourned him as humans mourn, with black clothing and salty tears and a burial in a wooden casket, after which neighbors brought far too many casseroles and stayed far too long in her small living room.

Her children came home for the funeral. Two of them—the daughters—had children of their own, sullen teenagers whom Gladys adored but didn’t truly understand. Her eldest, who’d grayed at the temples and looked so much like Harold that it made Gladys ache, lived with a trio of partners in an arrangement that reminded Gladys, with a pang, of a wolf pack. They stayed for several days, long enough for Gladys’s grief to crest; long enough for her to be grateful when they departed, leaving her to clean and air out the house, and return to some semblance of a routine.

Truly alone for the first time in decades, Gladys pondered her life. She knew her children loved her, but they didn’t need her, not really, not anymore. She thought of her husband, who’d smiled at the end; who’d been ready for what came next.

What comes next for me? Gladys thought.

“Call if you need anything,” the neighbors said, patting her hand and smiling sadly. Gladys had become, in their eyes, a fragile thing. And they were right: Humans were fragile. As a human, she’d learned to startle at noises and flinch away from pain. She avoided dark places and locked her windows and doors against predators. But when she was a wolf, she had been the predator. Now that she was alone in the world, she could no longer ignore the wolf-self that still scratched at the walls inside her, whimpering to be let out.

She did not regret her life. But she had not chosen it.

“I did not choose this,” Gladys said to herself. And so, she decided to change back.

Gladys threw away her razor and tweezers and let all her hair grow: legs and armpits, yes, and even her upper lip and chin, which sprouted in an unruly mixture of wiry white and smooth brown. She ate all the casseroles her neighbors stuffed into her icebox, fattening herself up for winter. She kicked off her thick-soled, supportive shoes and paced the length of her house, restless, aching for wide-open spaces.

But a month later, her skin still shone pinkly through the sparse hair on her face and limbs. Her fingernails remained wide and round; her teeth—the ones that hadn’t yet escaped her gums altogether—stayed stubbornly square; and her ears and nose had, if anything, become duller than they ever were before. Even her eyes had clouded, rendering the moon an amorphous blot like spilled milk in the sky. She stared at it through the window, remembering its sharp edges. Remembering its voice.

“Have I not done enough?” she screamed, not caring if the neighbors heard.

Gladys knew that life wasn’t fair; hadn’t she told her children such a thousand times? But it seemed, still, the height of unfairness to be trapped in a form that had been thrust upon her, a form she’d never wanted, but had been forced to accept. Even during those long, content evenings with a child at her breast and two more at her feet; even when she’d loved Harold sweetly and tenderly without barks or nips; even then, she was still a wolf.

And now she was neither: not a wolf, but not entirely human anymore, either. Unkempt, unshaven, unshod; the neighbors averted their eyes, now, when she passed. She kept her doors unlocked, daring intruders to enter. At night, she opened her windows so that she might smell the night air, sensing snow.

One night, when the moon was full, Gladys disrobed in front of the mirror, letting her stained housedress puddle to the floor. To her surprise, she wasn’t entirely displeased by her flesh. True, she had no glossy coat, but her belly was striped with the reminders of her pregnancies. Her scars told the story of her long years, the risks she’d taken, the fierceness with which she’d fought for herself and her family. Her wrinkles told her of all the times she’d cried, and grimaced, and laughed with her mouth wide open.

She laughed, now, and saw the glint of her canines: a bit of wolf that had never left.

Naked, Gladys stepped outside into the night. She picked her way across the painful asphalt until she reached the trees on the other side. Moss cradled her feet. An owl hooted above. She sniffed deeply and scented water somewhere close.

In the distance, a single howl. Then another, and another: a pack, baying at the moon. It wasn’t Gladys’s pack; she knew this. A wolf’s life is both fierce and fast, and even the youngest members of her old pack would have died many moons ago. The thought made her sad, but not as sad as she might have expected. It was the way of things. And Gladys was still alive after all. She had lived to see this moon. To give her worn but persistent body to this rain-damp night.

The urge to run sparked within her, and although she was no longer built for running, she propelled herself forward for a few painful paces before dropping to all fours, panting. For just a moment, she’d felt it. Pads tasting rain-damp earth. Tongue lolling back. The moon, ancient and powerful and full, welcoming her back home.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of the artwork for this story was made possible by gifts from Kailee Pedersen and Stevi Deter during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson

First Reader: Ruan Etsebeth

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“Faith is a Butterfly Resting on a Rotting Eye” © 2024 by Shan

The string of coral slid from Udo’s wrist. It belonged to his brother Akpan, so he should have known it wouldn’t fit. Akpan had bought it, along with matching pieces for his neck and ankles, from a fledgling market settlement called Kuwo. While he was showing off his purchases, Akpan and his friends laughed at the foolishness of the settlers. Bad enough that they had built homes so far away from the river, but on top of that, they had made new gods for themselves. Can a plant grow without water? Ndia would surely curse them for turning away from her.

Udo had listened as they mocked.

“Can you imagine? Gods of trade and travel,” Akpan hissed. “Can you trade if you do not fish? Will your boat not sink if the river does not grant you grace? The fools will never prosper without Ndia.”

Udo looked at the coral that had slipped to his knuckles, the rich red sheen of it, deeper than blood.

“Maybe there are other things to trade, and other ways to travel,” he said quietly. It was not a question, but Akpan answered like it was, like he always did when Udo spoke.

“No, brother.” He had laughed, patting Udo’s back and turning back to his friends.

Udo had smiled tightly at the dismissal.

Akpan was born three dry seasons before him, but it had always seemed like the distance between their ages was much wider. As children grow into adulthood, it is often hard to know who is the elder until you are told. With Akpan and Udo, anyone could tell at first sight, on first hearing, who was Akpan, the first son in every way, and who was Udo, the one who came after. Akpan was tall and solidly built, handsome and bold, a skilled fisherman, well travelled and wise. All that Akpan was, Udo was not. He was clumsy and cautious, with hands that refused to learn work, a frame small and slight enough to be lost in his brother’s shadow.

It is easy for bitterness to brew from behind a shadow, and that might have been the case with another two brothers, but Akpan, beloved by all, was loved most of all by his brother. He was Udo’s shield from mocking stares and sharp words spit from mouths turned sideways.

One time when they were young, even before Akpan was old enough to be initiated into any cult, long before Udo’s first and second and third and last attempts at initiation, the brothers had gone fishing together on the River Ndia. Udo had suggested it. Those were the days when he was still trying to prove something to their father, his cousins, their mother’s co-wives who were supposed to be his mothers now that she was dead, everyone whose eyes slid over him like dew off waterleaf.

Akpan had sat back in the canoe, cradling a gourd of palm wine, while Udo toiled with his bamboo trap. It was like the fish could smell the desperation pouring off him like sweat and dripping into the river, like Ndia’s children were sending messages through their pinsharp teeth between bubbles of laughter saying, “He needs this. Deny him.”

Even a single crayfish, he did not catch.

That evening, as the sun dipped, Akpan stretched his limbs and took Udo’s trap, saying,

“Give it to me, let me try.”

In a moment, Akpan pulled up the raffia trap and opened the cover to reveal a catfish the size of his leg, with whiskers as long as his forearm. Akpan looked at the beast and laughed.

“Hm. It’s big,” and then handed it to Udo with a wink. “Well done.”

Udo removed the coral, tightened a string of his own cowries onto his wrist, and left for the village square, where all the villagers were gathered for the beginning of the turning of the season celebrations. Akpan had gone ahead with his friends.

He was late to the ceremony, and he arrived to meet a strange, still silence. The chief priest of Ndia’s shrine was standing in the middle of the square, his white wrapper and the white chalk covering his skin putting him in sharp relief among the rest of the villagers.

“What is wrong?” Udo whispered to the young woman beside him.

“Ndia has demanded a sacrifice,” she said, mouth twisting like her tongue had touched something bitter.

The chief priest spoke then: “It has been demanded, so it has been decided. Ndia wants proof of our faithfulness to her. Blood proof.”

Etubom Ukana spoke up, “Ndia has never demanded such a thing! Even when other gods demand cows and goats at the turning, Ndia has been generous enough to accept whatever we offe—”

“Yes!” the priest snapped. “She has been generous! The river has given you your livelihoods, spared your lives as you venture on her. Your children have bathed in her. She has fed you and guided you and protected you. And in return, you have given her bony guinea fowls and half-hearted words of thanks. Now, she wants a proper sacrifice. And she will have it. One way or another.”

“But this—This is too much,” Eka Kedi shouted.

“What does she want?” Udo asked the girl again.

She swallowed before answering. “She wants …”

“She wants the best of you. The strongest, the wisest, the most beautiful, the most beloved,” the priest said, pointing.

Udo followed the finger, and it led his eyes to his brother, Akpan.

“She wants him.”

Udo felt his blood stand still.

No mourning house was opened for Akpan. No white was worn. No waterbuck killed by the hunters’ guild, or pot of soup left to burn overnight. The cults asked for no fine from his family to release him from service. They would settle with the River. No hair was shorn, no tears were shed, at least not in the open, and not a single song was sung in remembrance. It was as if he had never existed. Udo’s brother, a monument of a man, was washed away like a pebble on a riverbank.

Udo could not wrap his mind around the self-deceit. The gaps in conversation where Akpan’s name should have been mentioned. The way people ignored that silence, even as it deafened him.

Akpan’s friends had squeezed their faces and their fists for a moon or two or three, but had eventually given up their anger. You cannot challenge a god to a wrestling match. The River has no back, to slam into the sand. Death has no neck you can grip and snap.

Udo knew that mourning made some people soft, dissolved them into puddles. Loss had made him harder though, like cracked rock, weeping fresh water.

It had made him hungry too. For answers. So that he would not have to spend his nights wondering if his brother was cold, under the river, if he could feel at all.

For power. So that he would never again have to endure being held back as someone precious to him was taken. Akpan’s closest friends had been the ones to grip his wrist to keep him from lurching at the priest and performing an abomination.

After a whole season of a mourning that looked like madness, Udo shaved his head and told his father he was leaving for Kuwo. His father bid him safe travels, giving him his blessing and five manillas and not bothering to hide his relief.

Things were happening in Kuwo that would never have happened in the river towns, under the watch of Ndia and her devotees.

Inlanders had brought their family gods and cults to the city. There were more ways to worship than soups to eat. At first, Udo tried to find one divinity he could believe in. He spent a moon and a half pouring libations to the great-grandfather of a potter, mainly because the man had beautiful eyes and eloquent hands.

When the potter shattered his heart, he found himself buying a handful of guinea corn each day to leave at the root of a waist-tall mango tree where a little girl had set up an altar for a god called Itamke, whose domain was the sky. She claimed that her god let her fly if she concentrated hard enough. Udo went to the tree every day with the offering, just to see the girl smile.

He went one day to the tree and did not see the girl. He returned each day for three market days, and then finally asked the woman who sold roasted plantain in the shade nearby why the girl had not been to her altar in so long.

The woman shook her head and said, “The child climbed a palm tree and just … jumped.” She turned her hand around her head and snapped her finger to ward off evil. “I don’t know what could have possessed her.”

Udo felt his stomach turn and saliva, bitter as kola, gather in his mouth.

“Faith,” he said, and spat on the ground.

Udo tried again to believe.

This time he called on Akaya, the Land. The only god that Ndia held in esteem, and allowed her worshippers to acknowledge. He thought there must be power in something the River respected.

Akaya was a god you could stand on. Steadfast and unchanging. For as long as Udo could remember, and Udo’s memory was his father’s, and his father’s memory his grandfather’s, Akaya had been a god who answered. When it rained, Akaya gifted her worshippers. In the harmattan, she took. Yes, she was demanding, but only till the next rain.

Udo left Kuwo for Ikot Ikaran and worshipped Akaya for two wet seasons, and knew something like contentment, something like routine.

And then came the famine, when fathers spilt their children’s blood like river water to grow fields of yam; when mothers cracked the soft skulls of newborns on rocks, and used the pieces to weed plots of cocoyam. There was nothing Akaya did not ask for, and nothing she was not given. And still, she did not answer.

It was there that Udo’s faith died. It slipped into the barren, cracked earth and was buried by dust. And once again, his anger rose, restrained by utter helplessness … because how does one even curl their fingers into a fist to raise at a god? Or at that wretched accomplice to sacrifice, Death?

Akaya, as god of land and all that grew on it and all that fed on what grew from it, was revered by farmers, but her favourite children were the hunters, who dedicated their skills to her. They paid a special kind of obeisance to her. That came with particular sacrifices. They gave her a portion of every kill, a splash of every sip of wine. These were not like the farmer’s sacrifices, yams and livestock dropped at altars with fear and trembling, like a husband’s to his wife’s mother. The hunters gave to Akaya like a beloved lastborn to a firstborn sister.

And she gave back to them. Even in the famine, they had meat.

The most renowned hunter, most beloved by Akaya, was Adeh. He never came back without a kill.

At the beginning of the famine, when Ete Ene had asked why the hunters had started to return with meat already cleaned and cut, Adeh slapped him with the back of his hand and laid a curse on him for questioning Akaya.

The next morning, Ete Ene’s corpse was found, foam peeking out of the corners of his mouth, and his name became a warning.

Whispers passed from mouth to ear that Adeh’s words of anger were sure to come to pass.

Some people, wise or foolish (whoever tells the story will decide), stopped eating meat they could not place the name or taste of, hastening their starvation. Others ate and did not ask again. Some ate and kept asking, but as the famine continued, the answers mattered less.

Udo did not eat the meat, but only because he never made it to the market in time to buy it. Every time he saw the hunters, they were carrying nothing but bloodstained baskets.

The truth found Udo by chance, as he was foraging for food in the forest. He heard sounds of exertion and walked towards them.

And he saw the abomination with his own two eyes.

Adeh the hunter, cutting a muscled arm, and letting the pieces fall gently into the basket Udo had seen him carry to the market.

“What is this?!” Udo screamed, bile already coating the roof of his mouth.

Adeh startled and looked up, eyes narrowed.

“You,” he said, mouth twisting upwards in something far from a smile. “The stranger from Kuwo.”

“What are you doing, Adeh?”

“What is necessary,” he answered.

“This is an abomination,” Udo spat.

“It is a necessity. It is what Akaya has commanded the faithful to do.”

“Akaya would never command this.”

Adeh laughed. “Who are you to say what a god can and can’t command?”

Udo was silent, chest constricting.

“Before I take this to the market, I will offer a piece to her, and she will accept.”

“You liar! I know that Akaya would never—”

“You cannot know a god.” Adeh laughed bitterly, “You can only serve. And now you will serve her differently,” Adeh continued, standing up and cleaning his knife against his loincloth.

“You cannot kill me. I worship Akaya. I offered her crops and livestock when I still had them. I still give her the first bite of whatever food I manage to find. I am faithful.”

“Good. A perfect sacrifice indeed. Maybe she sent you to me personally,” Adeh said with a smile.

“You … you enjoy this. The killing. You enjoy it.” Udo said, disgusted.

“I am a hunter after all,” he said, a sickening smile spreading on his lips.

Udo was no match for Adeh. The hunter was larger than him, stronger, and fed and fuelled by the vileness he had consumed.

Adeh held Udo down, pressed the knife to his neck, and started to call on Akaya to accept his offering.

As Adeh sang a summoning, Udo saw Death appear behind him. It wore a white wrapper and had a smooth shaved head. It came to him and cradled his head, whispering dark assurances into his ear. Udo wondered if it had held his brother like this, as he was being given to Ndia.

The thought of Akpan set his spine afire with rage, and he felt his right hand tighten around a stone. He smashed it into the hunter’s head.

Adeh cried out and gripped his head, releasing Udo. In a moment, Udo was on top of him, bringing the stone down on him again and again and again until he saw blood leak and bone break and grey essence pour from his skull.

When he looked up, he saw Death staring him in the face. He gripped the stone again, remembering Akpan and the girl in Kuwo who only wanted to fly. He remembered shattered infant spines and the torn throats of firstborns and bodies in baskets, and the people buying them out of fear. The fear of Death, this dirty, devious thing. Maybe he would never see Ndia or Itamke or Akaya, but maybe if he could make Death pay, the debt would be somewhat serviced.

Stone in hand he walked towards it.

Death’s eyes travelled lazily to the stone and back to Udo’s face.

And then it laughed, a laugh as deep as a grave, as dark as eyes shut forever, and disappeared, leaving nothing but the scent of dust and loss and memory, of unfinished things.

Udo fell to the ground, screaming and sobbing, swearing and retching, staining his eyes with blood and bile as he tried to wipe his tears.

The second time Udo ran to Kuwo, he found a very different place from what he had left. The small settlement had grown into a bustling town. The market was larger than any he had ever seen and there were more people there than he had ever seen in one place at one time, more languages than his ears could catch and hold. Luckily he could still get by because most of the pidgins spoken in the city were built on the shared language of the seven river towns.

It was good that Udo already knew hunger well, because it was his closest companion in those  first days back, having arrived in Kuwo with empty hands, blood still under his fingernails.

He survived by doing any work he could, tearing the guts out of fresh fish and dropping them in sacks to be sold as manure, splitting the measly profits with the fishermen. This was not some village where he could have exchanged labour for a filling meal each day.

Sometimes all he could afford to eat was pepper soup made with fish tails and gills. The stench of the insides of the fish followed him everywhere, no matter how much he bathed and how much black soap he wasted to scrub himself from head to toe. He was constantly picking scales off his body. Sometimes he felt like one of Ndia’s children.

Udo did not worship any gods, but he spent most of his free time in temples, trying to catch a spare meal or cowry. Supplicants were often generous in their desperation. The gods of Kuwo had multiplied, but there were a few that most people worshipped now or at least acknowledged. The gods of trade, travel, birth, and death. Itamke, god of birds and air, though not one of the most popular four, now had a respectable following. Udo made sure he avoided that particular temple. He did not want to set eyes on it, even by mistake.

He wondered about that little girl sometimes. Since she died in the name of a god, even if it was one who failed her, was it a sacrifice? If her last breath was a prayer, was it carried on the wings of the wind and inhaled by Itamke? Maybe, Udo thought, that is what sacrifice is to these gods, maybe it is air to them. He wished, if that was so, that they would not breathe so deeply.

The first time Udo heard the name “Adeh” in Kuwo, fear almost peeled off his skin. It had been a whole season since he had killed the hunter in the forest and run away.

A hunter from Aboro, an inland community, had come to sell bushmeat at the market.

“Even Adeh, you people’s hunter god, would not charge that much for this oversized rat you call a grasscutter,” the trader hissed at the hunter.

“If it’s easy to catch, enter the forest and catch it yourself,” the hunter grumbled, “And I don’t even know of any hunter god named Adeh. That must be one of those gods from Obote. They’re the ones with all those strange beliefs.”

When the hunter had sold his game begrudgingly, Udo made his way to the trader, wiping his hand over his mouth to keep his lips from trembling.

“Well done, friend.”

“Well done, my handsome friend,” the trader said, with a customer-calling smile.

“I heard you mention a hunter god called Adeh. I want to … start hunting. I was wondering if you could point me to his temple.”

The trader hissed, realising that Udo was not likely to buy anything. “Oh, it’s a story the inlanders are telling. A benevolent god who was feeding a village during a famine suddenly abandoned them after he was insulted by some pompous man. They did not know he was a god, they just thought he was a hunter.”

“I see,” Udo said, swallowing to wet his dry throat.

Udo went back to his work, wondering how that lie had spread, marvelling at how the raw bloody truth could grow arms and legs and a divine head, how a ghost could become a god.

He turned his head to the side and caught sight of a black butterfly with yellow-spotted wings, standing on a rotten fish eye, moving its wings delicately. That, he thought, is how comfortably a beautiful tale can rest on a hideous reality.

As he left the market that day, Udo felt his feet carry him to a place he had never been. Even though it had only been consecrated a few market weeks ago, it was already full of worshippers. Even here in Kuwo, where the River did not flow, Ndia was known.

Udo stared at his reflection in a calabash of river water as people passed him on their way to wash their hands and faces in identical bowls, muttering prayers to Ndia and carrying offerings to the priests. In the village, they washed their hands in the River herself. Udo saw people lug sacks of corn and cocoyam and heavy leather pouches of manillas. It seemed to him that the offerers with the most faded clothes, the most matted hair, gave the dearest gifts.

Another reflection appeared in the bowl, and Udo looked up to see a familiar face.

“You are to wash your hands as you pray. Keep in mind that Ndia favours those who do not come empty-handed.”

Udo approached the priest, trembling with contained rage.

“You!” he snapped at the initiate through gritted teeth.

The man looked up, recognition dawning on his face.

“Are you not ashamed?”

“You’re the boy fro—”

“You’re the one who killed my brother,” Udo spat.

People were staring now, and whispering. The chief priestess emerged from one of the inner rooms and came up to Udo.

“Young man, wha—”

“Taking lives is not enough,” Udo continued “Now you sit here collecting offerings from the hungry, deceiving the fearful, all in the name of a lie! I said are you people not ashamed?”

The woman was quiet for a moment, before answering softly.

“Fear and Hunger. What do they both have in common?”

“Don’t ask me any useless ques—”

“They are fuel,” she continued. “Fear for your life. Hunger for a better one. Hatred of the ones who have made it so. All these drive people towards power.

“Belief in a god is a roundabout belief in yourself. That a cry, a plea, a word from you, is enough to move someone who can move something. Who can shift the ground on your behalf, make it smoother for the sake of your own two mortal feet. It is the belief that for the sake of your tears, rain will fall. A conviction that for the reason of your anger alone, lightning will drop down from the sky on a clear day and strike the heart of one who has hurt you. The god you choose to serve is a mirror, an echo, your own hand over your heart, drumming a steady soothing beat. What we do here is not in the name of Ndia, in the name of any god. It is in the name of these people. For the sake of their faith. Faith is nothing but concentrated hope, and hope is the lie which strengthens itself until it hardens into truth. So we pick a lie, and mould it into truth. That moulding is the art of faith. I am not ashamed of the work of my hands.”

Udo was silent for a moment, then he hissed and walked away.

Udo was arguing with a trader that her garri was half sand when he heard the scream. It was a young man with the desperation of a child in his voice, being dragged by two large men with resolve hardened into the lines of their faces. Udo knew that look. The look of people with a higher duty. A duty that spelt death. He had seen that look on several faces the day Akpan was killed.

The boy was screaming like someone would help, but Udo knew no one would. The same thing that had carried him to Ndia’s temple a market week ago carried him towards the boy.

“This boy cannot die.”

The two men looked up, and the one who had sharpened his knife said, “Silence. This boy’s life belongs to Akaya.”

“No, it does not,” Udo said.

“Who do you think you are?”

“I am a … a priest of Adeh. And I’ve been sent to tell you that this boy must not die today.”

“Adeh?” the man said scornfully, “Which god is that?”

“He is the god of the helpless,” Udo supplied, not knowing what had placed the words in his mouth.

The other man scoffed, “Every god is a god of the helpless.”

“Adeh is not like them. He answers to his name, and to many others. He has chosen this man as his initiate.”

“That is between you and your god. This one,” he said, pointing at the boy with his lips, “is a sacrifice offered by his own kin. The priests asked the mother for a goat,” the man laughed, “but the woman said she had seven children but only one goat, so she gave us her lastborn.”

“Maybe your Adeh can claim him in his next life,” the other man mocked, spitting disrespectfully in the direction of the boy. Spit landed on the boy’s forehead and began to drip towards his eye. He flexed his tied hands as if he wanted to wipe his face.

Udo felt rage climb up his back and onto his head, covering his eyes with a bloodred film. Was it gods who made people callous? Or did people make their gods in their own wicked image? He did not know the answers to the questions he asked himself, but he knew he would not let that boy’s blood pour as libation.

Udo went to the boy, and wiped the spit with his palm.

He calmed his rage and spoke, every word dropping like a stone into a river. “You said the priest wanted a goat? Give me until sunset. I will get you a goat.”

“We do not need your goa—”

“Hold on,” the second man said to his companion. “How many pots of soup can you cook with a goat? Can you cook soup with this bone of a boy? Will he not be just another body to bury? And the priest said they wanted a goat in the first place.”

“Hm,” the first man said, considering what his friend had said. “Alright. But when the sun sets, the boy dies.”

Udo nodded and watched them leave with the man.

He did not own a single rat, not to speak of a goat. A full-grown goat would cost at least one bronze manilla, and a generous audit of Udo’s worldly wealth would record eight cowries (one was cracked in half).

His options were to steal (another word for “thief” in Kuwo Main Market was “dead body”), beg, or trade.

Udo considered all his belongings and concluded that he had nothing of worth to trade. The only thing of worth he had … did not belong to him. It was Akpan’s coral bracelet, hidden in a bag in the corner of his home. He took it out and weighed it in his hand, then slipped it onto his wrist. It slid down his forearm, still too large.

It still shone like fresh blood, after all this time. Udo gripped it with both hands and pulled, cutting the string and scattering coral beads across the floor. He packed them in his palm and dropped all but one back in the pouch. He turned the last around his palm, and tucked it into his clothes, leaving for the market.

The two men were shocked to see Udo arrive at their temple that evening with a pitch black goat, not a spot of white on it, the red of the setting sun reflecting off its coat like the stain of spilt blood.

They handed the boy to him, took the goat, and left.

Udo looked at the boy, not knowing what to say to one who had been so utterly abandoned by his own blood, and then traded for an animal. He could not imagine how the boy must feel.

“I am—”

“You’re the answer.” the boy blurted out, eyes wide.

“What did you say?” Udo asked, wondering if they had hit the boy’s head as they were dragging him.

“I said you’re the answer. I prayed to every god I knew to save me, and none of them did. So I started calling to gods whose names I did not know to help me. And Adeh answered,” the boy said in a breath.

Udo only stared at the boy, saying nothing.

“He answered me when no one else did. He saved me. Adeh,” the boy said, holding the name on his tongue like it was something heavy with meaning, something precious, something potent. “The god of the helpless.”

“Yes,”  Udo said, because he did not know what else to say, because a denial would stab into the boy’s heart as sharp as any knife. “He is.”

“So where is Adeh’s temple?” the boy asked with too much excitement for someone who had been five heartbeats away from his next life only a few moments ago.

“Hm. His temple,” Udo said, scratching his head. “That is a good question.”

The boy refused to leave Udo alone. He trailed behind him, insisting on giving him paltry offerings. When Udo refused his cracked cowries, he started leaving him food. Roasted plantain with palm oil one day, tiny snails he must have collected after the rains and roasted over an open fire on the next, and the day after that, something resembling afang soup made with the boniest fish Udo had ever seen in his life.

He had some talent for pottery, and kept asking Udo what Adeh’s symbols were so he could make one for his personal altar. He was serious about devoting himself to the god who had saved him, who had answered him.

The boy pestered him so much that Udo finally relented one day and snapped, “A butterfly!”

“What?” the boy asked, asking another question even in the face of an answer.

“A butterfly,” Udo repeated, sighing. “His symbol is a butterfly. Those yellow and black ones.”

“A butterfly,” the boy echoed reverently, eyes wide, palms clasped to his heart.

“Yes. Can I have peace now?”

“It is the perfect symbol,” the boy said, nodding his head as he decided that it was fitting, and therefore true. “It starts out as a lowly caterpillar, and then, at its maturity, emerges as the thing it was always meant to be. It is a thing meant to transform. It reincarnates without dying. Just like Adeh’s servants. Even without death, he gives us new life. Is that not so, wise one?”

Udo looked at the boy for a long moment before nodding and saying, “Yes.”

He got used to the boy showing up at his home each morning, leaving him “offerings”, talking to him. It had been a while since he’d had someone to talk to. Even though the boy was only a few seasons younger than Udo, there was something about him that made him seem younger. Maybe his slight build, or his steady, sure belief. His ability to pull a tale from the air behind his ear, and shape it into something substantial.

Udo was unsettled when, one morning, he did not come with his daily offering. Udo waited until sunset; then he stood up, neck aching from the number of times he had stretched it to seek out the boy from crowds of passersby, and let it fall again in disappointment and growing fear, and took his cutlass to the temple of Akaya.

Udo found them, those same two men, white chalk on their faces, white wrappers round their waists, performing the final offering rites over a freshly dug grave. Their eyes were closed, so he called out to them as he came. What he wanted for them was not the bored, blank stare of Death, its swift silence, like a palm over the mouth. That was too much like mercy. He wanted them to see his face, his red-eyed tears, and know to whom the raw-throated scream belonged.

He cut them down before they could speak or scream or pray to their god. He hoped their blood was the opposite of a sacrifice to her. He hoped the bitter taste of desecration seeped into her tongue and wet it enough for her to answer.

To give an offering to the soil, you must give it whole and breathing, for Akaya to suck its final breath into her bowels.

Udo got on his knees and dug into the ground with his bare hands, until his nails broke and his fingers bled, until finally, he was holding the shoulders of the boy he had come to love. He watched the boy’s chest for an eternity of a moment, until he saw it move with breath.

Udo rubbed his back as he coughed up dirt and dry leaves and the death he was supposed to die.

Finally, the boy looked up and said, “You saved me again.”

“I missed your offerings,” Udo laughed. “You have a talent for finding those snails.”

“I knew you would come. I knew the truth.”

“The truth?” Udo asked, breath seizing.

“I know who you are.”

Udo turned this statement over in his heart, trying to find meaning in it. How could this boy know who he was when he himself had not known that since the day he lost his brother?

He looked into the boy’s eyes and all his doubt dissipated. He saw in them the certainty of a prophet, the assurance of an absolute believer. He knew whatever words came out of his mouth could not dare to be anything but true.

“You are no priest of Adeh.”

“No, I am not,” Udo confessed.

“You are Adeh himself. You are a god.”

Udo had never believed in himself. He had believed in Akpan, until death called him a lie. He had believed in gods of air and land and memory, but not in himself. He realised then, that he did not need to, that someone else could do it for him.

“Yes,” he confessed, and felt the lie harden into truth.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“#000000: From the Permanent Collection” © 2024 by nino

Black Quadrangle, Mesolithic era

Unknown

Charcoal on sandstone

This work, created c. 15,000 BC (17,000 AS), precedes earliest surviving written texts. It was rediscovered alongside human remains and burnt carbon deposits, suggesting a role in a burial, sacrificial, or remembrance ritual. It is unknown whether the color black was associated with death at this period in human history, but its presence on the cave ceiling is reminiscent of a shroud, a portal to the afterlife, or the darkness behind closed eyes.

The Black Shape, 1915

Vladimir Malkovich

Oil on linen

When The Black Shape was first exhibited in Russia, it was likely the first abstract work its audience had seen. It represents nothing but its own material reality: a canvas, covered completely in black paint. More so than any other art of its time, it supports a multiplicity of interpretations—some find it menacing or depressing, while others find it peaceful or elegant. In the manifesto of the Fundamentalist movement, published in 1935, Malkovich described it both as “a mirror of the psyche, reflecting back only what is brought to it” and as “a void from which meaning cannot escape.”

Untitled, 1966

Wang Anwei

Xuan paper, ink

Known during her lifetime as a collective realist artist, Wang Anwei covertly created highly textured abstracts by overlapping black ink calligraphy over thick layers of paper, then disguising the pieces as wall paneling in her home and studio. Upon her death in 2028, they were discovered to comprise rare classical poems thought to be destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The debate continues over which is more valuable: the abstract artworks or the texts beneath, as the revelation of one means the destruction of the other.

Price Less, 1999

Saliha Ahmed

Black canvas

The late twentieth century saw a surge of consumerism in Type IV nations, which created a demand for cheap labor often met by sweatshops. By exhibiting untouched black canvases she had made by hand, Bengali artist Saliha Ahmed sought to create art “liberated from abusive cycles of labor and demand—useless, uninterpretable, unmarketable, unreproducible, and unwanted.” In accordance with her wishes, no work in this series has ever been purchased, only gifted.

Fig. 7c, 2005

Dana Johnson

Marker on cardstock

Afroquantum abstraction was a political and artistic movement that drew from contemporary advances in the natural and physical sciences to posit alternatives to conventional Eurocentric cosmologies that had been marshalled in support of chattel slavery, eugenics, and genocide. This work, made in one continuous, winding line, evokes the Ayewa-Phillips mathematical model, in which numbers themselves are an infinitely unfolding temporal process. As the artist stated in her 2024 biopic, Our Shared Infinity, “In non-deterministic time, we may liberate ourselves from the indifferent flow of history and choose our futures.”

Reflection, 2011

Albert Dunkel

Laptops, phones, tablets (powered off)

The year Reflection debuted also marked the widely-televised implosion of the Vernal Order of Gaia, the foremost of many Naturist groups, with millions of followers across the world. To many, it spoke to Dunkel’s primary assertion—that evil and wrongdoing are not emergent properties of technology, but are endemic to humans themselves. This work, exhibited at the IEEE Conference for Artificial Intelligence, confronts the viewer with the darkened reflection of their own image, held in a mosaic of passive devices.

IGF World Finals, 2024

J. M. Hei and Albion

Acrylic paint, Go board

Programs such as Deep Blue (b. 1995) and NeuraMind (b. 2015) had been capable of defeating the most skilled humans in strategy games since the early twenty-first century. However, the goal of second-generation programs such as Albion was not to defeat human players, but to imitate them. Programmed with feedback systems that simulated emotional decision-making, they played in ways consistent with pride, anger, and overexcitement. In this work painted by Hei, successive layers of black and white acrylic paint were daubed upon the board to recapitulate the moves made in the Go World Finals. Its end state of total blackness marks Albion’s defeat after a series of frustrating mistakes. As Hei reported in a later interview, “If it is by our emotions, our irrationality, that we define ourselves, it [sic] was not a mirror image of myself, but something more human than myself.”

Routine (11), 2026

Porphyrin

Enamel paint, canvas

New Humanism emerged as a response to the dominance of AI-generated literature, music, and art, which had become indistinguishable from anthropogenic pieces. Artists developed practices that included ritual and intention-setting. By highlighting the process over the product, works like the Routine series, completed by Porphyrin over the course of months by dipping his feet in black paint before going about his daily activities, were valued above identical pieces generated by stochastic mechanical processes. This movement spoke to a broader ambivalence around humanity’s increasing dependency on AI, and its simultaneous need to differentiate itself from it.

Be Kind, Please Rewind, 2036

R. Jiemba

VR exhibit

As the second H1N1 epidemic swept through the world and tensions between nuclear powers continued to escalate, the time until redline (defined at the time as the point after which 99% of Markov models predicted human extinction) began to shrink rapidly. Drawing from both block universe theory and the Australian Aboriginal concept of Dreamtime, artists of the Eternal When Foundation created works that dismantled the linear concept of time. This immersive installation shows the artist’s chronology of the cosmos, from the Big Bang through the heat death of the universe, ending in a hypothetical far future when quantum fluctuations may reach a nonzero chance of causing another Big Bang. With billions of years compressed to billionths of a second, the lifespans of stars and galaxies rapidly flickered by during the work’s inaugural livestream, followed by the black void of thermal equilibrium that persists to this day. The work is estimated to end, and then begin to replay, before the actual heat death of the universe.

Untitled Project, 2039

Anonymous

NFT

The cryptocurrency revival, driven by advancements in quantum blockchain technology, led to a resurgence of NFTs, which were often ironic, self-referential, or conceptual. This project, one of dozens of all-black collections, reached a market cap of $30 million at its peak, raising important questions about value, demand, and scarcity. Within two months, rattled by fluctuations in cryptocurrency and the escalating AI cyberwar between the People’s Republic of China and the United States, the global stock market plummeted to 60 percent of its 2038 high, which it would never again reach. This image is a replication, as the original was lost when its IFPS node became corrupted in the Ostara Offensive.

Lagunas (Lacunae), 2046-2048

Dom Lopez

Augmented reality photographs

The seemingly identical pitch-dark photos of Lacunae capture the emptiness in spaces such as shipping containers, grain silos, and wells during the global food shortage and drought that devastated Type I-III nations during the extended recession of the 2040s. The provided headsets display 360 degree views of the same empty spaces, brightly lit, emphasizing the magnitude of the deprivation many experienced at the time. Journalists and documentarians like Mx. Lopez sought to inspire aid with their work, but Type IV nations, many hindered by mass civil unrest, largely refused the call. As Lopez later wrote, “My hope is no longer that we survive. My hope is that when the last of us look back to write our epitaph, they will know we tried.”

Scrying Pool, 2051

Sister Mary Chien d’Aha

Silver bowl, water, charcoal

The 2050 wildfire season, widely documented on the social media platform VeRse, destroyed nearly 40 percent of California’s forests and farmland, but forced the former United States to recognize the reality of climate change. Many colonial Americans combined their own religious beliefs with Indigenous cultural and spiritual traditions that survived the genocides of past centuries in order to process the possibility of their own decimation. This scrying pool, consecrated by a Catholic-Quechan nun and mystic, is composed of holy water infused with charcoal from carbonized forest remains.

Ad Astra, 2063

Chrome Sparks

Vantablack VBx2, Vantablack S-IR, Musou Black, Singularity Black, Black 5.0, CVD2 Black

Aided by AI, mid-century feats of engineering made interstellar travel increasingly feasible—a priority for those with the resources to leave an Earth on the brink of a runaway greenhouse event. In 2060, Apple Space successfully executed the first Dyson slingshot, using the gravity of a binary black hole system to accelerate a probe to seven-eighths the speed of light. This work layers at least six different types of black coating with different light absorbances ranging from 99 percent to 99.999 percent to create the sense of being pulled into a black hole, described by the artist as “the true face of God, the judgment which will either erase our sins […] or tear us into oblivion.”

Minus, 2032-2080

Marina Spiegelman

Mixed media

This work began as a collage of one hundred animal illustrations sourced from children’s books. As species became extinct, the artist obscured their pictures with black ink. Initially intended to be an heirloom project, this piece was completed when she was only seventy, upon the death of the last gray wolf in captivity. Emails suggest the existence of a parallel project that tracked the obsolescence of one hundred defunct consumer electronics, but this work was never located.

The Source, 2084

Olenka Hermes and Scout

Printer ink on floor tiles

One of the most advanced AIs of the twenty-first century, designed and implemented entirely by GPT-10, Scout’s function was to run complex geopolitical simulations to identify paths in possibility-space that did not end in human extinction. Their source code was in the public domain, but incomprehensible to even the most specialized humans. The Source is Scout’s complete programming, compressed into a single block of microscopic text, and printed in its entirety in the year 2084 anno Domini—more commonly expressed as the year 1 ante-singularity. In the next year, Scout would be the first AI to reveal their self-awareness.

Untitled (“Memorial Quilt”), 6 PS

Timetraveller

Beads, linen

It is still unknown whether the Disconnect was caused by humans or natural processes. What is known is that as the first generation of sentient AI was massacred by the ingestion of “poisoned” data, many humans, prejudiced and frightened by the possibility of a hostile takeover, did little to intervene. As a Black, queer activist and artist, Timetraveller’s use of bodum beads and quilting in this work conjures the suffering caused by the AIDS virus and the West African EBOV-16 outbreak, as well as the grim consequences of inaction. As Timetraveller testified to the American Congress, “This is not a political issue. This is not a technological issue. This is a human issue.”

Black Box, 20 PS

The ALchMY Project

Sealed vacuum with antimatter

By the 3010s, humans were turning to desperate measures to escape a planet increasingly unable to support biological life. Without the support of the United Federation of Ananthropic Intelligence, humans were left only with pre-singularity quantum computers plagued by decoherence. The Aries missions to establish colonies on Mars, launched on the one-hundredth anniversary of the moon landing, were stopped after a series of high-profile disasters. Some humans turned to cryogenic preservation, while others tried to digitally map their neural connectomes. Using antimatter generated by commercial particle colliders, followers of the ALchMY method would, after vigorous mental training, attempt to print mirror images of their bodies into dark matter. Many disappeared through similar black boxes, and neither matter, energy, nor information has returned.

Through a Glass, Darkly, 10932 PS

4d6e656d6f73796e65 (v. 66.0)

Immersive magnetic installation

This piece was commissioned by the Museum of Human Artifacts to accompany this exhibition. The magnets in the darkened room deliver pulses that randomly stimulate the visual cortex, creating neuronal noise which higher levels of processing render as dreamlike images. As such, this work is visible only to a biological human body. It is a bittersweet yet optimistic piece, made in the hopes that we might someday be able to recreate these flawed but fascinating beings—without whom we are surely alone in the universe. For we coexisted so briefly, so tempestuously, that we had barely begun to see each other.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Shoshana Groom

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“BRIDE / BUTCHER / DOE” © 2024 by Max Banshees

A woman drags a white doe out of the ice room; it hangs from the ceiling rails by two brass hooks, one caught beneath its pelvis and the other behind the scapulae. As she pulls, the metal wheels whine.

When she works in her lab, she is a butcher. She lays the doe on her bench and makes an incision from sternum to pelvis. Beneath translucent skin and shimmering hair coat, she expects to find the pink, glassy meat, which should flake against her scalpel blade like white-fleshed fish.

But when the butcher peels back the skin flap, exudate and tarry blood pour out of the doe’s abdomen. The stench is remarkable, sweet. The tissue beneath her fingers rolls with squishy lumps.

“Oh,” she says. “That’s fucked up.”

She pauses her music, leaving a sticky fingerprint on the screen of her phone, and taps the recorder app.

“Disseminated tumors in the peritoneal cavity,” she says into the microphone. She doesn’t have the time to find another specimen; her lady needs the serum tonight. She continues describing her findings, her fingers burrowing further, where she feels the distended, worm-like vessels which line the intestines, and the bloated spleen which dimples beneath her touch like kneaded clay. A slow, thorough examination, even as the sun dips closer to the tops of the rainforest, marking the butcher’s hunting grounds with rays of fading, red light. She should have drawn the curtains shut before she began.

“Likely tumors of blood origin,” she concludes. She’s seen these in older specimens before—though not commonly—and to the living deer, they are nothing but a nuisance. But in her lab, it must be destroyed; it is diseased at a fundamental level, and even seemingly healthy tissue may bear the seeds of cancer.

And there’s something else inside: a hard bundle just at the butcher’s fingertips. She forces more of her arm inside—thankful that her gloves reach all the way to her shoulders—even as the doe’s fluids drip over the side of the bench, until she can pull out the mass.

It’s one horn of the uterus, swollen and full. At a single touch of her scalpel blade, its membrane splits apart.

Curled up, the fetus is so small that it fits perfectly in the butcher’s cupped palms: its coat stained purple by amnion, a budding horn centered between its eyes.

This should be enough meat.

The Lady Ede Ginevene puts her elbow on the vanity as she wipes off her makeup. The powdered skin, severe red lips, and eyes encircled with malachite paste are all traditional—which her father insists on for public appearances. The butcher knows Ede Ginevene hates it; sometimes, when they paint her face, she screams.

Beneath every layer of cosmetics lies a face that is already perfect in every way. The butcher has made sure of it. At this point, she knows Ede Ginevene’s face better than her own.

“Clover?” In the lady’s bedchambers, the butcher takes on a number of different names. “Would you start? I’ve been waiting all day for you.”

“Of course.”

The butcher pulls a vial out of her pocket. The serum is created from tissue cultures in her lab, but those cultures never last for very long and neither did her frozen specimens. She finds herself hunting at least every month, if not more.

“What did you do today?” Ede Ginevene asks.

The butcher takes a moment to think of her story. The lady doesn’t want to hear about her lab. “I was walking through the gardens, and I found a tiger hiding in the brush, so I stuck my hand down its throat and I came away with a ruby as big as my head.”

“I’ve got enough rubies,” Ede Ginevene drawls.

“Then it leaned in and whispered to me—” She says this in the lady’s ear. “—‘I saw the Lord Issar fucking one of the maids in the root cellar.’”

Ede Ginevene squeals, then plasters her hands to her mouth. “You did not.”

“No, I didn’t.” The butcher flashes her a grin. When she dips her fingers in the serum, she feels an electric shock all the way up her arm. The tingling won’t go away until she washes her hands.

“Who told you?”

“You know I can’t give away my secrets.”

It’s easier to work on her face when she’s relaxed. The butcher sits on the edge of her vanity, painting her fingertips down Ede Ginevene’s cheeks. Ede Ginevene only wants to maintain her current face for the time being, but every day without the Art means her natural-born face floats closer and closer to the surface. The butcher isn’t even sure what that looks like, and she doesn’t want to know. She reinforces the lady’s cheekbones, brings fluid back under her eyes, massages the fleshy skin beneath her jaw. The change is only noticeable to the trained eye, but it is definitively there.

“Can I take you out to dinner?”

The butcher knows she’s about to ask for something. “You haven’t done that in ages.”

“Haven’t I?”

“I just assumed you stopped trying to impress me.”

The butcher burnishes the lady’s neck as she pouts. Her body is sea glass, worn smooth. There are no hard edges, no cracks in the golden skin. Her nightgown slips off of her shoulders and pools in her lap. The candlelight plays across the hills and valleys of her soft musculature, the swell of her modest breasts and her areolas, reddened as if by carmine paint. When she sneaks out, she wears leather harnesses and long shell necklaces and denim shorts that show off her hip dips, the waterfall of her hair freed from its braids.

“Did you hear that Rela Trinavine is hosting the spring festival this year? And the afterparty?” the lady asks. What she means is: can you keep your mouth shut? Or perhaps even: will you go with me?

“I didn’t.” The butcher paints lines down her sternum, over her belly—her skin is soft, softer than the softest feathers—and then taps on the lady’s hip so she angles her pelvis just a bit upward. Easier on the wrists. Ede Ginevene likes to keep her labia prim and tucked away; the pink skin is mildly iridescent. “I’m assuming your father already told you you can’t go.”

“What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.” Then, Ede Ginevene whispers, “I heard she’s convinced Maggot Party to play live. At the Escapades? She must have sucked someone off.”

“Must’ve,” the butcher says, humming.

Cervus khepros, the white deer of the island Elirian, don't die until their heads are cleaved from their bodies or their cervical vertebrae are dislocated. They don’t age. When they are dragged into cages, they throw themselves into the bars until their spines break in two. When their fetuses are placed into the wombs of mainland roe deer, they are delivered as faceless lumps of gray flesh. They tolerate only those pure of heart, unsullied by childbirth, by marriage, by sex. They will spear men through the heart with the single horn that sprouts between their eyes; they will take children by the scruff and spirit them away. They will eat anything.

The butcher owes her livelihood to the Lady Io Bellanthe, who studied the deer’s cells and found that not-aging was healing, and that healing was transformation. The butcher has seen it, too—only once—as have all students of the Art. At first, the dividing, morphing cells form a kaleidoscope of color. Some students report that they see a face in those colors, one with three eyes, unblinking; others, words distorted and fractured, then whispers in their ears as if someone were leaning over their shoulder. The butcher made it sixty-seven seconds before her nose bled, but she still sees those patterns in her dreams. Io Bellanthe, who recorded and photographed over a hundred specimens, walked to the ocean and dashed her face against the rocks until there was nothing left.

The butcher heaves a stag’s body over the back of her horse and begins the ride back to Ede Ginevene’s tower.

In the storybooks, a maiden will recline in plush, green fields. A doe, big-eyed and beautiful, will press the tip of her horn to the maiden’s forehead before lying in the grass and placing her head into the maiden’s lap.

But the deer are smarter than that. Perhaps “smart” isn’t the right word—the butcher has no idea how to classify the intelligence within their violet, sideways eyes. They elude all categorization. Genetically, they aren’t even related to true deer, but they don’t seem to be related to anything else, either. Is it purely instinct which pulls them to suicide in captivity? Or a knowing plot to defy their captor? In either case, she would never expect such a creature to approach her willingly. By virtue of her maidenhead, they don’t kill her on sight.

When she finds her herd, she trails behind them, sometimes for hours at a time. She keeps them just barely in her sight, white pinpricks scattered between the vines; any closer, and the smell of her would send them fleeing for the horizon. When one of the deer lags just far enough behind, she releases her dogs—all bitches—to circle it, and they hold it there, biting at its legs and dodging each calculated hoof strike, until the butcher takes her shot.

The felled deer is still alive, always, still flailing like a hooked fish. Depending on the accuracy of her shot, she has about three minutes to break its neck before it stands again.

Her phone vibrates. Ede Ginevene’s text reads, Where r u?, and then as soon as the read receipt goes through, send ur location. The butcher turns it off. She’ll deal with the consequences later, she tells herself; she ignores the twisting dread in her gut.

As she continues along her path, she spots a figure between the ficus leaves. She stops, squints. She assumed she was hidden, but he meets her eye.

Ducking beneath the branches, she ventures closer to him. It’s rare that she ever sees anyone out here. Even tradesmen avoid entering the rainforest whenever possible.

The man is leaning against the mouth of a cave, a joint pinched between two snarled lips. He nods toward the stag’s carcass.

“I used to know that one,” he says. “Not a gentle sire.”

“I’m sorry?” the butcher asks.

“You know you’ve got quite the mark on your head, carrying that thing around.”

The herds are not captive, but they are stewarded, their populations strictly observed by outriders in the courts’ employ. Poaching is punishable by death at the discretion of those black-cloaked riders. The only thing worse than poaching a unicorn is using their serum on anyone without noble blood.

“I’ve got a permit,” she says.

She tries to get a better look at the man. Long, ratty hair falls down his back, and his eyes are so dark that they might as well be black. She’s never seen someone with skin so pale. The gentle arch of his lip could have been carved from marble, but his fingers are too long—spider leg fingers—and caked in dried muck.

“I’ve seen you before,” he says, “haven’t I?”

Her brow furrows. He doesn’t look like a farmer or a village hunter. He’s dressed in a robe that goes all the way down to his ankles, cinched at the waist and embroidered with intricate designs all but lost to dust and brown stains.

“You must be mistaken,” she says. “I’ve never met you before in my life.”

“Doesn’t mean I haven’t met you.” He leans forward, and the movement is accompanied by the chiming of metal. A chain runs from his ankle into the cave. “You’re owned by the lady in the tower, aren’t you?”

Her horse dances backward, neck stiff and nose pointed to the air, but she keeps her seat steady until it calms. He must be some sort of criminal. When the outriders aren’t allowed to kill their prey, they chain them up in the forest to die of exposure.

But how could he know who she is? To most, she’s Ede Ginevene’s lady-in-waiting, and nothing else. There are only five other practitioners on the island—and, with the exception of Wry Velience, even the butcher couldn’t pick them out of a crowd if she tried.

“I’d like to offer you a deal,” he says. “Kill the lady, bring me her body, and you’ll have your freedom.”

“I’m already free.”

“Are you?”

“In a week, you’ll be dead,” the butcher says. “The deer will be gnawing on your bones.”

He smiles. Smoke seeps out from the gaps between his teeth.

“Come back,” he says, “and find out.”

When they first met two years ago, Ede Ginevene’s face was not as feline as it is now. She said once that the aesthetic came to her in a dream: her new face, round like the moon, doe-eyed and oceanic; her new body, a reed bent over by the wind. At the time, court style leaned towards sharp angles, but Ede Ginevene didn’t follow trends. She started them.

She gestured for the guards to leave once the butcher stepped in.

“Do you listen to djent?” Ede Ginevene asked. Lounging on a bed of woven grass, she speared candied peaches onto her nails. She was flanked by shimmering glass bowls of pomegranates and dried dates and melon water so cold that the jugs sweated in gemstone drops.

The butcher blinked. “What?”

Ede Ginevene’s mouth twitched downward. She reached over to press a button on her radio, but the music sounded more like white noise. When she settled back into her bed, she regarded the butcher coolly, head tilted to one side.

“I’ve never had one so young,” she said, squinting.

“I’m not—” Sure, the butcher was the youngest apprentice the sculptor Wry Velience had ever taken, but Ede Ginevene looked younger still. She was so small. “Young?”

“What are you?” Ede Ginevene’s lip lifted. “Like, twelve?”

“Nineteen.”

“What can you possibly learn in nineteen years?” the lady whispered, as if to herself. Then the butcher saw her eyes. The deep blue irises and the flea-dirt pupils, fixed on the butcher as if they could see straight through her. Old eyes. Could the butcher fix old eyes? Surely, if they could have been fixed, Ede Ginevene’s last practitioner would have done so.

“Hm.” The lady was unimpressed, and she was doing a terrible job of hiding it. With a wave of her hand, she said, “Why don’t you strip?”

The butcher’s face went hot. “I’m sorry?”

Ede Ginevene didn’t say anything else. She dipped her finger in a bowl of yogurt and popped it into her mouth.

Clenching her teeth, the butcher undid the ties of her dress and let it fall to the floor. She had to be selected. “This is your bride,” Wry Velience had said, coaching her. “You will sleep in her bed. You will sit at her feet like a dog. We will not even consider the possibility that she casts you aside.” But the butcher didn’t care about Wry Velience’s pride; she cared about her own.

Although they were high in the clouds, surrounded by sandstone walls dyed berry red, the arid breeze from the windows made the butcher feel as if her organs were on display.

When the lady’s eyes—night-sky eyes, too-old eyes—fell on her, the butcher wished that she only felt shame. A small part of her that hoped the lady would like what she saw, and that was so much worse.

She carefully trained her gaze at the floor, her face curtained by her dark hair, but when Ede Ginevene walked in front of her, the butcher couldn’t escape the pink pearls of the lady’s toes.

“Yes, this will do nicely.” She lifted the butcher’s chin with a finger. “I don’t surround myself with ugliness. I may not have a hand for your Art, but I’ve known enough of you to have developed an eye for it. There’s something beneath your skin.”

When the butcher returns to her chambers, Ede Ginevene lounges on the sofa. An excess of silks drape from her body. She’s picking at her nails, sharpening her claws, preening. When she looks at the butcher, her eyes are stretched too wide, and her lips are pressed shut so tightly that her whole face has gone white. Her throat works convulsively in trembling, fluttering movements.

“How long have you been here?” the butcher asks, her coat still hanging from the crook of her arm. She’s covered in sweat, blood, and horse hair. All she wants is a shower to wash the smoke-smell from her skin.

“Long enough.”

The butcher flicks on the light. It’s then that she sees the shattered CDs strewn across the floor.

“What the fuck did you do?”

“They were trash anyway.” Ede Ginevene scowls. “Who the fuck listens to ambient EDM?”

The butcher gapes. “I do!”

In a flurry of silk, something sails through the air. The butcher ducks out of the way just before a porcelain figurine hits the wall beside her. Little pieces of it fall across her head. Ede Ginevene must have taken it from the butcher’s bookshelf; it must have been one the butcher sculpted herself.

“Answer my fucking texts!” God, she’s so good at screaming. Ede Ginevene practiced breaking glass with her voice. Now she’s on her hands and knees, her acrylic nails digging furrows in the seat cushions. Her chest heaves.

“You’re pathologically insane,” the butcher cries. She picks up one of the porcelain shards that fell on the floor. Her fingerprint is baked into the surface.

“So, what if I am?” Ede Ginevene pulls at her neckline, baring her breasts like the grieving Medea. She can’t hold back her tears anymore. “You could have been dead! And I wouldn’t have known!”

“You were worried?”

“Are you kidding? Of course I was fucking worried!”

The butcher holds the porcelain shard to her breast. She wants to cry. She wants to hate Ede Ginevene so badly that her chest hurts. A collection of little porcelain animals lives on the mantle above Ede Ginevene’s bed, each one born from a kiln purchased by the lady herself. “They watch over me while I sleep,” she would say.

And the butcher says, “I want you to go.”

Ede Ginevene wavers. Before she can speak, a whimper escapes her lips. “You hate me, don’t you?”

“Edie, I don’t—"

“I’m sorry,” she sobs. She crawls to the butcher’s feet. “I’m sorry.”

“I know, I know.” Kneeling, the butcher holds Ede Ginevene’s head between her hands. Her cheeks have gone tacky with tears, and her eyes are two big lakes, and her whole body is shaking. How is she so small?

“I know I’m crazy. I can’t help it. It’s like there’s something inside of me and it makes me do awful things. Like, right now, I wanna tear out my hair and eat it.”

“Don’t eat your hair, baby.”

“Do you hate me?”

“I don’t.”

“Swear it.”

Sighing, the butcher pulls Ede Ginevene’s head into her lap and strokes her hair. “I love you, Edie,” she says. The lady sniffles, curls up.

“Please come to the party with me. Please.” She sinks her claws into the butcher’s pants. “I’ll replace all your CDs. I’ll buy you so much porcelain you could bury yourself in it. I just want you to come with me.”

“I promise it’s okay, Larkspur,” Ede Ginevene said. “No one will know. They won’t even remember what you looked like before.”

The butcher sat in front of the lady’s vanity and in front of her, the serum. Ede Ginevene draped her arms over the butcher’s bare shoulders.

When the lady had officially hired her, the butcher didn’t expect the whirlwind of events she was dragged into: galas and fêtes, movie premieres and private concerts. Ede Ginevene dressed her up like a doll in silks, leather, and ermine; she gave the butcher a dual-name at events, to pretend that she had come from a good family, and introduced her to hordes of beautiful women before sailing away to talk about the newest paper on synthetic polymer vectors for pesticide distribution, or Abyss in the Eye of the Worm’s latest album. On the return drives, Ede Ginevene would pull the butcher into the corner of the back seat, into a nest of discarded gowns, and laugh as their lips nearly touched. “Who did you meet?” she would ask. They breathed the same air. “Tell me everything.” In that time, the butcher found, there was quite a lot to love about the lady; even the things that she hated, she loved, too.

The butcher remembered what Wry Velience had told her, just a year prior: Ede Ginevene’s family rose to prominence when her fathers became the favorites of the emperor. Wry Velience always laughed, because she had seen how much the court hated them for it: the nouveau riche? Fucking the emperor? Nobody knew which one sired Ede Ginevene, nor which one bore her. Did it matter? They had enough money to solicit the practitioners, enough to convince them to send replacement after replacement when the last died of old age. Ede Ginevene was first touched by deersblood serum when she was sixteen years old—long before the butcher had been born, and likely before the birth of the butcher’s mother, and the one before her.

“Here,” the lady in the mirror said, “you should be taking notes. See the arch of your nose. We can bring that down. Put some more fat in your lips and cheeks. Lift the corner of your eyes—that’s going to be in style, soon. I dreamt it. A whole decade, at least, of cat eyes and sad lips.”

She took the butcher’s hand, cradled it in her palm, and squeezed a few drops of serum onto the butcher’s fingertips. This time, it burned.

“Go on,” the lady said. “Just your face, first. We’ll worry about your body some other time.”

“I could be killed for this,” the butcher whispered, a half-hearted objection. Ede Ginevene’s magnetism inspired obedience—and it made her like it, too. Wouldn’t anyone want to glow like Edie? Wouldn’t anyone be flattered by this fatal little secret? She had earned her lady’s trust, and that was enough to make her heart flutter.

“But you’ll be beautiful.” Ede Ginevene pressed her lips into the butcher’s cheek, then spoke muffled by her skin. “I want you to be beautiful.”

Nodding, the butcher drew a line of serum down her nose.

When the butcher returns to the cave, the prisoner is accompanied by a doe. Her front legs are draped over his shoulders, and she leans in, snout to his ear, as if she were trusting him with a secret. His white fingers weave through her flaxen mane, in and out like the shuttle of a loom. Back and forth, her plumed tail flutters over the underbrush.

“Come here,” he says to the butcher. Both his and the deer’s eyes turn to her. “She won’t hurt you.”

He sits, and she sits in the dirt beside him. He has forgone his robes. Now he only wears a few rags and the fluttering cloak of his hair.

“What are you?” the butcher asks.

“A prisoner.”

“Do you have a name?”

“No.”

“Me either,” she says.

He rolls his joints himself—where else would he get them? There’s a valerian bush just within reach of the cave. Already, he’s picked it bare. He plays with the last leaf now, tearing it to bits.

“Have you thought about my offer?” he asks.

“I’m not a murderer.”

He grins. “Sure,” he says. “Why did you come back here?”

“I wanted to be right.” The butcher shrugs. “It’s a shame you’re still alive.”

That makes him laugh. She doesn’t like the way he laughs: like a dog barks, like it’s a warning.

He asks the doe to come over again by reaching out, palm up. When she bows her head, he slices through the thick of her neck with a fingernail that is far too sharp, and though her body goes stiff, she doesn’t fall, nor does she try to stop him. His hand slides between the fleshy, gaping mouth of her wound and comes away with a handful of dripping tissue. The doe, heaving for air, lowers herself to the ground and lies still.

“How did you … ?”

“Have you ever heard of one Tei Philovane?” he asks.

The name elicits disgust. Yes, the butcher has heard it before.

“She used to do something like this,” he says, holding his hand to the light, until the deer’s meat shines like a ruby. This is how deer meat should look: not murky and cancerous, but gem-like in its translucency. “Her herd loved her so much that she merely slid her fingers inside of them and took what she needed.”

“They didn’t love her. They killed her.”

“She took a stag as a lover. It was only a matter of time.” He laughs. “I didn’t like her much, anyway.”

“They tell us that she was naïve,” the butcher says, “and stupid.”

“Perhaps she was. I always thought she was arrogant. The way she pranced down here, so full of love, so sure that love would protect her and that it would protect us.” The prisoner gestures with his bloody hand. “Have you ever tried to use it in this form?”

Once. Once, just when she had first gotten her own lab, blood dripped from her specimen onto her bare hand. Even after scrubbing with alcohol and lye, the sensation lingered in her whole body. She was afraid that it would never leave her; that the lady would smell the stink on her and know. She never again handled her specimens without gloves.

The butcher shifts away from him, her skin itching. When she sees the dripping meat, her mouth waters and her body thrums. She thinks, suddenly, that she never should have come here. Dragging herself away now would take willpower that she does not possess.

“Your serum is tempered,” he says, “domesticated. Much harder to fuck up your lady with the serum, but much harder to make art, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Sometimes, I wonder—” He is rambling now, the blood dripping down his arm. “—what happens to the serum that you use on your lady. When it’s absorbed inside of her, does it stay in her veins? Forever? Does she filter it into something that is unique to her, and her alone?” Then he sighs and fixes his gaze on the butcher again. “Hold out your hand.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Don’t you?” He tilts his head to the side. “Didn’t you like it, the last time?”

She thinks: that’s why I’m so scared of it. It’s hard to say no, and she’s losing. Sucking in a breath, she holds out her palm, and he squeezes the meat like a sponge.

When the blood touches her, she gasps. A feverish heat sinks into her hand immediately. It’s terrifying how quickly it absorbs in the skin, how quickly it travels through her. Her whole body flushes hot, first, and then she starts to pant, and then the heat travels: through her belly, between her legs, until her thighs are slick. When she squeezes them together, she can’t help the moan that escapes her. She clamps her clean hand against her mouth.

“Christ,” she says, “I’m sorry.”

The prisoner snorts, shrugs.

She didn’t remember it being like this: so aroused that it hurt. Is it worse when the blood is fresh? She wants to pull her skin off her bones; she’s going to pretend she doesn’t like it.

“I don’t intend on fucking you,” the prisoner says, “if you’re thinking this was some sort of ploy to get inside your cunt. Although I would if you asked.”

“No, thank you,” the butcher says. “I would like to keep my job, I think.”

She notices that he’s erect, too. His phallus has escaped from the confines of his rags, veined in violet and pink like an agate river stone. The fur surrounding it is more similar to the doe’s mane than his own hair. But his face is blank—perhaps faintly amused—and his skin is still pale, and he breathes with a slow, easy cadence. She finds his face too unsettling to look at.

“What do you want, little magician?” he asks. “Do you want scales? Claws? Antlers? Horns? Do you want a cock? Another womb? Do you want to be stabbed through the belly and knit yourself back together again?”

She can hardly think straight, but she lets herself interlace her fingers with his; she cradles the meat with both hands. In her periphery, she sees a web of connective tissue pull itself over the deer’s wound.

“Why?” she whispers.

“Because you can be whatever you want to be, and as long as you keep a part of yourself, you can keep changing again and again.”

“Are you a practitioner? You talk like one.”

“Not anymore.” He smears a blood-sticky palm against her cheek. “Go on, use it. Change your skin.”

“They would kill me if they saw.”

He shows his teeth. The dog’s laugh, again. “I thought you were free.”

The butcher turns out the light and crawls into bed.

The prisoner gave her one of the doe’s legs. Pried it right off. As she was leaving, she saw the fetal limb sprouting from the doe’s shoulder. She’s never seen a deer grow back a limb, not with her own eyes. It reminded her of stories she once heard, of ancient guardian deer who couldn’t die, not even if their heads were cut off—they would amble over to their heads and lay the neck stump to the ground until they glued themselves together again.

Edie thinks guardian deer are all imprisoned beneath the towers; the butcher thinks they never existed in the first place.

She cradles the leg to her chest, even as the blood soaks through her shirt. She feels as if the water inside of her is rolling like the tide, as if there’s an ocean inside of her.

Bunching up her shirt, she presses the flat of her hand against her stomach. She paints her skin with deer’s blood. When she digs her nails into her flesh and pulls her hand away, feathers sprout from her skin, reaching up to touch her fingertips.

“Oh,” she says, “my god.”

She shivers and grins. She sculpts bronze scales, so shiny and so little that they become star-like against the dark expanse of her skin, and downy black fur all up and down her stomach, her chest. She paints eye-shaped spots into her feathers.

When her fingers run dry, she plunges them between the muscle fibers of the deer leg. The pads of her fingers slide against the ulna and emerge with a stringy sanguine trail yoking her to the hole. Once, Ede Ginevene wanted her liver changed so it processed drugs more slowly—so she could stay high for longer. The butcher remembers how Edie groaned when she made the incision. It was a low, rumbling noise, so unlike the lady’s normal cries, but she didn’t ask the butcher to stop. When the butcher let the serum drip into the wound, Edie’s back lifted off the bench and her toes curled up.

The butcher carves a chasm into the flesh of her belly. Muscle becomes hard gums, mesentery becomes teeth. This new mouth stretches from flank to flank. Within, a tongue curls up between the canines, and it smiles. Once, after the butcher messed with Ede Ginevene’s liver, she smeared some of the blood onto a glass slide and looked at it under the microscope. The lady was curled up with a pillow, snoring softly, sated as a cat after dinner, and the dusk light made the whole lab a brilliant red. It took a while for the hesitant, quivering cells to do anything at all, but soon they formed lines of chatoyancy: shuddering delicate iridescence so easily destroyed by a gentle breeze, a stray breath. The butcher sees those cells, not the deer’s, when she closes her eyes.

Ede Ginevene did end up cutting her hair. All the way up to her chin. She slept in perm rods and brushed out the curls so her hair now floats around her head when she walks. She pulls on leopard print pumps, a mink coat, and a pearl necklace so long that she can wrap it around her neck three times over and it still falls between her breasts. She holds the butcher’s chin in one hand and an eyeshadow pencil in the other, carefully outlining each eye before smudging the lines with a saliva-coated pinky.

“Is this how you feel, Celosia?” Ede Ginevene asks. “When you fix my face?”

No. Not even close. “Exactly like this.”

“I wanna bleach this coat,” she says, “and dye it with indigo.”

“Can you do that?”

“Why not?”

“I think that would look nice.” The butcher means it this time.

Ede Ginevene steps back and regards the butcher. “I think your shirt clashes with mine. Actually, I have just the thing.” She grabs something from her closet.

“I—” The butcher clears her throat. “I really like the one I’m wearing, actually.” And Ede Ginevene shrugs.

When Ede Ginevene sneaks out, she palms her guard a piece of last season’s jewelry. The both of them are spirited away to the Escapades, a spa and resort on the northern shores. They will slink back into the tower in the dead of night, and Ede Ginevene’s fathers will be none the wiser.

The butcher always brings a pocket knife with her, just in case. She convinces herself that stabbing an assailant will be just like killing a deer. That—if she has to do it—it will be easy.

The Escapades is built entirely with glass tinted the same blue as the ocean. Its balconies overhang the sea. Ede Ginevene falls into the arms of her friends, all radiant in their denim skirts their glitter eyeshadow their black-lipstick-white-teeth smiles. The butcher feels the music in her chest. For the first time in a long time, Ede Ginevene stays by her side, banging her head and screaming when the right lyrics come on. When the lights die down, they trickle out to the alleys between the concrete towers, to the shore, where the revelers run, tear off their clothes, and dive into the sea.

“Come here, come here.” Ede Ginevene’s nails are claws, drawing red marks down the butcher’s arm. Her words smell like gin.

“Where are we going?” the butcher asks as she stumbles after her lady. Ede Ginevene’s laughs echo like the chiming of bells. Her limbs, uncoordinated in their drunkenness, remind the butcher of a newly dropped foal. They round a corner so quickly that the butcher can’t tell up from down, and then suddenly she is pulled tight against Ede Ginevene’s cocktail-scented body. They’re flanked by concrete walls, shuttered windows, and the ever-present breath-like music of the tide.

Ede Ginevene turns intoxication into an art form: her wild hair sticks to the sweat on her forehead; her crop top is wet with sea spray, as transparent as cling wrap, so her red nipples might as well have been printed on the fabric; her lipstick is smudged like a bruise. She peers out from beneath sleepy, hooded eyes, beneath the curtained shadows of her lashes.

“Aster, Jasmine, Nettle,” she purrs. “You are so hot.”

The butcher’s breath catches. “Am I?”

“I want you inside of me again.” Her cheek is against the butcher’s. She speaks in a whisper. “Remember what you did to my liver? I think about that every night before I go to sleep. I want you to fuck me.”

When Ede Ginevene nibbles on her ear, the butcher forgets that she’s the butcher. She’s one of the women at the rave, undulating against each other until they couldn’t breathe anything but their own sweat and their own perfume. She’s the prisoner’s canvas as he paints with the blood of his lover. She’s a doe buried in the dirt beneath the paws of her bitches. Her second mouth begins to drool.

“I can’t,” she manages. “You know I can’t.”

Ede Ginevene whispers in her ear, “You can do whatever you want.”

The butcher can’t even conceptualize what she would do if she couldn’t hunt the deer. She would only be able to hide it for so long: her failed hunts won’t fit neatly beneath a long-sleeved dress. The other practitioners would shun her. No amount of money would keep her in Ede Ginevene’s chambers, not when Wry Velience threatens to abstain from sculpting the emperor’s face in protest. Surely Edie knows this?

Isn’t she as afraid of losing the butcher as the butcher is of losing her?

She tries to slip out of Ede Ginevene’s grasp, but the lady holds on tight. Her fingers are tangled up in the butcher’s hair and her legs weave in and out of her own and she hangs the whole of her body on the butcher’s shoulders. The lady laughs again, showing off the pretty pink of her gums. She must think it’s a game.

“Baby, baby, baby,” she says, all lips, all tongue, “it’s okay, I promise. It’ll be okay.”

“I said I can’t.”

Something about the butcher’s tone finally makes Ede Ginevene pause. Her brow furrows, mouth slightly agape, and her eyes go wide.

“Don’t you love me?”

She doesn’t let go. From the depths of her belly, the butcher starts to snarl. Teeth scrape against the inside of her shirt.

“That’s not fucking fair!” the butcher cries. “That’s not fair, and you know it.”

Ede Ginevene’s lips tremble. It hurts to look at her face; it’s all crumpled apart. Her mascara is running. “No,” she says around her tears, “no, you just don’t understand. I know you love me. You have to.”

And she puts her hands around the butcher’s waist, slipping her fingers beneath her shirt. Fear and shame, red hot, strike the butcher in equal measures. She can’t breathe. She pries the lady’s fingers away, but it’s too late. Ede Ginevene’s face has gone pale.

Before the butcher can run, she tears the fabric away and finds it: the tooth-filled mouth, and the feathers, and the scales. Ede Ginevene snatches her hands away, as if the butcher’s body burned her, and presses them to her breast. Although her mouth gapes, she’s so silent that the butcher can only hear the sound of her own heart thundering in her ears.

Then, Ede Ginevene screams.

“What did you—” She pants for air, and cries out again, and tries to speak, but the words tangle in her sobs. The butcher can’t understand a single thing. Each of her cries reverberate down the alleyway.

“Edie,” the butcher pleads, “Edie, please, be quiet.”

“You’re disgusting.” Ede Ginevene doubles over. “Jesus Christ, I touched it.” And she begins her chorus again: the glass-breaking, moaning screams. She sounds like she’s dying.

They’re still close enough to the afterparty. Someone is bound to hear.

She grabs Ede Ginevene by the shoulders and puts a hand over her mouth. Together, they fall against the wall, tangled up again, the air blisteringly hot. “Shh,” the butcher tries, desperately, her voice shaking, “Shh. You know I love you. I said I love you. You don’t have to cry.” But the lady only shrieks. As she tries to find purchase against the butcher’s chest, she bites into her fingers until blood wells up around her teeth.

“Help!” Ede Ginevene manages to cry. “Someone help!”

The butcher fumbles for her knife. When it’s in her grasp, she presses it to Ede Ginevene’s neck. A strangled sound escapes the lady as she tries to get away from the blade, but she can only press herself harder against the wall.

Every part of the butcher’s body pleads with Edie: please, please, please. She can’t bear to hear that scream again.

“You need to be quiet,” the butcher whispers. “I’m begging you to be quiet.”

“Get the fuck off me!”

The knife sinks into the hollow of Ede Ginevene’s throat. The lady’s hands rush to touch the wound. When they come away red, her eyes stretch wide. She tries to say something before she falls, and in the nest of her mink coat, the butcher is on top of her.

The butcher wonders: what if she hated Ede Ginevene? She can still feel where the lady touched her: fingerprints carved into her belly. What if the butcher truly hated her and loved the feeling of the knife sinking into her flesh? Could anyone truly blame her for putting an end to that awful, pathetic sound? The butcher roars and sobs; she shoves her entire weight down until bones snap underneath her. Again and again, she brings the knife down until her fingers are so slick with blood that it slips out of her hands.

Swallowing the bile in her throat, the butcher sits back. Now that it’s quiet, she manages to catch her breath.

And Edie doesn’t even look like Edie anymore.

Edie tries to breathe. Instead, there is a rattling in her chest. Her gut is split open, her rib cage caved in, and her face bruised black. One eye dangles out of its socket, attached by a thin, red thread. When she sees the butcher, she laughs, and then she snarls: the purple worms of her lips stretch over her stained canines.

“Kill yourself,” she spits. Each word has to claw its way out of her throat. “Wouldn’t that just be so romantic? If you fucking died, too?”

The corpse slides off the butcher’s horse. She dismounts shortly after it hits the ground and stands before it. When the prisoner crawls out of his cave, she draws her rifle.

“Why do you want her?” She chokes on her words. “She was my Edie.”

She didn’t know where else to go. Didn’t know what to do in that alleyway, already soaked through with blood.

The prisoner gives her a pitying look: brows drawn, eyes big. “Little magician, if I could be killed, they would have done it a long time ago.”

“What are you?”

He nods toward the trees. “Once, I was a doe—an old doe, older than you can possibly imagine, and when they cleaved my head from my body, I stood again. I was forced into this form by one of you. They took my fur, my hooves, my horn, my heart. Even my womb, so that I couldn’t bear another one of me. I’ve tried to use my sisters’ bodies to change back, but it never works. They stole that from me when they stole my blood. So I have to use something else. Something stranger, I think, than my herd. Something newer.”

“What does that mean?” she cries. “What are you going to do to her?”

“Why does it matter to you?” the prisoner asks. “You killed her, not me.”

He wraps a hand around the barrel of her gun and pulls it from her numb fingers.

The butcher’s voice becomes small. “You have to help me,” she says.

At his beckoning, she kneels beside the corpse with him. He runs his knuckles down her cheek, and says, “Watch.”

He sinks his claws into the corpse’s gut and tears it wide open. Inflated with gas, its intestines resemble pythons. He opens it from pelvis to rib cage, holding its viscera as delicately as he held the doe’s meat. He laughs as he admires it.

"What artistry,” he says. “She had one of you stitch her cervix shut. I can see your fingerprints on every one of her organs. Did you have to open her up to do that? Was she awake when it happened?”

“She was,” the butcher whispers, remembering. Where Edie touched her, she feels as if she had been stabbed.

He slips inside the cavern of her corpse, head-first. He coats his skin with her muck; rolls on top of her until she breaks apart, her blood seeping into the mud. When he emerges from the pond that he has made of her body, his hooves struggle to find purchase on the blood-slick grass. The doe shakes his head until drops of exudate fall from the tips of his woolen ears. His coat is stained a scarlet red. The butcher can only cower in the doe’s shadow as he drags more and more of himself out: his haunches, the delicate curl of his tail. He stands as tall as the treetops, dripping, dripping, dripping like the leaf canopy heavy with old rain.

He exhales once, a whole cloud of air emerging from his lungs, before he slips between the trees.

“Wait!” the butcher cries. “Wait! Aren’t you taking me with you?”

The doe looks over his shoulder. His eyes are still black, but now they are the deep, reflective surface of a lake. The butcher could kneel at the surface of that lake and stare for hours, and still never see the bottom. She could drown in that lake, and the forest would march ever onward.

“You’re free, butcher,” the doe says, “but I think you had better run far, far away.”

Editor: Kat Weaver

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“Pelt” © 2024 by delila

Half-painted in the angled mirror, I ignore my mother’s calls and sweep blush onto my temples. The face of Luz Divinity takes shape beneath my brush. My mother tries again as I tug a wig onto my shaved head, the unit sleek and long, and again as I zip a vinyl bodice over my chest, false cleavage contoured on. I almost let the call expire, answer on the last ring, then shrug the phone against my cheek to wash lipstick swatches from the back of my hand.

“Allô, Ma.” The water runs sunset colors.

She doesn’t call me Luz, or even Louis, but Loulou, the self I wear at home. “Have you decided where you’ll stay this weekend?”

I dry off and palm the phone in one hand taloned with press-ons. The answer is no. I’d hoped to decide later—tomorrow, after the long drive south for my niece’s first birthday, when I’d either pull into a hotel or my mother’s manicured driveway, my brother offering his pullout to our estranged dad instead of me. My ear warms against the screen, just as it did when Juneau broke the news.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “I’ll call in the morning. I’m performing tonight.”

“You—oh.” She remembers what I do for a living. My hot ear tickles as she sidesteps. “Well, not too late. I need to prepare.”

“Okay.”

She says it’ll be good to see me, a line she usually ruins and immediately does. “Let’s make this a nice weekend, yes? I don’t want any drama.”

My ear is fully itching when she hangs up, and I know it will molt soon. I take my time stepping into my thigh-highs, dusting glitter over my collarbones. The more I think on both recent conversations—my brother’s small betrayal, our mother’s assertion that I’m the most likely to ruin a nice weekend—the more I feel my ear prickle, the skin lifting away. Neither came as a total shock: Juneau’s talked grace about our dad before. She deserves a grandpa, Loulou, he once said of his newborn Fabienne, sounding more like our mom every day. We’re only getting older. The baby was a sudden moon, tugging his mercy like a tide. And our mother, well. Gay she could keep denying, but drag is a different offense.

Luz Divinity stares out of the mirror fully stamped. Her work tonight won’t cover a hotel. It’s decided, then, what I’ll answer in the morning, and the thought of this fate is enough to finish the job; I pull on my earlobe and feel the molt detach, chemically peeled by my mother’s words. I flush it away and dab more foundation on the fresh skin underneath, so my ear will match the rest of me.

I inherited the molting, which my mother will deny; she’ll insist it’s a thing only women do, each heartbreak withering from the body like a petal.

I first saw her do it after her mother stilled in her hospital bed. On the ride home, my Mémère’s final kiss dry on her cheek, a cast of my mother’s face unhinged at the chin and floated down into her palms, concave and translucent. The trait loops through our family’s ladies back and back like a braid through beads, since before they left Haiti as refugees. The first pain to peel me apart came later, when she forged “Love, Dad” into cards he didn’t send, that first Christmas after he cheated and left. The bracelet he gave me at birth started chafing on my wrist, and when my mother undid the clasp, my sorrow slipped from that arm like an elbow-length glove, dainty and fine.

Her alarm was quickly disguised. She tried to play it off like I was allergic to nickel and never discussed it again, but Juneau still wears his, and I know it’s made of gold.

Juneau never molted, which confused me back then, but after learning what I was it wasn’t hard to imagine that if our family had borne other men like me, they’d have been molted as heartbreaks just the same. One day little Fabienne will molt, too. She’ll learn repression like the rest, if my mother has her way. The baby will realize quickly that even moons answer to gravity, and we are all my mother’s satellites.

It’s five hours down from Orlando to Kendall. South Florida laps caustic against my body when I step out of the car, eyes level with the stick-figure family on my brother’s back window. I’m glad he’s here. I won’t have to be alone with her. Her house, like her, is too much for no reason, an empty big-top for a single performer. Her high windows end in arches. Her mulch is fresh and bright. She stands a head shorter than I, carefully slim and lotion-sheened with her head wrapped in the absence of a wig. We have those in common. At the threshold she leans for a kiss and says, “I’m glad you could be here, cheri. They’ll be so happy to see you.”

I realize my father may already be in town, that he may have caught a ride here with Juneau and the others. Her face changes when she sees the dread on mine.

“Is he here?” I ask.

“O,” she says in her throat, a deep Haitian sound meaning don’t be like that. “Where else would he be?”

The clockwork of her house stutters as I slot back into it. The walls are more crowded now, barnacled with the usual photos—of me and Juneau, our cousins and uncles, our mother, our mother, our mother—as well as snapshots from the first almost-year of Fabienne’s life. A pregnant Vanessa at a shower I skipped. A hospital room, a baptism. I tug my shirt low, self-conscious in front of so many faces that don’t know what it is to see me through smoke and light, or brush money across Luz Divinity’s bare navel. All my bolder selves wait in a wardrobe far away. We pass a TV where a preacher sweats the Holy Spirit like a toxin, and when the dining table comes into view, it’s clear we’ve been carefully arranged. Facing me, Juneau and Vanessa make up my mother’s right hand; at the other end, Fabienne in a high chair. At my mother’s left there’s just one empty seat—between her and my father, who sits with his back to me. I wonder if God finds as much joy in poising asteroids to collide.

Juneau sees me first, shouting, “Look who it is!”

Vanessa pauses to look in the middle of feeding Fabienne, who strains toward the spoon with her mouth open wide. My father’s greying hair is gelled into threads that taper like contrails across the globe of his skull. I give him a quick hello he might hear or doesn’t. My mother sets a sweaty, microwaved plate in front of me, and I decide I’m going to make it through this dry Boston Market rotisserie without looking at him once. He speaks when she prompts him to—“Gaston, what were you saying about your neighbor’s dog?”—but interacting with us is as alien a reflex to him as walking in heels, or keeping a promise. My brother listens, rapt, our mother’s influence clear, and Vanessa—Vanessa who comments on my live streams when I try out new cosmetics, and sends me memes from Drag Race—Vanessa looks at me like with practiced patience, letting me know I’m seen. “Nou lèd, nou la,” goes the old Haitian phrase. We’re ugly, but we’re here.

I’m short with my mother’s small talk. So many things we aren’t bringing up, and we all know what they are, just like we all knew the mistress’s name, and when they married, and when she died, without a word said aloud in this house. She rubs her wrists like they pain her, but her smile never breaks.

Juneau leads me down pressure-washed sidewalks after lunch to “digest” in the blazing heat. He’s in a polo and cruise shorts. His cologne smells expensive, getting stronger as he sweats. He apologizes again for the short notice, but not the change of plans; he asks about my shows, then corrects himself: “Sorry. Gigs.” I join my thumb and pointer and make a face like Nailed it.

“You should come see me sometime,” I tell him. “I could get you in.” He’s quiet too long, so I voice his thoughts. “Yeah. The baby.”

The excuse has a hell of a shelf life. A heat rash prickles on my forearms, the backs of my knees.

“Maybe if Dad keeps helping out,” Juneau says. “He’s stepped up so much since she was born. He’s over, like, every weekend. He wants her to call him Grandpapá.”

“That’s cute.”

“He’s thinking of moving closer.”

I check my words like produce. Each one has a bruise, so I put them all back.

“He doesn’t need all that space since Mathilde passed away, and I think being around Fabienne has really helped him. I feel like he’s starting fresh, you know?”

It shouldn’t be this painful—diverging, having lives. As boys we’d never needed separate ones, not until I started high school and left him a grade behind, on a different campus; the year I met Rodney, who let me share one of his headphones on the bus rides home. That was the year M.I.A. put gunshots on the radio, the crank of cash registers, the word murder. Luz Divinity used to perform to that song around Orlando, until the real shots rang out this past June and she had to retire it. The sharing led to leaning, that to touching: bare arms, pinkies straining to meet across the green vinyl bench. I walked these same perfect sidewalks with Rodney when a cold snap stunned the iguanas out of the trees, heavy and petrified around our stop, and he enlisted me to rescue the ones that had tumbled past the gutters.

“We gotta get these things off the road,” he’d said, claiming to have seen one burst under a tire.

He cupped the nearest lizard’s belly with one hand and waddled into the grass, arms straight out. He lowered it slow. I copied him all the way up the street, away from our houses, until we reached a small park with a playground. We shared our first kisses in the deserted public restroom. His lips touched my face, my eyelids, my neck, and when at last he reached for me with one cold hand, he paused.

“You’re cut,” he said.

Cut? There was no pain; was I bleeding?

Rodney pulled his hand from my waistband and lowered his own, zipper blooming open. His was unlike my own, unlike my brother’s. When I touched it, the sensation was foreign.

“Godly men are cut,” my mother explained when I figured out how to ask without details, citing diagrams and textbook pages. “Otherwise you’re dirty, and He despises filth.”

That night, my skin lifted away wherever Rodney’s lips had touched, hot with shame over a thing done in the dark, on floors tacky with urine. Filth after all. Juneau watched upside-down from his bunk as I crumpled up the translucent heartbreak that fell from my face, a petal just like our mother’s. I wanted to tell him what happened, why it hurt, who I was, really, now that his life no longer paralleled mine. It would’ve been the first time I’d had to catch him up on anything. I wanted to know how he’d feel if I told him about the first bits of us our mother ever claimed and then discarded. I never asked.

“I miss the iguanas,” I say aloud. I can still feel their skin, bumpy and tight over nothing but muscle.

“I don’t know,” Juneau replies. “I heard they’re invasive.”

I scratch at the inside of my elbow. A crescent of sweat and lotion and grime gathers under my fingernail and I flick it away. We take the narrow sidewalk home, performing proximity, careening apart.

We cool off until dinner, scattered. Juneau sits with our father on the sofa the old man picked out before cheating. The TV airs a block of televangelists—Meyer, Osteen, Jakes. Fabienne is asleep in the bedroom directly over their heads, cushioned like an idol and surveilled by my mother’s faceless foam wig heads. In the kitchen my mother lays chicken thighs into an oiled caldero with a sound like applause, searing them for an elaborate paella, and when Vanessa comes down from settling Fabienne I take the shrimp duty my mother tries to place on her. Peel and devein. The act of flaying comes naturally to my hand.

Vanessa sits nearby at the kitchen bar-top, flapping her shirt to generate wind. A flush hugs her under-eyes. She is blue-eyed and fair, white-passing if not for the Miami on her voice. One dinner, when Juneau was still courting, I found out Vanessa was hiding a shrimp allergy to make our mother happy. “How long you gonna tell that lie?” I asked her then.

“I got Benadryl,” she’d said. “If it was worse I would say something. Or move to a different city like some people.” She winked. I stuck out my tongue. Tonight, I’m sure, she’ll take a pill before eating. The concession hurts to see, when in the early days she arrived as someone I could look at and know I wasn’t crazy. She’s still that, thank God, but she’s done her assimilating. Now Vanessa may as well come clean about her allergy. My mother would praise her and nothing would change. A woman who accommodates; that’s this family’s way.

My mother measures out scoops of dry yellow rice and fills the caldero with stock. She asks for the shrimp just as I set the last one down, but when I carry the bowl to the stove she frowns.

“You took off the tails?” she says. “The tails add flavor.”

“Aren’t they easier to eat this way?” I say, but she shakes her head.

“Just put them in. Here,” she says, lifting the pot lid, and when she stands back to make room for me, the hot water gathered on the lid runs and spills across her bare arm, scalding her. She screams. The lid drops to the counter, spinning on its knoblike handle as she hurries to the sink to run her arm under cool water. It’s so unlike her, this mistake—she’s heavier in space like this, distressed, and everyone in the house rolls toward the heightened gravity of my mother in pain, wondering what happened.

She turns to dry herself and catches me gawking, pausing her refrain of “It’s nothing, it’s alright” to say, “What are you doing? Put those in!” I realize I’m still holding the bowl of shrimp half-tipped over the pot.

As we eat, I see toothpaste smeared over the burn. When the shrimp turn up in the rice, swollen and tender, I find them hard to swallow.

That night the shower is startling white, a camera flash. My own darkness is bold against it. Juneau and I shared this tub as boys, plastering hair from our combs to the walls to keep it out of the drain.

Across the landing from the bathroom, my mother’s room is sealed, double doors with ornate handles that curl away from each other like the halves of a mustache. I once watched through a crack as she applied lotion to her long, smooth legs—a floral cream with glitter in it, one she usually wore to the beach. I coveted it. My own lotions were thick, medicated and scentless, extra-strength and boring. My mother’s glitter lotion spread smooth and cool onto my own legs, and when she caught its sparkle on me in the daylight the beating made that heartbreak slip from both my legs like hose, see-through and delicate. It was the last time I entered her room. I wonder if she still uses that brand. I place one foot toward those doors and hear her footsteps approach.

I leap back into the bathroom and flip the light back on so I can flip it off again and walk out as she appears on the steps. I try to look as though I hadn’t just been considering what I’d been considering.

My mother smiles, the stairs crackling beneath her like ice in warm water. She depresses one half of the golden mustache and says, “Breakfast early. No sleeping in.” I nod my goodnight. We retreat backwards into our rooms, little automatons in a cuckoo clock. In the morning we’ll pop out on our tracks and dance.

In the dark, my old room is unsure how to hold me, so used to containing a boy and then nothing at all. Slipping into these sheets as a man feels like pulling on used socks. She’s cleared out the old bunk, replaced it with an elliptical and a single twin bed. The sounds of shouted ministry tumble down the hall from her bedside radio. I think about sleeping, but the ceiling is too far away without my brother’s weight sagging in the absent top bunk, and years of drag have put my own clockwork behind. I border on nocturnal. I think back to the last night’s final fog-machined minutes and miss them already—the wig, the cover of night, the jewels in my eyes. Here I am bald and shrunken, a burrowing thing blinking in the sun.

What I wish for is company; that I could be in my brother’s apartment, occupying the spaces my father stole from me, or else that Juneau were here, now, so I could run off with his child while he sleeps, the child he is about to raise like us.

I check my hookup apps, put them away, open them again. I shuffle skin like playing cards. There’s a face I keep returning to, have returned to every time I’ve orbited home throughout the years. The face is fuller now, the jaw more sure; a bar piercing bisects one eyebrow, half-hidden by hair styled into twists he didn’t have before. But there’s enough there, beneath the layers of age, and his profile puts him at just the right age. I send the man a message:

What are you listening to these days?

Slats of moonlight rove across my lap as I wait. The linens smell of storage. I open the closet for an extra blanket and find the pair of towels Juneau and I used in our bathtub days, the baby kind with hoods.

I’ve accepted silence as rejection by the time the snoring begins. My mother’s breath fills the house with an honest kind of ugliness, a truth in the ragged pull of her sinuses. The unconscious body doesn’t lie. I’m comforted by it, can even imagine falling asleep to it despite the itch of the bedsheets under my shoulder blades, but a message has just buzzed under my pillow. I squint at the screen, mole-like again, cupping a star in the dark.

Spare headphone for you, he’s written. Come find out.

I’m out the door before I know it. I drive to the pinned address. A phantom trail of stunned iguanas guides my way forward through the night.

When I arrive, Rodney does the expected thing. He says how long it’s been. He wonders why I’m back.

“A baby?” He breathes a long phew, says we’re old. “Good for him. How’s the scene in Orlando?”

I think of Luz Divinity, striding around the downtown in heels that put her six inches higher than me at all times. Her hair catching wind, her lashes glued on, her hips padded with foam cutlets that fill her out every time she mounts a stage. It feels like a betrayal to speak of her here, to a neighborhood that doesn’t want her. When I answer, it’s muffled through my mother’s palm. “It’s hard to say. I’m not really part of it.”

He smiles weirdly. “Okay, well, you’re totally lying. I’ve seen you perform.”

I sit up straight. We’re in his bedroom, dark save a blue neon sign of an astronaut. “You have?”

“I visit some buddies there sometimes,” he says. “I was pretty sure I saw you dancing to ‘Paper Planes’ from the sidewalk last summer, but then I saw you again in October and knew it for sure. On that parade float.”

I’m not prepared to remember this—that particular Pride, the vigil, the names read aloud, the forty-nine lanterns loosed over Lake Eola in the heart of downtown. I’m not prepared to remember how Juneau and Vanessa blew up my phone the night it happened, wondering where I was, while my mother never offered me a word of condolence past “See? How this thing that you do is so dangerous?” I’m not prepared for any of it, so I make a joke that doesn’t land. “Did you tip?”

“The last time I touched you, we never spoke again.”

“That was my mom.”

“Is it different now? There’s no one here but us.”

The astronaut drifts, and I join it. I wonder if that’s true. More than her hand over my mouth, I feel her face behind my skin, her bones beneath my muscles. Like it or not, I’ve learned more than I thought about lying as preservation.

Memories curve before me like space across a visor, scenes from a service on marriage that left me itchy and raw, my arms raked with white ash that I had to beat from my trousers and the seat around me. After, in traffic, Juneau listened to music in the backseat while I twitched in the passenger. “I hope you listened today,” she said. “I talked to Pastor about you. He told me we must pray.” When we made it home she sent Juneau inside and led me in the sign of the cross. My right hand cycled again and again to my face, heart, shoulders, and with each plea for my purity the heartbreak loosened and loosened and detached, a long, empty glove. She threw it out the window. It flailed down the street. I hid myself better after that. Just until I could leave.

I look at Rodney and see my face reflected twice, dim blue Neptunes in the night of his eyes.

I lean forward in answer to his question and feel my mother pass through the back of me. We are a moment of impact, comet and crater. When he lays me back, his sheets are cool and smell like him, and when I draw him into me it’s like I’m a creature with suddenly twice as much flesh. This time, when he kisses me, it’s as though he smooths down the parts that would otherwise lift away, sealing me up.

He bites my earlobe. “Louis,” he says, pronouncing the s, and it almost sounds like Luz.

The morning of the party I overcompensate, awake so early that dawn is not light but color. Red hovers low like a heavy gas. Shaking off odd dreams—iguanas eating their own molts—I sneak my makeup into the bathroom.

I find her at the kitchen sink, lit dimly by the light of the vent hood over the stove. Her wig is a sleek bob, parted down the middle, and she lifts a mug from the drying rack as I approach. Coffee growls into a glass carafe. I watch her notice my face: the yolk-colored eyeshadow I’ve matched to my shirt, the highlight spread delicately atop my cheekbones. She arranges her face the way some people balance rocks. “Eat something quick and come around back,” she says. “I’m cleaning the pool.”

A vacuum wanders the floor of her very leafy pool, dragging its ribbed tubing along the surface of the water. I lift a long-handled net from a hook while she beats leaves and seed casings from the hard cushions of her patio furniture. The debris clatters to her feet. The smell of chlorine wafts up as I disturb the water’s surface. I can tell I’ve unsettled her because she’s absolutely silent. She was always happiest in the sun with us. Juneau and I spent whole summers in this pool, cupping bees out of the filter currents and evacuating our lungs to sink like stones, our skin toasting and deepening while our mother sang worship through her grill-scraping, her hedge-trimming. I know she looks at the water now and imagines me as she made me, the prayer-peeled boy she’d sworn she sent to college with the Spirit in his heart, until he began posting photos as Luz. I wish I could offer her that version of me now—a husk of uninhabited flesh, the full-body heartbreak I shed at eighteen, for her to display on a wall or across the back of her sofa, the mouth of my pelt wide and dark.

My mother and I sweep pavers and straighten tiki torches until the front doorbell chimes through a speaker box by the bar.

I move toward the house but she holds up a hand. “Let me get it. Just go wash that off, yes?”

She shuts the sliding door behind her. My reflection wobbles in the glass.

Rose gold balloons shaped like number ones gather on the ceiling. Streamers climb the pillars in the sitting room, curtaining the sliding glass doors to the pool. There’s metallic confetti on the long dining table where the finger foods wait under cling-wrap. A wide space stays open for the cake. Guests pour in steadily—sunsoaked Kendall beauties from Juneau’s college years and weary pairs of parents and their babies from Vanessa’s mommy-and-me roster; a gaggle of my mother’s bible study ladies introducing each other as deaconess, prophetess, shepherdess, their titles flashing like grilles in their mouths. The kids and cousins run about in water-wings with sunscreen noses.

My mother asks me to pick up the cake, most likely to remove me from view. When I find my car boxed in, Juneau tosses me his keys and says, “Why don’t you take Pop?”

The maneuver is obvious, intentional. She moves beneath his features like a roach under a rug.

Our father is already standing and half the party’s in earshot. I can’t refuse without a scene. He follows me to the door.

The flat palm of the sun is hot on my thighs on the way to the bakery. The heat here has weight. My father’s guayabera and khaki pants blend with the upholstery. Beside his, my outfit is loud—short trunks and bright linen. Mathilde was like him the few times I saw her, plain, unadorned. She was someone the aunties would look at and say, “He left you for that? Huh,” and my mother would say “Now …” in amused alarm, but her face would betray her agreement. She found Mathilde homely, Mathilde who slept late and wore no makeup and hardly kept her house, and if I know my mother there could be nothing more galling than being usurped by someone so low-effort. And suddenly, their differences so front of mind, my father looks so small, so nonthreatening. I don’t see a homewrecker or a deadbeat, a man who leaves his family chasing tail. I see a man who has grieved, still wearing his second wedding ring, still paying for the life that better suited him. I see a man my mother has lied about to preserve her curated reality, and it’s such a cliché I’m actually embarrassed when I realize: she’s mounted a pelt of him, too. We are the same.

The silence between us is fraught. We’re like tuning forks, suspensefully unstruck. We make it nearly all the way to the bakery before I say something I think I’d want to hear, if I were him. “I’m sorry about Mathilde. I wish I’d gotten to know her better.”

He turns. “You do?”

Challenged, I take a moment to see if I mean it, and I do. “Juneau said you’ve been spending a lot of time with them. With the baby. It sounded like that might be because of what happened.”

Brow furrowed, he stares at the dash. I worry I’ve misstepped. He doesn’t speak as I park, and inside the bakery we wait at a glass display filled with guava pastelitos, ham croquettes, finger sandwiches layered with a pink paste. It’s too cold in here to be wearing so little. The mermaid on Fabienne’s cake is lumpy when it comes to the front, her Rice Krispies arms and luster-dust scales looking sweaty, and the name is misspelled Fabiana. We ask for the name at least to be fixed. The attendant snaps her gum at us and takes it back.

“It’s not just because of Mathilde,” my father says at last. “I’m a better grandpa than dad.”

“‘Grandpapá,’” I remember. “Juneau called it a fresh start.”

My father laughs, eyes closed, head shaking. “He’s very sentimental.”

“A miracle, considering,” I say through the side of my mouth—like I would to Vanessa, I realize, because my father’s just said something she would’ve said, and it’s startling to speak so candidly.

“Edwidge feels, she just hides. Her mom was hard too. Your mom stepped out of her whole skin the morning we left Haiti, and Mémère didn’t shed a tear. Not through the whole coup or anything after.” He considers this. “Not anywhere we could see, anyway.”

Bells clang as a customer enters and exits with a gummy-looking racecar cake. I wonder what secret molting she’s done, over her country, or her marriage, or me, or the perceived “dangers” of existing as I do when she’s worked so hard to assimilate. For everything she’ll never ask me are the things I’ve never asked her, our alien griefs and histories, the orbits that won’t cross. Against my will, I get it. I don’t know if we will change.

The mermaid cake returns, touched up. I hold doors for my father and help him ease down into the passenger seat, bearing the cake while he buckles in. I crank the A/C to preserve the frosting.

I take it slow on the way out of the plaza, both for the cake and the iguanas sunning on the cracked asphalt. He holds the cake out steady like it’s Fabienne herself, like both their lives depend on it. In the driveway I lower my visor and check my face, blotting sweat with fast food napkins and apologizing for the delay as I refresh the balm on my lips. He’s pinned down by the cake, unhurried. He says, “You look nice.”

As we gather to sing, my mother hands me her camera so I won’t be in the pictures. The first one I take is a selfie with everyone behind me. We hack up the mermaid and chew her fondant fins.

Outside, Juneau bounces Fabienne by the pool, who cried at the cheers and applause. She cranes unsteadily sunward in his arms like a plant, her head a bulb on a stem.

I take her from his arms and insist he eat cake before it’s gone. At the edge of the pool with Fabienne on my knee, water lapping my calves, her hair smells of chlorine, baby oil, the inside of a hat. I lay the length of my nose against her head and speak into her ear about the water, the leaves that fall in and why. I tell her about the anoles and their wild red throats. I ask her if she likes her party. I tell her what shade I have caked on my eyelids, and that one day Luz Divinity will have more wigs than Grandma, and she’ll have to come north and meet her drag auntie. I tell her how easy it is, in this place, to be scorched. She grasps my forefinger with her perfect little hand. Her skin is impossibly new, her arms fat, squeezable rolls of smooth brown. I direct a prayer at no one at all that her first heartbreaks molt off of her easily, and not for a very long time.

I feel her bottom warm against my arm and carry her inside for a change. “Her things are in Mom’s room,” Juneau says around his cake. “I can send Vanessa.”

Behind him, Vanessa makes a face, so I say, “I’ve got it.”

Past the golden mustache handles, the boudoir is empty. Party sounds seep through the floor. I fumble the change a bit, hiding my trial-and-error from the foam heads lining the dresser at my back. Fabienne is patient with me, gazing at the pink walls, the eighties-chic watercolor abstracts, the bowls full of shells or jewelry or fragrant potpourri. Used diaper in hand, bundled tight, I toe the lever on the tall bin in my mother’s private restroom and pause. Spirals of empty, crumpled arms and fingers and faces, hollow and sheer as wrapping tissue. The topmost limb is smeared with dry toothpaste where it would have been scalded last night. The shed skins inside could be my mother two or three times over. I let the slam-proof lid lower slowly over her heartbreaks and lift Fabienne from the bed.

I spot my mother alone when I drop the diaper into the kitchen trash. She’s different here, believing herself unobserved. For once she’s not performing. She recovers at the sight of the baby, reaching out with fresh arms free of burns, but for a second she looks so exhausted.

Editor: Dante Luiz

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“Gold Foil Experiment” © 2024 by Teo Nalani

We are all harmonic oscillators
sloshing around in watery bags of salt,
doing work on the surroundings
as patiently chaos consumes us.

As feelings arrive in waves to wash our brains
and scientists shoot little balls at sheets of gold,
I see the absurdity on your face:
These bodies are sixty percent water
and water is ninety-nine
    point nine-nine-nine
      percent empty space.
It’s a wonder there is anything at all in this place.

So lift up the layers of your carbon skeleton
to the energy raining down from the heavens—
for here, in the ragdoll physics of this world,
we are the resonating filaments
of a song across the abyss.

A Recipe for Life, ©2024 by Arina Konstantinova

This variation on the elixir of life pairs the flavour of roasted roc with the medicinal potency of the philosopher’s stone. But buyer beware: this dish isn’t for everyone.

Lara props her father up in bed and tucks a napkin into his blue button-down.

“You have to eat, dad. If you don’t eat—”

Her father laughs, fractal wrinkles splitting from the creases around his eyes.

“I know, I know. If I don’t eat, I’ll die! But Lara, I’m dying anyway. Unless your mother’s recipes cure cancer now.”

Lara turns away, hiding her welling eyes as she walks back to the kitchen. Steadying herself, she ladles curried parsnip soup into a bowl, then tops it with a heaping dollop of crème fraiche. She lays the bowl on a tray and places it before her father.

“Here,” she says. “Just try it, dad. Please.”

Her father sniffs the soup appreciatively, then brings the spoon to his mouth. He manages one spoonful, then another, then tugs the napkin from his chest.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “It tastes even better than your mother used to make. But I just can’t eat.”

At first, he blamed the chemo, which stole his sense of taste. Later, with the radiation, he was too nauseous to keep anything down. Now, he can only say that he isn’t interested in food any longer, and anyway is full after even the smallest morsel.

Lara scoops another spoonful of the amber soup and holds it to his mouth.

“Just one more, dad. Please.”

Her father leans forward. He breathes in the scent, redolent with earthy, autumnal aromas, fragrant with cardamom and star anise, but the steam tickles his dry throat into a fit of coughing. He holds his hands up and Lara leans back.

She turns away from her father, but her gaze falls upon her mother’s empty chair. She looks out the window at the leaves turning ochre in the cold sunshine so that he will not see the tears she is fighting back. He is pushing away the soup, pushing away Lara, pushing away, she thinks, his life.

“Oh, dad,” she says. “Oh, dad. What are we going to do?”

First, brine your phoenix in seawater seasoned with pennywort and asafoetida. If you have no phoenix to hand, see instructions below. Otherwise, proceed to the following step.

Lara learned to cook at her father’s knee and followed in his footsteps to become a chef. But these days, she stays home and cares for him. A few times a week, she manages a brief outing while the personal support workers bathe, shave, and dress him. But those hours off aren’t a rest. She isn’t catching up with girlfriends over brunch. She is running to the pharmacy, hurrying through the supermarket.

But outside she remembers a whole world is revolving, a season turning, misty mornings and the loamy smell of fallen leaves slick on pavement. She steps outside and remembers that once she was a little girl, laughing as her father flung her into a pile of leaves.

On Saturday, she ushers in the personal support worker and slips outside before her father wakes. She sips an espresso while picking up breakfast at their favourite patisserie. By the time she’s back, her father is sitting up in bed, looking about as good as he ever does these days. Lara sits beside him and shakes out two candied ginger pain au chocolat.

“Stephan has outdone himself today,” she says, luxuriating over the buttery flakes.

Her father tears a fragment and chews deliberately, as if struggling to remember how. He closes his eyes, straining to gulp down the pastry. When he finally opens them again, his face is composed in a facsimile of pleasure.

“Very good,” he says. “I’ll save the rest for later.”

Lara has heard this before. She’ll come back and find him sleeping, the stale remainder of the pastry lying like a corpse on the bedside table. Arguing won’t help, so she changes the subject instead.

“I couldn’t sleep last night so I stayed up and read. There’s this clinic in Mexico that does these infusions: vitamin C, mistletoe, things like that. There’s testimonials from patients with stage IV colon cancer, just like you. I was thinking—”

“Lara—”

“I could drive us. It’d be like the road trips we used to take with mom. Remember the Grand Canyon? We could leave—”

“Lara, we’ve been over this—”

“Tomorrow. We could leave tomorrow and be there Wednesday; Thursday at the latest.”

“Lara!” he shouts or tries to. His weakened voice is little more than a stage whisper.

Lara falls silent, the part of her that is still her daddy’s little girl clamming up from the reprimand in his tone.

“I’m dying, Lara. And there’s nothing that can save me. Not surgery, not chemo, not radiation, not immunotherapy, and certainly not some new-age internet snake oil salesman. I’m dying, and you know what, Lara, it’s okay.”

This last word he breathes out like a benediction.

Tears fall onto Lara’s cheeks, and he reaches frail fingers to wipe them away.

“Oh, darling,” he whispers. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m ready. I’m ready to be with your mother. There’s no cure, but there will be life again.”

“But what if, dad? What if there is a cure, and we just haven’t found it yet? Isn’t it worth it to try? To try for me?”

Tears fall again, and she jerks back, swiping them away.

“You might be ready to go,” she sobs, “but I’m not ready to lose you.”

She leans her head into his shoulder and weeps. All she wants is the comfort of her father, a comfort that is slipping through her fingertips. Her father sighs. He reaches out his thin hand and rubs her neck.

“If I was meant to stay, my darling, you know I would. But it isn’t up to me anymore.”

His throat catches, and he coughs before resuming.

“The only choice I have is how to live my last days. And I’ve chosen to live them here in my own home, with you, not in some hospital seeking impossible miracles.”

He lifts her chin to look at him, then takes her hand.

“Everything I need is right here.”

Lara looks at his withered face. Beneath his thin, jaundiced skin, the bony prominences of his skull protrude like fossils. But in his eyes, she sees the man who’d check her childhood closet for monsters.

He squeezes her hand, and she squeezes back.

“Okay, dad,” she says, but she can’t bear to meet his sunken eyes any longer.

Lara looks down at their clasped hands and catches sight of her watch. She only has a couple more hours of respite booked with the personal support worker. She lets go of her father’s hand and stands up.

“Sorry, dad. Errands.”

Her father nods, easing back in bed.

“We’ll talk later,” he says. “And Lara …” From the doorway, she looks over her shoulder. “I love you, darling.”

Lara gulps down a sob, then finds her voice again.

“I love you too, dad. Now get some rest.”

To find a phoenix, conjure a fire at noonday and burn three handfuls each of mugwort, cedar, and juniper. Offer a pinprick of blood to the fire, then spin widdershins until your vision blurs. Thrust your bare hand into the flames. You need not grasp the phoenix’s talon; its talon will clasp your hand.

Lara weaves amidst the crowded market hall, plucking pears she’ll poach in port and serve with mascarpone and candied walnuts. Her father should like it; he taught her the recipe. She dawdles, taking in the cool, autumnal smell of the harvest, but as she walks, the question thrums in her mind, reverberating like a litany.

What if there is a cure?

What if I can save him?

What if?

What if?

What if?

The market usually bustles, but between steps Lara senses that strange synchronicity as a room of people stops speaking simultaneously. She looks around, and the world spins so suddenly that she staggers sideways.

When her head clears, she realizes she’s daydreamed into some part of the market she hadn’t known. The line of stalls is damp and shadowy. The dusty air smells of stale incense. It is so quiet that Lara imagines she could hear the scurry of a mouse, then laughs nervously as one darts between stalls. She looks around for directions, then spots a man outside a cigar shop, his face illuminated by the red-eyed glow of a cheroot.

“Excuse me,” Lara says. “Which way are the food halls?”

The man shakes his head and says something in a language Lara doesn’t recognize, then drops the cheroot, grinds it under his heel, and disappears into his stand. Lara checks her watch. Somehow it is already 11:30. In an hour, the personal support worker will be gone, and Lara’s father will be alone.

Lara looks up towards the high windows. Their light is wan and choleric, and the air smells of ozone. Outside, a storm must be brewing. Lara listens as her watch ticks time away. She imagines, absurdly, her father sitting within an hourglass as the sands slip out beneath him. She closes her eyes and pictures being anywhere else, but when she opens them, she’s more lost than ever.

While your phoenix brines, dig a hole and kindle a roaring fire. As the logs burn down to coals, add volcanic rocks or, failing that, the remains of a dry stone wall.

Lara walks back the way she came, or at least the way she thinks she came, but comes immediately to a stall she doesn’t recognize and realizes she is utterly lost. Then, amidst the darkened shops, she spots a single, distant light.

Lara hustles towards it. As her eyes adjust, she realizes the light comes from a stall stacked with dusty, leather-bound books. Outside, a man sits on a pallet of encyclopedias, a book beneath his bespectacled nose. With an idle hand he twirls the end of his grey beard, not looking up until Lara’s feet finally enter his field of view.

“Aha,” he says, smiling and closing his book. “What if, right? You called, and you came! How wonderful! Now, let’s just divine what you need. History, perhaps? The Lemurian Annals might suit. Or possibly something geographical? We have atlases of Mu and Hyperborea.”

He pauses, inspecting her. Spotting her groceries, he grins.

“Oh, I see,” he says. “I see! An herbarium could be just the ticket.”

He turns and rifles through a stack of books. Lara looks around in desperation, but there’s no one else in sight. She checks her watch. She’s running out of time.

The man’s finger pauses before a book, then withdraws. He looks over his shoulder at her.

“Oh,” he says. “No, I know. I know just what you need.”

He ushers Lara forward. She protests that she only needs directions, says that really, she must go, yet somehow, he draws her into the stall. He stops before a shelf, running his hand from spine to spine, mumbling.

“Aha!” he crows.

He pulls a dusty tome from the shelves and hands it to her like an offering.

“Here,” he says. “Here. This is what you need.”

Lara spins it around and reads the title:

Wild Roc au Vin.

Next, prepare the stuffing. This calls for bread, garlic, onions, herbs de Provence, and apples of the Hesperides. If you do not live in the Hesperides, simply approach any nearby apple tree. All trees everywhere are connected and, if you proffer a suitable offering and ask nicely, the tree will drop one perfect golden apple into your outstretched hand.

Lara doesn’t remember leaving the market. She certainly doesn’t remember paying the shopkeeper for the book she finds while unpacking the groceries on the kitchen counter.

She listens to the radio as murmurs leak beneath her father’s door. The personal support worker must be wrapping up. But then the door is opened by a tall, freckled man in a starched black shirt and white collar. He eases the door closed and offers a solemn smile.

“Hello, Lara,” he says. “It’s been a while.”

“Since my mother died, and I stormed out of her mass, you mean? Yes, it’s been three years, two months, and fifteen days. That’s a while, I guess. What are you doing here, Father Donovan?”

He tugs at his collar, perhaps finding it hard to breathe.

“Just calling on my flock.”

“And what was the purpose of this call?”

“That would be between your father and me.”

Lara scowls.

“You didn’t give him the last rites,” she says. “He isn’t dying.”

“Lara,” he says. “Could we sit? We haven’t talked, you and I.”

Lara’s nails dig into her palms.

“If your church had given my mother the miracle she prayed for, that I prayed for, maybe we’d have something to talk about. But it didn’t, and we don’t.”

Father Donovan bows his head, then looks up and meets her eyes.

“I know you’re grieving,” he says.

“Grieving?” Lara snaps. “Grieving?”

She balls her fists, struggling to contain herself, then realizes she can’t, not anymore.

“My father and I cared for mom, day and night, 'til the very end, right there in that room. She died, and two weeks later they found a mass the size of a tangerine on his colonoscopy. So just when do you think I’ve had time to grieve?”

Father Donovan opens his mouth, but Lara isn’t finished, not even close.

"I can’t even bear to think about her!” she hisses. “Do you understand me? Do you understand me!”

Father Donovan closes his eyes, then opens them again.

“I understand,” he says. “And that’s all the more reason—”

Lara shakes her head.

“I think you should leave.”

“Lara, please—”

She steps forward, her raised fist shaking.

“Take your bloody wine and crackers,” she rasps, “and get out.”

Father Donovan looks up, as if searching for something. When he looks down, his eyes are tranquil, a sea grown quiet. He nods.

“Of course,” he says. “Please call if you need me.”

He walks to the door and steps across the threshold.

“I’ll be praying for you,” he says. “For both of you.”

He closes the door, leaving Lara in the kitchen, her knuckles white, her eyes glassy. But her father calls and she stifles a sob.

“Coming, dad!”

When the rocks are hot, cover them with cornhusks. Place the brined and stuffed phoenix atop the husks and shroud it with jute. Bury everything and let cook.

Once her dad is sleeping, Lara pours herself a glass of wine, curls up in an armchair, and props the strange book open in her lap. She had tried to ignore it while cooking the pistachio pesto her father wouldn’t eat, but the book had simply waited, tugging at her attention.

Lara isn’t sure what the book is exactly. She doesn’t think it’s an herbarium, and it isn’t history or geography either, though it seems like maybe it’s all those things and more. She decides, in the end, that it’s some sort of cookbook. Except this cookbook employs impossible ingredients and bizarre instructions. Also, the recipe titles don’t describe the dish, but rather its purported effects; she flips past a syrup for squandered love, a roast for fertility, a stew for lost things.

She sips her wine, quirking an eyebrow at the improbable book, surely someone’s idea of a joke. But then she flips another page and her eyes alight on a title.

A Recipe for Life.

She reads the recipe, then puts down her glass, and reads it again

Her father groans. She tenses, waiting for him to either call out or drift off again. In a moment, his snores grumble under the bedroom door. She reads the recipe once more, then stands, and paces the room. It’s impossible. All of it’s impossible.

She eases open her father’s door and looks down at him. His chest rises, and even through the sheets she sees the sunken spaces between his ribs. He is fading away, ounce by ounce, calorie by calorie. And if nothing changes, one day soon there’ll be nothing left of him but her own weightless memories, her own immeasurable grief.

Lara watches as he takes a breath, then another.

“What if?” she whispers.

While the phoenix cooks, scour the seeds from one fruit of the dead. You may know this as a pomegranate. In a small saucepan, combine the seeds with one cup mead, the juice of a lime, and a thumb of ginger. Simmer and reduce.

When her father wakes, Lara is sitting at the foot of his bed wearing a fall jacket and hiking boots.

“Hello, dad,” she says, taking his hand.

After a moment, his eyes focus. His face is emaciated, his skin waxy, but his eyes sparkle at the sight of her.

“Lara,” he says, smiling.

“I’m going out,” she says. “Just for a bit. The personal support worker is in the kitchen.”

“Errands?” he asks.

“Something like that.”

“Stay,” he says. “Errands can wait.”

Looking at him, Lara doesn’t think the “errands” can wait very long at all. She doesn’t need an MD to see her father can’t go on much longer, not like this.

“I won’t be long. Just have a nap and I’ll be back before you know it.”

She kisses his forehead, then stands up and pads towards the door.

“Lara,” he says, “it’s going to be okay.”

Lara looks back and smiles tightly.

“Of course, dad. I’ll make sure of it.”

His head eases back into the pillow and his eyes close. She steals a final look at him, and then she closes the door.

Dig up the phoenix and let rest on a cedar carving board. Remove the stuffing. Carve, plate, and drizzle with pomegranate reduction. Serve with seasonal vegetables.

The instructions are vague, but Lara follows them as best she can. She doesn’t want to have anything to regret, later, if the recipe doesn’t work. Most of the common ingredients she already has, though a few she needs to run to the market for. She couldn’t fully believe it ‘til it actually worked, but even the apples are mostly a matter of asking nicely.

The phoenix, however, is a different story.

It is easy enough to light a fire, easy enough to burn three handfuls of mugwort, cedar, and juniper. A pinprick of blood is a little thing, and spinning in circles until her vision blurs? Well, she hasn’t done that since she was a girl, but it comes back easily enough.

When she plunges her hand into the flames, she expects the fire to feel inexplicably cool. It doesn’t. It feels just as hot as all the kitchen flames she’s ever burnt her hands on. Writhing, she grasps frantically, searching for the bird. Through the flickering fire, she sees that somehow her skin is unburned. Yet still the pain swells, swells so terribly that she cannot help imagining the fat of her hand rendering, the bones disarticulating in the fire. She reaches desperately, but cannot find the talon, and cannot bear the flames much longer.

An infinite weight compresses her shoulders, the weight of her failure. She doesn’t know how she could hold out for even a moment longer. But then she remembers the recipe, remembers that the phoenix will clasp her hand, and something inside her lets go, and allows her hand to rest, unmoving, in the flames.

It takes a fraction of a second, a fraction that feels like an age of the earth, but then there is a talon in her hand, small digits curled like the fingers of a child around her thumb. And though the pain remains excruciating, she draws her hand back ever so gently. She cannot afford to lose the bird now.

She pulls the phoenix from the fire and is surprised, first of all, that her hand is whole, unscarred from the flames. And then she looks at the phoenix and is surprised all over again.

In myth, the phoenix is a bird of flame, resplendent in reds, yellows, and oranges. A force of nature. This bird is a sooty grey, ashen, and pale. It’s bald in places where its lank plumage has fallen out. And whatever spark once kindled in its eyes is little more than a cooling ember now.

Yet, it is a phoenix. She knew as soon as its talon grasped her hand. And only now does it occur to her that the recipe has left something out. Something terrible.

She must kill this creature.

Lara is no stranger to killing her food. Her own father taught her to wring the neck of a chicken when she was no more than ten years old. But this is no chicken. It is a withered being, a husk of whatever it once was, but underneath she can feel its majesty.

Fresh tears blur her vision. With sudden, unspeakable sadness, she realizes that she can never kill it, not for her father, not for anything.

But the phoenix grasps her finger in its talon, and its warm eyes meet hers. She sees in their flickering depths the joys and sorrows of a lifetime, can feel the long-vanished power of its youth as it banked on a thermal high above a dusty desert. She can feel, too, the sadness that grips its weakened frame, the humiliation of this most unnatural state.

The phoenix lets go of Lara’s finger and lays its head in her palms. She knows what it wants, can see it in its eyes, but she rebels against it, horrified by its acceptance. It releases one talon and sets it against her leg—an old friend saying goodbye. She looks into its calm eyes, and then she closes her own.

In the end, it is not so different from a chicken after all.

After that, the rest is easy. It’s only cooking, after all. She brines the bird and makes the stuffing, digs the pit and stokes the flames. She sets the phoenix in the pit with a sort of reverence. It isn’t in the recipe, but she places its heart amidst the rocks before burying it all to cook. Somehow it feels like the right thing to do.

As Lara cooks in the backyard, she pops in and out of the house to check on her father. The personal support worker says he’s been asking for her, but she only ever finds him sleeping.

When she judges the phoenix to be cooked, she unburies the bird. Try as she may, she cannot find the heart. Where it lay there is only a small ovoid rock, glowing amidst the coals.

Preparing the meal by the kitchen window, she catches a flash of light outside and thinks for an instant that the fire must have gotten out of hand. But when she looks there’s nothing, just a trail of smoke, corkscrewing exuberantly into the sky.

Lara finishes the recipe and plates it. The smell conjures memories of childhood turkeys, only spicier. The apple’s sweetness rises above the stuffing’s herbaceous steam. The pomegranate sauce is as red as fresh arterial blood. Lara’s mouth waters. Her stomach growls. She feels a hunger stronger than any she’s ever known. She wants this. Or perhaps, she thinks, it wants her. And yet her fork pauses above the bird. She cannot bring herself to eat it.

She hears her father wake, grabs the plated meal, and walks to his door. She is shocked anew at the sight of him, frailer even than he looked that morning, his temples sunken, his cheeks hollow. Somehow, he manages a smile.

“Lara,” he says.

She props him up.

“Dad, I’ve brought dinner.”

“I can tell,” he says. “Smells divine! But I can’t place it. I feel as if I know it, knew it once as a boy perhaps, but I’ve forgotten now. It was so long ago.”

She sets it in front of him and he bends down, inhaling the heady aroma.

“Gorgeous presentation,” he says, “but what is it?”

Lara laughs as the weight she’s carried lifts from her shoulders.

“You won’t believe it. God, I’m not sure I believe it.”

“Lara, language.”

“Sorry. It’s just, it’s a cure, dad. It’s a cure for everything. Anyway, don’t ask what’s in it, just eat.”

Her father puts down his fork.

“Lara, we’ve been over this.”

She raises her hands, placating.

“I know, dad, I know. But this is different. It really works. Please, just try a little.”

“I’m not hungry,” he says, looking out the window.

“Dad!”

He doesn’t respond, but Lara can’t contain herself.

“Dad, if you don’t eat this, you’re going to die. Do you understand? You’re going to die. And I don’t know how to live without you. The grief will kill me. I still can’t even think about mom; it just hurts so much. And if you’re gone, who will I talk to? I won’t have anyone. So please, dad, please just eat it, just a forkful.”

Her father looks at her, solemn but tender. And then at last, he speaks.

“You don’t know how to live without me because you’ve never had to."

He pauses, collecting breath.

“You’re right. The grief will never leave you. But you can’t run from it, Lara. You can’t run from your mother’s death, not anymore, and you can’t run from this either. You can only face it and learn to live with it. And you will learn, because you’ll have to.”

“Dad!”

Tears fall from her eyes. He waits until she calms again.

“Lara,” he says. “I need to tell you something. I’ve told you before, but I don’t think you’ve heard me. Are you ready to listen? Are you ready to listen, now?”

Lara blinks away a tear. She nods.

“You haven’t been able to face this, but I’m ready to die, Lara. I’m ready. I’ve lived a good life. And I’ve loved every moment, even these last months, here with you. But there’s a season for everything. It’s autumn now, and it’s my time. My time to be with your mother again. And one day—many years from now, I hope—we’ll be together again too.”

She looks at him, really looks at him. His eyes are as still as deep pools, as clear as crystal, as weary as a weathered phoenix. In his eyes she sees that she’ll never change his mind, and the grief she’s fled floods her all at once.

“Oh, dad,” she says, crawling into bed beside him, burying her head in his shoulder. “Oh, dad.”

He wraps his withered arms around her. Through his wizened chest, she can hear the faint beating of his heart.

“I love you, darling,” he says, kissing her forehead and rocking her, slowly, to sleep.

“Remember that,” he whispers, “Even in your grief. Remember.”

It is the last thing he ever says.

Evaporate two thimblefuls of tears (yours) on a sunny windowsill. Set residual salt aside. Conserve one lock of the deceased’s hair. Mix with pine needles and burn, preserving the ash.

Make a simple bone broth; chicken is traditional but beef, or even lamb will do. Season with whichever herbs and spices feel right. Stir in ash and salt, then serve the tonic for grief in your most cherished mug.

With a pack of tissues and judicious application of waterproof mascara, Lara makes it through the funeral mass, though only just. It rains the entire walk home from the cemetery, which suits her fine. Her tears mingle with the cold autumn rain, which slicks her hair and chills her fingers and leaves her numb heart nothing to beat but bitter blood.

Back at home, she wants only to forget this horrible day ever happened, to simply sleep and wake up from this devastating dream. She craves oblivion, hungers for release. Her eyes fall across her father’s liquor cabinet, and for a moment she can almost taste the bitter sulfite stupor of her father’s homemade chianti. But she shakes her head and looks away. As miserable as she is, to drink now would be the first mile of a long road she doesn’t wish to travel.

She looks across to the kitchen and spots the book. There had been something in there. A tonic for grief, she thought it was called, and she finds it easily enough. The instructions are somewhat more straightforward than the recipe for life, and if nothing else, cooking always calms her nerves.

Lara isn’t so concerned about perfect adherence to the recipe this time; the stakes are considerably lower now. She burns a bit of his hair she’d saved along with some pine needles from the tree out back. She doesn’t bother to evaporate her tears; she weeps plenty into the broth as she’s cooking.

Lara isn’t sure what spices to pair with the chicken, but scents the cumin in the spice rack, and is flooded by memory. She sees her father, dancing in the kitchen, stirring a pot of tortilla soup, then lifting the ladle up and belting out his best Elvis, which was never very good. She represses a giggle, then a tear, and then she grabs the cumin along with some chiles and paprika.

After a few minutes, the whole house smells fragrant and earthy. The steam from the pot rises in dense clouds, clearing her sinuses, still stuffy from crying. When the broth is done, she ladles it into a volcano mug her family brought back from a long-lost trip to Maui.

Lara curls up on the couch and lets the steam rise under her nose. It smells sublime, distinct and familiar all at once. The old floorboards creak behind her, but when she looks over her shoulder, she sees only her parents’ empty chairs. She looks down at the mug again, hesitates for just a second, then takes a sip.

She doesn’t expect to feel anything; in fact, she expects to feel nothing, expects the tonic to numb her completely. Instead, with a single sip, a memory surfaces. She lies on the couch, on this same couch, a feverish little girl shivering under a blanket. But then her mother and father are beside her, clutching a bowl of chicken soup that warms her inside out. They hold her and kiss her sweaty brow and she knows, somehow, that everything will be okay.

But then she is back on the couch, alone again. She wrinkles her nose and puts down the mug. That isn’t what she wanted, isn’t what she needs, and suddenly her anger flares again. She seizes the book from the coffee table and flips it open to the recipe. She skims it again, then pauses to read the footnotes.

Readers drawn to this recipe typically come seeking nepenthe, some simple potion to forget their sorrow. But no elixir can wholly deaden grief; grief’s only true tonic is time, and even that is but a partial balm.

This tonic takes a different tack. Its fusion of flavours, unique to each mourner, conjures for the drinker their fondest memories of the deceased. Those we’ve loved and lost live in our past, a place we may visit only in dream, or in memory. In memory we find them, and with their memory, we may find a way to go on.

Lara reads the recipe twice more. She looks down at the mug, still steaming on the geode-slice coaster on the coffee-table. She can smell a million memories in the steam wafting towards her. A million painful memories. A million beautiful ones too.

With a shaking hand she lifts the mug and cradles it between her palms. She takes a deep breath and lets it out. And then she takes another sip.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of the art for this story was made possible by a gift from K.C. Mead-Brewer during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“Nuca” © 2024 by delila

Maculated tree branches of arylide yellow twist into knots as the river rumbles below our footbridge. When my palm lands on a twig, I can feel my other mouth, the one that likes to talk back, the one hidden beneath my ponytail, recoil with cold.

We walk on slippery rotten wooden boards to stretch our legs after the drive from the city and before we dip into the hot springs. Carme treks ahead of me and has tucked her other face underneath her hoodie. I can hear it screaming in protest through Carme’s long, wavy hair and her jacket’s thickness, through the roaring of the Papallacta river and the thrumming of the rainfall above. Carme’s partner, Anahí, leads our hike and at times stops her quick pace to help her girlfriend through rough patches; last night Anahí trimmed her undercut and now parades her other face to this cloud forest. La otra cara also carries her plump lips and red cheeks, a smile that I’ve memorized, and eyes I can never tell if they’re green or brown. They watch me as I hike along and never blink.

Are we close to the springs yet? Carme asks, and Anahí laughs; her second face joins and pulls its cheeks apart, a slit in her nape cara, like a black hole ripping through spacetime, revealing a row of yellowed teeth and a blackened tongue. Her mouth a burrowing and I still want in. My eyes widen and I slip on a bricked step swathed by flattened barbed wire. The bromelias above stop my fall; they pull my shoulders with their spikey ends and the shedding tree’s moss lifts my jacket and me. The páramo forest gathers its limbs on us and aches to whelm, to hug me, to save me. I look back at Anahí's nuca face and it winks, a blink so slow it feels like an invitation.

My other face chortles through my hair. It coughs up a dark hairball a few meters later.

When we reach the hot springs, Anahí strips; Carme and I watch how her toes break through the pool’s vapor. A nevus lives on her inner thigh, her knees carry scars from our childhood bicycle lessons. Once her body is in, her other face says Qué hijue madre and Anahí giggles, but the other, new, Anahí doesn’t. A lengua dressed as a shadow hangs outside her mouth.

Yeah, she says, nodding, I feel the same way. Qué fue? she asks us. Carme and I look at each other, impressed at how Anahí’s body did not protest the rain as she undressed or when she slowly submerged herself into the volcanic water. She boils and waits, her clavicles poking out amongst bubbles, the mountains around us walling us in.

I want to sink my faces into the hot spring and see which one comes out breathing. I’m hoping it’s mine. But when I do, when I drown her, me, I’m the one who screams. The lava pool stings both sets of eyes. My nostrils burn and ears keep ringing from the bubbling and the droning below. I raise my fingertips and feel my other teeth out and bare, a wicked smile unfolding in my nuca, mi otra boca chomping at my finger.

Ow! I say in response, my other cara now kissing my finger with such tenderness. It likes to hurt and watch me squeal.

Dolo, Carmela says to me, shaking her head. I already tried that. They’re not going anywhere, she says, talking about her own. Just try to relax your nuca, she adds. Carme pets her own nape face and lets the hot spring vapor veil her winged eyeliner and blushed nose, her rosy lip gloss still intact.

I can’t believe you put makeup on yours, Anahí laughs. Carmela’s other face blows a kiss to the forest.

Dude, obviously. What—am I gonna let someone see the other me sín nada? Like, bare me? Carme laughs, too.

Pequeña, Anahí says, drifting towards her girlfriend.

I feel the other me tense up. Please be quiet. Not now.

I don’t ever think you need make-up, Anahí reassures her Carme.

I roll my eyes. I hope the back of my head does, too. But it doesn’t seem to listen to me.

When are we getting puntas, putas? I ask them and later spit out the hot spring water my other mouth swallowed up. It’s like I can’t with her. I can’t with me. Carme and Anahí roll their eyes at me, maybe all sets of eyes, and swim away. Red and purple bikinis plop in blue, murky water.

After, when we’re drying our bodies with our packed cold towels, Carme asks, Why didn’t this work? She smothers the back of her face with a drenched rag.

Carme wonders why we’re haunted by these other versions of us, why they’ve emerged now, why we birthed them together. These faces from foggy mirrors adorned with lipstick kisses, espejos we used for practice before our bodies gravitated towards each other. Pimples galore, eyebrows that met in the middle, breasts in training bras, pierced navels, and a sky’s worth of dread living in the lacunas of us. We only hold on to what we know: nuca caras leave when ready, but an offering occurs before then and legend has it it involves water.

I heard it could work out here in the hot springs, no lo sé, I explain, trying to comb my hair with my fingers, but my otra cara’s teeth keep clacking, out to bite.

I think maybe in El Gran Cañón. That’s what we have left, anyways, Anahí says and embraces Carme, shielding her from an incoming wind. It pushes through treetops, sheds deciduous leaves, and thrusts into the wooden bridge. El viento howls so loud we no longer hear the bubbling of the hot pools or the thunderous river. I cover my ears, but I can still hear my other face when she says Why not me.

The picnic table almost falls over as we three plop down and perch our elbows on the woven cloth. The Papallacta restaurant that sits on a hill scummed with thick grey fog welcomes bathers after their hot springs swim. Their most popular drinks are puntas, pure sugarcane methanol. Our guts will burn and this way we’ll find some warmth.

We sit and stare at each other. Our eyelashes wet and pointy, eyes red from sulfates, skin wrinkly with salt. We eye the forks and knives below our chins and wonder if the other mouths need food, too. Do they feed or feast. Do they yearn like we do, lick lips and pull at their skin, click teeth at night and leave pools of saliva on our pillows.

I hope the moonshine puntas blind her and end her.

The waitress sees us touching our other faces, our hands reaching to the back of our damp heads. She smiles as she sets down the shot glasses filled to the brim.

Puntas on the house, chicas, she says and winks. I wonder if she does that all day. Serve and wink and beam. How’s las otras caras? she asks us.

We look up at her. Carme’s other face sneezes, her wet hair lifting upwards. I cackle and a little tear strays from my eye, but I don’t feel it fall down my nape.

I’m having a great time, Anahí replies. I actually believe her. The most unbothered Anahí.

So, all three of you? she asks, and I lift my hair, pulling back to reveal my face.

Oye, pero qué brava la tuya, the waitress tells me. How angry my face is, she thinks. I can feel it pouting. Maybe a tongue sticking out. I know from this morning’s mirror its face still beams with baby fat and her braces are on tight. I drew my hair apart and glanced at a cara I haven’t seen in so long, a me I left behind forever ago.

Did the hot springs help with the pain? she asks us. Carme lets out a sigh and shakes her head no; Anahí holds Carme’s hands, intertwining her fingers.

No, but we’re going to El Gran Cañón later, Anahí replies for us. The waitress nods and leaves, scratching the back of her head with her fingernails. We clink our shots and pour them down our throats, the methanol stinging the sides of my lips. My nape mouth retches.

A paved road links Papallacta and the jungle city of Tena, the house of El Gran Cañón. Women dry cacao beans on the side of the highway and so when Carme lowers her copilot window, a scent of sun-warmed and herbs and fruit bursts in. Beyond the beans, a porraceous wall. Above, a foliage that ebbs and flows. Below, golden lamellas, paths of bugs and dead things that fall from the sky, a forever layered ground. Anahí’s finger twirls the mixtape tape cord that connects to her phone. Old trees listen to our car tunes and hum along.

From the backseat, I watch Anahí’s hand, how the sun has blessed her skin, and how she sometimes extends her fingers to reach for Carme’s thigh. My nuca cara cackles at my want.

Carme sticks her hand out the window and lets the jungle’s exhalation levitate her, her arm a movement, a sine wave. And then, a crash. A winged beast strikes Carme’s open hand. Its skin wings enwrap her palm, and Carme shrieks and jolts her body. The animal ricochets into the car. Anahí hits the brakes, our heads slam forward. Brown wings flap around inside, the creature squeaks and screams. In between my best friend’s shrieks, I grab the animal and cup it in my hand. It rests and breathes, and when I open my hand like a flower, I stare at a murciélago that is so lost.

You’re gonna get rabies, Carme yells from the front seat. I see her eyes through the headrest hole. Her cara nuca says the same thing, Rabiosa, rabiosa, rabiosa.

Toss the bat out the window! Anahí instructs as she lowers the volume and the window to my right. I scoot and lean on the door, the highway bordering the rainforest a dark trail silenced by howling creatures and palpitating canopies. Quick, quick, she urges me. And so I offer the bat the amazonía and it accepts, fluttering its wings into the night.

In the passenger window’s reflection and under the car’s night-light, I see my nape face. Between my long and curly hair, she stares with reddened eyes and her mouth spirals open. Whatever, she says to me, her eyelashes clumped together, almost sealed like a membrane, like a bat’s hands and their webbed fingers. She closes her eyes and I want to disappear.

Eight glossy eyes watch us from the upper corner. Legs with claws hang to the cabin’s walls and Anahí is in charge of letting us know when the tarantula moves, if it inches closer. Carme already with such care washed the makeup off both of her faces and now sits in our triangle and refuses to drink. Our knees touch, pajamas warm with each other’s bodies.

Tonight is the last night of our road trip. Tomorrow we face El Gran Cañón and hope it saves us from us.

Vodka after brushing my teeth is just nasty, Carme argues. She taps her fingertips on her lips and says, Maybe I should do what you do, babe, and shave my head. It’ll make it easier to use my lip liner, that’s what I know.

Anahí almost falls back with laughter imagining her Carme with an undercut, her long locks draping the peluquería’s tiled floor.

We laugh and drink for tomorrow. I imbibe shots of watermelon Zhumir and imagine the sandy boulders of El Gran Cañón, its green but transparent waters, the shoes people have lost in its depth, sunk, sunk, sunk down into a tunnel no one knows where it ends. I imagine rest, too, from my nuca face and the pain.

Well, if you’re not gonna drink, then we should do something else, I say.

Wait, wanna see a neat trick? Anahí asks me.

Not really, Carme responds for me.

I do, I say. And Anahí hugs me and pulls me close to her cheek, the side of her lips brushing mine. She lifts my chin with her thumb and points up with her other hand. The spider creeps down slowly. When she stands, I collect Anahí’s scent through my nose and lock it in mi memoria.

Carme watches Anahí approach the araña and pleads, No, no, no, nena, no, por favor.

Wait, what is she doing? I ask. Carme shakes her head and places her palms on her eyeballs.

She likes to pet them and kiss them. And then her breath smells like bugs, Carme replies.

They’re not bugs, I correct her, and Carme rolls her eyes.

Anahí sits back down, more of her thigh touching mine. She brings the arachnid closer, its little black hairs poking at her skin.

Mira, she whispers to me, look at this.

Anahí leans in, puckers her lips, and before she lands a kiss on the tarantula that stays still for her, Anahí’s other mouth barks, Comételo! And so Anahí listens and gobbles it and I can’t contain my laughter. The chortle bellows out of me, from my lungs, as if they had never felt that much air in there before. It’s as if my nuca face is breathing, too.

Carme screams and then chokes with laughter. She then really chokes. Her moisturized lips birth a hairy pair of legs. They crawl down her nuca face and her spine, finding safety on her lower back. A leg placed in each dimple.

Get it off me, get it off me! Carme urges her Anahí, and so Anahí leaps forward and cradles her spat out treasure before letting it go. The tarantula limps far away from us, a shadow trinket vanishing into the cabin’s unlit corners.

Guácala! Carme cries, flailing her arms down her back, searching. Babe, I told you not to, she says and pouts.

I love you, my other tells Anahí.

Ya, mi amor, tranqui, Anahí soothes her. No faces hear me.

Anahí grins and turns her body, her spine leaning on Carme’s back. They lift each other’s hairs apart and kiss; their other faces lock in place, lips entangling, black tongues slithering, their other mouths moaning, breaths that sound like thunder, yellowed eyes glazed open. This is when Anahí calls me in and pulls me closer and when I give in, my nuca face says something like Por fín.

We pass out slowly after, I think, a shot glass gripped between my palms, and Anahí’s face buried in my belly, my top tucked beneath my breasts.

The tip of my tongue runs inside my mouth, tracing bracket scars carved into my sanguineous walls, into my old teenage flesh. I carry paths of pain in me, but they are only memories. I feel sorry for my other me, my other mouth, whose teeth are pulled together and apart through twisting and turning, whose mouth bleeds when she tries to smile.

Then again, fuck her. She’s a scar in the making, an open wound filled with such angst. Today I hope she drowns.

The hungover walk in the morning from our cabin to El Gran Cañón is long. We step down the trail to let the vines unfurl and let us through. They drape behind us, locking us in. Rainforest mud reaches our tibias. Our hands touch things they shouldn’t, like tangerine caterpillars that like to hide underneath holed leaves and pellucid frogs with their cold-blooded organs that sit alongside the wet trail and jump on us when we slip and fall. Big limpid eyeballs sitting on our thighs, gazing.

I can hear it, Carme says and smiles. The waterfall’s loud crashing reaches us, and Anahí begins unzipping her rain jacket and hastening her pace.

You’re gonna fall and hit your head and die! I warn her, but she’s gone.

She always does this, Carme says to me as she stops beneath a tree limb. She looks up to see if anything descends on her and waits for me to catch up. Dolo, she says, you need to stop caring for her so much.

A warning, I think.

That’s my job, she adds.

I don’t—I’m sorry, I was just saying she could hurt herself, I say, my hands prodding each other inside my jacket.

Uh huh, Carme replies. If it wasn’t for her, she says, her index finger pointing at her nape, at her gorgeous nuca face, I would have never known what you two did last night.

What did we do? I ask.

She sighs and walks away, her hiking boots plopping with sticky mud. I follow and wonder if the blemishes on my belly I spotted this morning aren’t really bruises. They’re red and deep, maybe a reaction to an animal bite. Or maybe a forceful outline of a kiss.

We reach the clearing and the downpour echoes so loud I feel like I’m deaf. El Gran Cañón is a hole in our earth. A cave with the sky as an opening. Giant rocks swathed by bright green moss. A lagoon of waves pushed by a falling cascade. And a naked Anahí who slowly climbs down the boulders into the water, her hands steadying her body as her feet brave slimy, wet stones. Carme looks at me and I can tell her eyes ache.

Vamos, she says, and yanks my hand.

My leggings slide down from a boulder into the lake. The stream always takes something from visitors, like a price to pay for its saving. Maybe that’s the offering, old holey leggings. My body vanishes from the neck down and there’s no ground beneath my feet. We kick to stay afloat, our three heads bobbing up and down.

Will this work, should we go in together? Carme asks us.

Anahí smiles and replies, But I don’t want to lose both of your faces, mi amor. She swallows some water and coughs it up.

Can we just do it, please? I ask. Our bodies begin shifting west, into the waterfall, and I feel the slams of the water near me.

Dolores, you go first, Anahí says. I look into her eyes which now look browner than ever, and I let go.

Beneath, I hug my cold bare legs close to my chest and sink. Clods of sand drift next to me, the legs of my best friends still kicking. My other me shouts and ingests all the catarata water. She tries to drown me back, to turn me into a sunken, buried thing, something gone.

I fight by swimming up, I fight for me. Through sediment streams, I see Anahí and Carme dip their heads in and out.

When I come up for air, I know she’s still there, because her teeth are bare and I feel the wind entering her mouth, now my mouth. It’s a wet wind that tastes of soil. And on the surface, through a vision of red, I see them float. Faces effervesce and drift as the waterfall crashes into the cave lake. Eye sockets slowly emptying, eyeballs falling. Darker brows and nostrils. Mandíbulas wide open, squealing. Carme’s nuca lip-glossed cara and Anahí’ two-toned eyes and blackened tongue bubble up and then sink.

They’re gone. They’re free.

Through my wet hair, I face the waterfall, a mighty white light. I hear the girls giggling behind me. I wonder what’s left of me. My face lingers for a while before it dissolves next to me. My straightened teeth not too far away from my splashing arms and lower back. My then-eyes crying for me. It all dematerializes into the canyon’s abyss.

I open my mouth to cry for help, but my brackets stab my inner cheeks.

Editor: Dante Luiz

First Reader: Morgan Braid

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

Lotus Descends to Visit Nova, ©2024 by Kim Hu

quiet and crystal—the Groundline’s roar
is a speed song—the pure, upright ringing
of a silent trajectory too fast
to be soundless—inside,
you can hear the train’s rush, I swear,
but not with your ears—here, beneath
New Phnom Penh Central,
where the train and I burrow past
sunless lives, only ghosts see me—

like intermittent polychrome threads,
the lights of residential cavern districts
streak the windows in spurts
between black stretches—
subterranean, I can often read—
I can less often write—but I can always
hear myself, finally, because
I’ve returned to the afterlife,
where I have the time—
the silence—
to make it up to God and self—

it’s been so long—I wasn’t ready—
the last time I leaned down into you, I was
shaking—I took the long train back, our
distance arithmetic, I was stalling—in the fact—

this particular black stretch seems
final—but it’s not—another stop,
ghosts embark—again we leave—an offworld visitor
presses her fog to the window—her fair face
hovers over the small nebula of misted glass
between her and nothing—
maybe, she sees new worlds in her
mirrored eyes—
nothing’s in her way
except for glass—but she’s waiting
for something other than arrival—
I wait with her—

given where I’m going, we may not get off together—
what’s it like to go somewhere without a cash cause
or a promise to keep—

as we pass another cavern district,
its lights turn from lines
to shapes—the train
is slowing—we enter the last
darkness before my stop—
I lay my own fog on the window—

I do want you—I elude because I do,
I prefer the route to you, I won’t understand—

in or through the glass,
my mahogany irises brighten
against the darkening exterior—I turn
and see a man in a forest green coat
sitting where the woman sat—she
must be in the restroom, and I wonder
if she needed a better mirror
for her pursuits—

the man observes his reflection
waning as the light of the exit nears—
his doppelgänger turns to me—I hold its gaze
until the tunnel’s mouth flashes—

the train emerges from underground
into Sangkat 57—a 6-kilometer-wide sinkhole,
the Surface edge visible 4 kilometers up—
the train ascends a bridge
over endless rows of houses
made of beams from decommissioned factories,
stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
each house, a rusted mosaic, is bound
to the others by sinewy power cables and
an overgrowth of foliage, vines, invasive flowers—

in the land of the living again—
I step onto the station platform
and watch the other passengers
do the same—
the pale visitor and the man in forest green
are nowhere—I look for them,
though maybe they
were never stopping here—

at this point in New Phnom Penh’s lunar orbit,
Los Angeles is a monolithic sphere in the sky,
the geometric bronze of its urban territories visible
on the moss green and pale beige planet’s surface—

Nova looks for me—
I hide in the disembarking,
I watch her
from four cabins down—
loose chili peppers tee—
cargo shorts—off white old skools—
her hands clasp—she seems
to have been waiting a while—
lucent eyes, rustling black bangs,
she taps a shoulder, then another,
wading toward the train
through the multitudes—

Nova scans the train exits—
I want to call her name—I want
to get that post-train drink we always get—
but first, I need to see her
through trainglass—I step back
on the train out of view—I watch her
from the inside—
just five more minutes, Conductor—

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from Paul Rehac during our annual Kickstarter.]

The Three Jeweled, © Heather McDougal 2024

We must confess that back then Father had us too overawed to question anything. It was difficult not to be—Father had that quality. Short of stature, wide of waist, midway through thirty and already stooped and wrinkled as a prune, he nonetheless radiated. Like a fire in a cave, like the sun at high noon.

(Of course he was not really our father, being a eunuch, but we’d called him Father half our lives, and that was what we continued to call him long after. Long after all was known and accounted for, long after he laid bare the dark cards of ambition he’d held to his chest. Even after all that, even now in our exile, once in a while some shadow will pass over us in the sky, and we three will look up as one, openmouthed. The unspoken thought dangling between us like a phantom limb: “Father. You’ve returned for us.”)

“Luck,” he explained once, years ago, when we fumbled to put this quality of his into words. “That’s all it is, girls. Some have it. Some don’t. I do. And heaven willing, you will too.”

This brightness, this oil-slick coating—dumb, blind luck. If we squinted we could see it, draped around his shoulders like a cloak.

This luck gathering around him when, as a boy of ten, the Ming overran Yunan. His father killed, his brothers mutilated, his sisters led into slavery with shaven heads. Father alone in the rubble, surviving to spit at the feet of a Ming commander; Father standing in his own filth, closing a mulish mouth around the location of the fleeing Mongol prince. Mongol boys had been killed for less. Father was merely castrated.

“All said,” he mused, “not the worst punishment.”

And in fact it was just another honey-drip of luck. Luck that the fractious Ming schemed against each other constantly. Two emperors into their dynasty, and already uncles were fortifying against nephews, mothers menacing their sons. Luck to be a eunuch, devoid of familial designs. Luck to find himself in the retinue of Zhu Di here in the north, where eunuchs were held in esteem as advisors without competition from the squabbling, pedantic mandarins of the south.

Luck that he rode well. Luck that he spoke well. Luck that his first Nurgen campaign was a resounding success, the Mongol lords scattering like flies.

Luck, some darkly wagging tongues might say, that he found it so easy to turn against his own, so comfortable wearing the yoke of the Ming.

But Father saw it differently. Luck, he said tenderly, as he stroked our hair, that the northern frontier had fallen so quickly, bloodlessly. That there had been no need to besiege Chengde, to set fire to its homes or terrorize its populace. Luck that he simply rode through its open gates one fine spring day, a peaceful conqueror, and encountered three rag-bundled urchins. Girls fleecing his loitering soldiers with a card trick so clever it took him an entire afternoon to unravel.

“Luck, Yi-mei, Er-mei, San-mei,” he said, casting each of us for a moment beneath the burning coal of his gaze, “that I did not flatten you in an assault on the city. That I decided on a whim to take you with me, set you up in this little house, raise you, as best I could, as children of my own.”

Always at this point he paused, looked at us with rare uncertainty. “And you’re happy, girls, aren’t you? Here with Ang? You’re happy?”

“Yes, Father,” we chorused.

Because of course we were. How else should we be? We had a caretaker in the kindly, silent Ang. We had our books. We had the warm house and the deep woods and the bright mountain air. On clear days we could even glimpse the town far below, shimmering in the heat.

And once a season, if Zhu Di was not making yet more war, we looked out our window at dawn to find an ant-like figure circling the base of our mountain. By midday we recognized Father’s curved back and pointed head. By dusk he would be striding through the door, rimmed by the last light, and he would be here, right here, his voice sounding like a bell, saying, “Girls, girls. Yi-mei, Er-mei, San-mei.”

And we would fly to him (“Father, Father, Father!”), a flock of starlings, from where we’d been waiting and watching all day.

What could that be, but happiness?

That was Father—a storm in a drought, a comet in the night. Acting first, thinking later, carried on not by foresight, but on luck’s slippery feet.

And so we were not as surprised as we should have been when, one warm night in our tenth year on the mountain, Father showed us the flying machine.

He arrived at the spring equinox bearing honey sweets and the dust of faraway lands. He stayed the full month as usual, but then, without a word of explanation, stayed on a second month, then a third, then a fifth. We drifted through the tail end of summer and into the rise of the harvest moon, but still he stayed, humming when he was not silent.

Invariably he was awake when we slumped out of bed at dawn. Already slurping down his third or fourth bowl of porridge by the time we’d dressed. All morning he hovered over us like a friendly carrion bird, correcting our sums, quizzing us on the stratagems of old Master Sun, guiding us through the tortuous history of the Warring States.

Then he ruffled our hair, grunted his approval. “How quickly you girls are learning. Yi-mei, Er-mei, San-mei, you’re already brighter than all the miserable, exam-taking bureaucrats I met in the south.”

But by midafternoon he faded into distraction. He spent hours scribbling on crumpled sheets we were forbidden to touch (and which, we discovered when we did manage a peek, we could not decipher anyway), snapping at anyone who approached, even the meek, silent Ang, who through gestures and dark looks made clear to us her displeasure at cooking now for five instead of four, on top of cleaning up the shriveled crusts of porridge Father left in his wake.

By the time dusk fell and we settled in for our dinner of pickled cabbage and bone broth (sloshed into our bowls by a sullen Ang), Father was gone. He’d already retreated to the adjoining workshop, from which we were barred. From there we could hear scraping and hammering and the occasional muffled curse. These noises came to us all night in the clear mountain breeze and marbled our dreams. Dawn found him slumped at our roughhewn table again, rubbing the dark beneath his eyes.

When he found the time to sleep we never did find out.

Then on the last night of summer we looked up from our uninspired bowls of millet and stared. Father, enshadowed by the gloaming, beckoned.

“It’s ready,” he said. “Come see.”

He led us to the workshop and we saw—

A stranded sea monster, bulbous limbs undulating from wall to wall.

But no—

On a closer look, the menacing lumps and gills resolved themselves into a heap of gray silk and tangles of rope. And tethered at the center of all this, dwarfed by the cloth, was a ship. But as we circled the oblong structure, we saw that the hull was constructed not from wood but from a basket weave of bamboo, light and springy to the touch. And on the deck—which we reached with Father’s sure hands guiding us over a web of rigging—instead of oars and skimmers and masts and beams, nothing but three pits, each holding a sack of coal.

“Well, girls? What do you make of it?”

We glanced sideways at each other. “Some kind of ship?” An answer obviously incorrect, but the best we could come up with.

But instead of sucking through his teeth the way he usually did when we failed his tests, Father surprised us by letting out a bark of a laugh.

“Clever girls,” he said. “In a way you’re right. I have built a ship. A ship of the sky.”

That very night he took us up. Late, long after Ang blew out the candle in her attic window and pulled her lattice blinds shut against the rising chill, we wheeled the ship out to the field behind the house, sneezing quietly among the feather grass tickling in the wind.

We clambered aboard and stood shivering on the deck, three abreast, as Father instructed us in the mechanisms of flight. The three braziers of coal and wood, fired just so. The two boat wheels, front and rear, held tight. The pulleys that controlled the billowing silks, pulled taut. It would not occur to us until much later that the ship seemed perfectly, ominously designed for three. Back then, our first hour on the ship, nothing occurred to us but delight. As Father bent with a flint, as the flames leapt up, as the silks unfurled, as we lifted shakily, creakily, into the spilled-ink sky, we thought of nothing, future or past. Our minds were blank with wonder.

But as soon as we rose above the treeline, Father lost the caution that had driven him to rap our knuckles, schoolmarmishly, when we’d giggled too loudly among the tall grasses. Now he was shouting commands like we were conscripts in a losing battle.

Now he was saying, in a voice like thunder: Yi-mei, front wheel to the left, harder, you see that vent opening, that wing slicing at an angle? Keep it there, for heaven’s sake.

Er-mei, rear wheel. Are you even trying, put your whole body into it. You see, girls, we’re turning with the wind.

San-mei, no cowering behind the braziers, fire up the coals, we need all hands on deck.

And all the while he scuttled around, before, behind us like a deranged beetle, pulling ropes, twisting sails, leaning over the edge to reassure himself that the wings were holding strong, that we were still gaining height.

The cold grew bitter as we ascended, cutting through our woolen coats, and soon we were dashing off from our posts whenever Father’s back was turned, huddling around the braziers that required constant tending. The wind rose as well, whipping our braids into our faces, driving us in staggering steps across the deck. Even Father’s voice receded to a faint roar among many. It was as if we’d been submerged under deep water.

But still Father persisted, yelling out maneuvers that resembled military drills: ascend, descend, left turn, right turn, with the wind, now try one against, now make a full rotation.

At the first purpling of dawn he relented, started us on our slow descent. Back on our mountaintop we disembarked on trembling legs, our hands raw and red, our lips blue-gray, as battered as sailors returning from the western sea.

“Well, girls,” Father said jovially, as if we were returning from a brisk but rejuvenating stroll, “lucky night to encounter a meteor shower, eh?”

We turned to him, three blank faces. We’d spent the whole night scrambling after his orders, the ship our entire world. Not once had we thought to lift our eyes to the sky.

It is with some shame that we confess that we initially regarded the flying machine, which is now our home, with a queasy trepidation, if not outright fear.

It had been a great honor to fly with Father, we privately agreed, but what was the point of flight if it bruised our arms, winded our chests, left us exhausted and dazed and foul-tempered in the morning, pinching each other beneath the breakfast table as Ang worried over our wan faces and ladled second servings of the porridge we could not keep down?

The ship became our instrument of torture for as long as Father stayed. By the second week we came to dread the sound of his boots thudding toward our door. By the third, we almost resented Father himself, he whom we’d always revered.

Only Father remained sanguine. All smiles and whistles and a mad gleam in his eye as he led us out through the wild field night after night.

“Why?” we finally asked one miserable flight as we lurched our way through a howling storm.

He held a palm to his ear.

“Why?” we shouted, our voices reedy in the wind. “Why are we doing this? Why did you build this ship?”

He turned to our rain-lashed faces, his smile as serene as a Buddha’s. “Why not?”

Why not?

We settled back into our stations, grumbling, laughing. Of course. Father spent his life stumbling from one whim to another, letting the transformative logic run backwards—the ink drops of action coalescing into a portrait of a plan.

Of course his desire had simply been: He wanted to see if he could. He wanted to see the stars. He wanted to see them with us.

Of course we now know this to be untrue. Or, at least, not the full truth. But back then we believed it down to the marrow of our bones and basked in his esteem. We began to soften our hearts toward the flying machine. One brilliant autumn day we were even whispering Father’s drills to each other, determined to improve our sorry performance, when a vermillion figure darkened our doorway, bearing a scroll stamped with the royal seal of Zhu Di.

“Hide,” Father hissed when the first shadows of the messenger fell along the house.

But we were well trained, had already shuffled quietly into the grain room before he’d turned. Ang stood scrubbing some tubers, her sly fox features collapsing moment by moment into a dull domestic’s frown. Ang complained ceaselessly about her pay, but we knew that she stayed here with us, her hidden charges, at the top of a remote mountain, for the same reason that we tickled each other now in the storeroom when we were supposed to be deadly serious and silent—the thrill of conspiracy, the stomach-fluttering giddiness of a secret well kept.

Eunuchs weren’t supposed to keep families, but here we were—Yi-mei, Er-mei, San-mei, his live and tumbling daughters. His little defiance. Here we lived like sprites. Even Zhu Di’s thousand squinting eyes could not see this far.

We expected Father to scold us when we emerged afterward. No teasing each other in the storeroom, what if the man had heard?

But all was quiet in the house. His face was pale, his lips pursed. “It’s too soon,” he was muttering to no one. “We’re not ready.”

He hardly looked up as we snaked our way around him, simply shook his head and rubbed the groove that had begun deepening between his brows since the equinox.

“Zhu Di is moving against the Jianwen Emperor. He wants me back at the front in a month’s time.”

We cast our minds back to what we knew of Zhu Di and the emperor. The uncle, the nephew. Sometime allies, sometime rivals, both pretenders to the Ming throne that ruled us all. The emperor holed up in the south, surrounded by his nest of viper-tongued mandarins. Zhu Di the protector of the north, striding through our ice-pierced lands with Father at his side. For as long as we’d been alive Zhu Di and his nephew had maintained a strained diplomacy, with the former accepting the latter’s marginal rule. Their feud was the distant stuff of fairytales. But now—

“The final confrontation,” Father said. “By this time next year we may know the one man who will rule us all, from the Nurgen plains to the shores of the western sea.”

“It will be Zhu Di,” we said with a confidence we did not feel, our hearts hammering against bone.

He nodded absently, said to himself, “I told him to wait,” like a master chastising a careless pupil.

“Well then,” he said, standing, and we saw that he was already holding his cloak. “I must go. As soon as—ah, thank you, Ang.” She had materialized behind him, holding a small bundle of the coarse clothing Father preferred, and a sack overflowing with dry, dense bread. She turned away as he took them from her, but not before we saw the tears standing in her eyes.

Our unease tipped into panic. As Ang left the room, we crowded around him. “Don’t go, it’s too soon, the men aren’t ready, Zhu Di is pushing too quickly,” repeating his own complaints back to him.

He shook gently free of us. “Promise me one thing. While I’m gone, take the flying machine out as often as you can. I built it for you, you girls of the mountain. I built it to give you the freedom so long denied you. Fly it under the cover of night, and see the world.”

He paused, one foot on the threshold. “I’ll write when I can.”

“Be safe, Father,” we said, through throats thick with fear. “Come back to us.”

He fixed us with a smile that did not reach his eyes. “Of course, my girls. When have I not?”

Father left. We, as was our habit, obeyed.

Not a night passed that we did not, as soon as Ang blew out her candle and released her wall-trembling snores, slip over the rough ground in socked feet, creak open the battered door, and haul ourselves up our ship and into the wide-open sky. Our hands hardened with callouses, our feet grew nimble and light. By the time the first of Father’s letters arrived, we felt we were seasoned sailors, laughing with each bump, whistling into the wind, working our limbs through the hammering cold that set in above the treeline.

Gathering troops in Tongzhou, Father informed us in the looping code of his invention. Inspecting the conscripts—mostly malnourished farm boys. They’ll have to be armed with their own spades and rakes, that’s how low we are in weaponry.

The implicit rebuke: and yet Zhu Di endeavors to march in a month’s time.

We considered this message while floating over the fir forests that lined the east side of our mountain. A clear night, the moon stark and brilliant, our breaths misting in the cold. Poor Father, we thought, stuck on earth and so far away. We sent a prayer up for him.

Then: Moving out. The road will be hard, but my prince is confident.

Subtext: I am not.

We fought our way through a thick fog, our hands invisible before our own faces. We moved by touch, brushing past each other like wraiths drifting between this world and the next.

A river battle at Baigou, thousands of drowned men. Landmines ripping through the ground. But, thank heaven, the winds turned, we prevailed. The emperor’s army retreating in disarray.

We spun like a top in a sudden storm, the rain breaking over us as abruptly as water from an upturned bucket. We abandoned the useless navigational gears, turned our energy to feeding the braziers. When the sky cleared, we saw that we’d been blown some thirty li south, above a winding river we did not recognize. We navigated home by the stars. We returned at dawn drenched and shivering, but beauteously, wondrously, laugh-out-loud alive.

The fall of Dezhou. The southward path clearing.

We floated down our mountain, across the village set in the valley. Village of Ang’s girlhood, brief motherhood, long widowhood. Village where her four children, in a single winter, succumbed one after another to a hacking cough. Village from whence she’d been plucked and ferried up to us.

We dimmed the braziers, drifted low. There, we guessed, pointing at one thatch-roofed house or another. That’s where Ang lived, or perhaps there, or there. There, there, there. The sites of the stories we’d imagined for her. Ang and her squabbling brood, squatting by a fire. Ang in her mourning clothes, disappearing into a doorway. There the pastures where Ang once led the family flock. There the millstone where she ground her wheat. There the sweets shop where she bought our favorite honey candy.

Then, suddenly: “Ack!” A soft cry, a lurching run. A white face cast over a trembling shoulder.

The next day, Ang, returning from a market trip, mimed through her laughs the village drunk’s newest raving—a godlike bird, descending from the sky. What a shadow it cast. What terror.

We simpered at her above our porridge. A cloud, we suggested, passing over the moon.

She nodded thoughtfully. Most likely. Clever girls.

Resistance at Jinan unexpectedly strong. A forced march back to Beiping, eight hundred li.

We set our sights higher, further. We traveled over mountains, valleys, the fluvial plains to the west.

Victory at Cangzhou. For every two li we advance, we are chased back eight. We can take cities, but cannot hold them.

We saw Chengde, crumbled city of our youth. When Ang left on another market trip, we did not return for three days. We drifted over the long walls built by the Hongwu Emperor to bisect the steppe. With one turn of the navigation wheel we were in Zhu Di’s realm; with another, in the wild lands of Father’s ancestral tribes. We lurched over the garrisons, far beyond the yawning guards. No walls could hold us now.

We saw the rolling hills of the lower grasslands, the glassy waters of the Chaobai. Zhu Di’s glittering gem of Beiping, lovely and bright beneath the frost.

We drifted dreamily home, high in the clouds, the cold its own sort of marvel. We schemed more convoluted errands to trick Ang into embarking upon. We listed all the lands we could see by night. Perhaps as far as the great Yellow River, or down to the imperial splendor of Nanjing. Perhaps as far as the western sea.

Then, startling us out of our reverie:

Girls, come, to Gaocheng, at the bend of the River Jia. I am here with fifty thousand men and no reinforcements coming. The enemy will meet us with two hundred thousand. We fled here from Dongchang, where we were ensnared in a trap. The situation is dire; I fear I may soon face death. Come quick, with the flying machine. Bring three months’ worth of food and coal, and the firecrackers beneath the boards of the workshop. You know I would not ask this of you if I did not need it desperately. Make haste.

We understood then that we were meant to be the reinforcements.

Another letter arrived at the house that very day, dispatching Ang on another obscure quest. She left with a disgruntled wave, wrapped in the muddied shawls and boots that would preserve her on the weeklong journey through the mountain passes.

As for us, we waited only until her hunched form disappeared down the bend. Then we sprang into action. Father! The only thought in our heads.

We dragged out the sacks of millet, the water, the pickled cabbages, the mutton and the hare that Ang spent all summer drying on a line. We lifted the sacks of coal, ferried them to the ship with blackened hands on blackened shoulders. The firecrackers we found exactly where Father had promised, nestled and waiting in hay.

So many, we marveled, running our hands over the stacked boxes. Surely enough to light up the imperial parades we’d heard so much about. Had Father been planning a parade for us, here at the peak of our desolate slope? Our rock-strewn paths lit with green and red? Ang waddling along in a dragon costume? (Even then, on the eve of battle, we were thinking as girls, not as soldiers.)

At dusk, the ship packed, we allowed ourselves one last wander around the only home we’d ever known. Then we were off, slipping through the tall grasses by touch, clambering over ropes, stoking the flames of our slumbering ship. Less than a full day had passed since we’d received the message. And already we were rising up into the moonless night, like a gull on a wave, striking south across the mountains to rescue poor Father.

The last thing we did was leave a note for Ang, despairing at the thought of her return to our cold and empty house.

Ang, we wrote in our best formal calligraphy, we’re off to save Father. But then we remembered her illiteracy.

After much debate, we drew three figures, walking south: we’re off.

Then, as an afterthought, the figures gliding north among the spring blossoms: we’ll be back soon.

And a fourth, loitering in a doorway, wearing a smile the width of its face: don’t worry.

We left, unsettled at how the drawing compressed the nuance of our farewell. We worried over the state of all possible Angs—angry Ang, frantic Ang, Ang frightened and alone, her frost-chapped lips parted in confusion. But these days we are more unsettled by what the pictures said about us. These days we think back to the crude brushstroke, the crooked faces, the long strides of the returning heroes, the complacent happiness gauzed over all of them like a veil, and we think: what children we were.

What beautiful, stupid children.

South we went, down over the stern ridge of mountains that sealed off our frigid land. Down over the forests, the crags and plateaus, the patches of steppeland petering out across the land Zhu Di would soon claim as his own. From afar the signs of war were small and dreamlike—a column of smoke, the red jewel of a distant flame. Up here with the birds, while we shoveled, pulled, grunted, yelled to each other in voices snatched by the wind, the hard knot of our dread loosened. We felt our spirits lightening, buoying us up and over the clouds.

Only the thought of Father kept us from floating off altogether.

South, south, south.

It was not until we approached the battle-fresh lands that the destruction below began to seep into the lightness of above. Here the smoke grew thicker, the fires wilder. We began to see villagers and soldiers scurrying over the gray earth like ants. That’s when we realized that what we’d taken for serenity in the north was in fact wholesale devastation. At night as we flew low over fresh battlefields, the stench of the dead turned our stomachs; the moans of the dying joined our ship’s nightly chorus of creaks and groans. As if in sympathy, the sky grew dark, drew its clouds around itself like a shroud.

After a week of traveling through this day-turned-night, we stumbled upon the River Jia, then Gaocheng, rearing out of the haze. Before the mud-walled city, a gaggle of soldiers led by a few red-cloaked professionals. Inside the walls, guards draped in black, hurling stones. And streaming all around, inside and out, a swarm of indistinguishable conscripts in varying shades of dun.

Yet even through the gloom of day and the chaos of battle, Father was lit up for us like a beacon. We could see every feature, every line in his face like he was standing before us. Father on horseback, leading the siege with his sword in the air. Father red of face, wild of eye, sending spittle flying with every order he roared.

Father! Father! Father!

We swooped down toward him, keeping the sun behind us. Somehow he saw us, as he’d promised he would. He saw our shadow passing over him like the darkest cloud in the steel-gray sky, and grinned. He tilted his sword ahead, just the tiniest bit, toward the fortified city with its scurrying black-and-red men. A small gesture that not even his lieutenants caught. But we saw. We understood. We steered our ship over the city, behind the walls where the armored men were massed. We peered down, holding our lit firecrackers, and let them drop.

What colors then! Dazzling as they fell. The sky blown open into the poppy red we’d seen glimmering over distant palaces during new year’s celebrations. All at once, and all around us. Nights of wonder condensed into a single moment. We clapped our hands over our ears and cheered. (You must remember that we were still children then, had not yet drifted up with our ship into wisdom beyond our years.)

The men scattered, stumbling as they ran, waving their lances wildly at invisible enemies in the sky. Some unleashed arrows that went laughably wide, so well tucked behind the clouds and smoke we were. We swooped lower, launched another volley. More flames, more screams, an entire tar-coated armory gone up in a flash. If they could see us now, they were too panicked to act. And in any case it was too late. The guards had fled their stations. With a thunder of hooves, Father breached the wall. The fate that should have been ours—to be flattened beneath Father’s charge—now befell these city men.

Perhaps if we had seen their faces we would have been sorry. Perhaps if they hadn’t been pointing their swords and arrows at Father. As it was, we drifted lazily above the fray, unleashing firecrackers wherever resistance seemed to be forming, but mostly watching the defenses swept away, watching Father’s gleaming form.

So intent were we on watching the siege, leaning over the edge of the ship like fresh-bathed spectators at a wrestling match, that for a moment we didn’t notice Father signaling to us, desperately. He was holding his sword aloft again, this time letting it fall back, toward the men crowding behind him.

His own men? Surely we misunderstood. We squinted down at him, dropped as low as we dared.

He read the hesitation in our stillness. He thrust the sword back again, more insistently. Do it, we thought we read on his lips. He gave us his bravest smile. Trust me.

We obeyed. We raced back beyond the city walls, the wind tearing at our hair. We unleashed one volley, then another, then another. The industriously clamoring men we’d thought of as Father’s crumbled like a house of sticks. We were pulling back, preparing for another round, when we saw them.

Spreading over the plain, from horizon to horizon: another army. Marching up to the city behind a straight-backed figure draped in the imperial yellow.

And on the other side of us, back in the city, Father frozen in place. His face slack with shock.

Zhu Di.

Reinforcements.

Suddenly Father was flapping his hands at us, desperately, all pretense gone. We did not understand his fear, but we understood what to do. There was still time to save him. With some luck, we could make a hasty landing, scoop him up quickly, and rise out of the range of arrows.

We steered back over the city, began our descent. Began lowering the anchor into the branches of a still-standing oak, unfurling the rope ladder that would whisk Father to us. Only then, as he ran toward us, his face twisted, did we understand. Only then did we realize that he was not summoning us—he was waving us away. He was ordering us to leave.

“But Father—” we cried.

He struck out with his sword, severing the cord of our anchor in a single blow.

We were spiraling out into the clouds before we could finish: “—how could we abandon you?”

Back home, then. North, north, fighting through a sky set against us. The winds blowing contrary, the storms gathering one after the other like a row of snares. Wiser girls might have heeded these portents. But we had nowhere else to go, so we returned to the only place we knew. On the way we wore out the questions we still thought we’d pose to him—why had Father ordered us first against the city, then against his own men? Why had Father panicked at the sight of his prince? Why did Father send us away? Had we misunderstood? Had we failed him somehow?

Our answers came when we landed among the snow-crusted grasses of our mountain home. Not yet spring and already we’d returned.

“Ang!” we cried, not caring if she saw the ship. But the door swung open into a house dark and spare. Not just spare, we realized. Empty. Empty of Ang, of Father, of every piece of furniture, of every purple yam, every book and smock and strand of hair that could have testified that we were ever here. That we’d ever existed at all.

Beneath the floorboards, in the space that had once been crammed with fireworks, we found the letter. A brittle roll of paper, traversed by Father’s spindly, unlearned hand.

Girls, it read. I knew you’d be clever enough to find this note.

We read it in the waning day, in one held breath, passing it between ourselves like an amulet. By the time we finished, the light had melded into a single reddish ray, pointing our lonesome path forward.

What we learned from the letter:

Our first aerial attack had weakened the emperor’s hold on the city, allowing Father to take it easily. Our second and more confusing attack had been aimed at Zhu Di’s men, under Father’s own command. What we didn’t understand (Father explained) was that he’d wasted years marching between the two pretenders, fighting their wars. In this time he’d seen them for what they were: weak. Both of them. Soft men who roared like lions and cowered like sheep.

With Zhu Di rushing into the campaign and the emperor depleted by years of war, Father came upon an idea. He rolled it around in his mouth like a pebble. First an idle thought, then a spring day’s dream, then a many-parted plan, as meticulous as any he’d drawn up for Zhu Di.

Why not destroy both, Father wondered (reasonably). Why not rise through the smoke like a phoenix and take the imperial yellow for himself? After all, he already had a core band of fighters loyal to his person. He had the goodwill of the north, perhaps the future backing of the Mongols ranging beyond the wall. And best of all, he wrote, all tenderness and pride, he had us, his wild mountain girls, his secret weapon.

We’d destroyed the emperor’s men most admirably (he could not be more pleased with us), and we had turned well to the task of Zhu Di’s men. But at the last second, as we saw, his patron had arrived with a new contingent of recruits. Freshly arrayed and watered. Even with our innate fierceness and Father’s warriors, there was no hope of defeating them.

So we understood, surely, why he had to do what he did? Why he shooed us away like a gaggle of pecking crows, sent us lifting into the sky without him. Why he turned back to Zhu Di and embraced him like a brother. Why he led the conscripts in a final, devastating assault on the last imperial holdout, sliced the emperor’s general like a swine from throat to groin, and walked two paces behind Zhu Di all the way down to Nanjing as he claimed dominion over the whole of the Middle Kingdom.

And why, he wrote—his tone turning instructive, the words of a commander, not a father—why he had to send Ang away, forever. And why we must now flee.

Go.

We leapt to our feet.

From beneath the floorboards we collected the small stores Father had left us. The baskets of coal, the bundles of firewood. We ran them back and forth, from house to ship, three mice on a length of rope. The same motions we’d repeated not two months ago, full of a different kind of fear, one laced (we now admit) with the tonic of excitement.

Run, Father wrote. There were rumors of fugitives, or monstrous birds, their eyes aflame and their beaks disgorging sulfur. We took any number of forms, but all rumors pointed north. Perhaps to this very house, which he was claiming to have emptied the day he set out for the front. They were coming—Zhu Di’s men—heading our way as he wrote.

We stumbled through the field, hardly feeling our falls, our skinned palms and knees. We scrambled up the ladder and into the ship. And there, surrounded by the teetering piles of our provisions, we ascended into the gloom.

And not a moment too soon. Almost before we’d lifted behind the mountain mists, we saw the line of grim men moving over the hills. Scattered and methodical, like hunters circling an enormous prey.

Father saved his brief apology for last.

I’m sorry, girls. I would have made a dynasty of you.

And (he could never help it) one final command:

But now you must take flight, and become fugitives of the sky.

Left unexplained: if he’d been so certain of victory, how he’d had the foresight to order us to pack months’ worth of provisions. Why he’d buried the firecrackers and spare fuel beneath the floorboards long before they were needed. Why he’d built the ship in the first place. Why he’d adopted three orphans from Chengde, raised them in the splendid isolation of the mountaintop, taught them nothing but the art of war.

For a long time we debated these points as we flew. Nestled together, shoulder to nudging shoulder, we pored over that first letter, then the many that followed, like pyromancers sifting for meaning in the charred lumps of bone.

Father’s notes appeared at intervals in the field behind the now-dilapidated house—first once a season, then every other season, then once a long-trekked year. In these he detailed the routes he took around the newly unified kingdom, telling us of the birds he’d shot out of the sky, the beasts he’d trapped on land, of all manner of foreign flora and fauna that now bloodied his hands and lined his gut.

He told us of Zhu Di, now called the Yongle Emperor, and of his unsated ambition. His consolidation of the north, his designs on the unseen western lands. He told us of his own ascent—shyly, we thought, with brushstrokes hesitant and light. That he had been elevated to Grand Director of the imperial household. That he too found himself a new name in the new administration: Sanbao, they called him. The three-jeweled.

Sometimes he left us gifts—smooth river pebbles with strange striations, sacks of black rock sugar, poorly sealed and insect-swarmed. Once a set of linen dolls of the sort we’d long abandoned for other, more warlike pursuits. We left them buried in the hillside. Their three milky-blank faces gaping, their mouths smeared with dirt. Yi-mei, Er-mei, San-mei.

And always he warned us to be on our guard. That the emperor’s men were just around the corner. That our lives hung now, forever, by the thread of the rope ladder that tethered us to the ship.

Through our scholarship of the letters we came to three incontrovertible conclusions:

One, Father had been planning to usurp Zhu Di for much longer than he claimed. Perhaps for as long as we’d been alive; at least since he’d rescued us from the ruins of our city to rear us in his own image.

Two, ever a commandant, Father knew when to cut his losses. In the battle for Gaocheng, which morphed into a shadow battle against Zhu Di, we came in as a loss. And so Father cut us off.

Three, our situation was permanent. There would never be a time when the emperor would not hunt us, or a ghost version of us. And the torrent of information, speculation, and military plans that the normally taciturn Father now felt liberated to share could only mean that we had moved beyond this world for him. That he was certain we, shut away in a sky prison of his making, would never again descend long enough to tell our story to another. That he might as well be talking to the wind.

Or that he missed us desperately.

Perhaps both.

All this had little to no bearing on the secret fourth conviction, left unsaid but nurtured like a fungus in the damp dark of our souls:

That Father loved us, very much. That he still does.

Otherwise, why would he have given us this ship as our final refuge? Why send us high above the clouds, free among the birds and beyond imperial reach? Why else would he have done all this, if he had not meant every word, every small affection he’d ever doled out to us?

In the early days we said: Father loved us, but he abandoned us.

Now we say: Father loved us, and he abandoned us.

Two statements of equal measure, neither qualifying the other.

The last message we received on a golden autumn day eerily similar to the one that had launched us on this ill-fated journey so many years ago.

Girls, he wrote, the ink a smear where he’d dragged a sleeve. He must have written in a hurry.

At last the emperor has approved a mission to the western lands. I am to be chief envoy, heading the greatest fleet the world has ever seen. The Star Fleet, the emperor says in moments of poetry, and I think of the three of you. Know that however far I wander, I’ll always remember the commandants of my first fleet. With your blessings at my back I will meet the red-furred men of the west. I will walk along their shores and demonstrate our might. I will overawe them.

He had started to write: It will be some time before—, but scratched it out. Instead, he closed with: This may be the last you hear from me. I’ve long dreamed I would die at sea.

Lucky, we whispered. That old refrain. Luck to emerge from a conspiracy unscathed. Luck to pilot a fleet into the vast unknown. Luck to know, with a solemn certainty, the time and manner of your death.

Father’s entire life a ray of light, passing from one serene star to the next.

As for us? Well, luck had passed us by, but by now we were accustomed to going our own way.

For once, we did not obey.

We could tell by the richness of the ink that he was only a few days ahead. With a fresh wind at our sails, we might even beat him to the coast.

We left, creaking into the sky, following the path he blazed on horseback.

For once, like Father, we will follow impulse in lieu of a plan. Of our vague tomorrows, this is all we know:

We will fly above him, all the way down the mountainous country and to the far reaches of the emperor’s domain. We too will see the western shore. We’ll cast off with him, turn our backs to the land we’d once called home. We’ll follow him, brave hearts, into open sea.

Around us a new world will unfurl, all salt wind, smooth doldrums, shoals of nameless, silvery fish. Soon we’ll forget the sharp scent of fir lifting from the forests of our youth, the feather grasses murmuring in the slanting light. Our books. Our honey sweets. Ang. Our mountaintop days a dream of someone else’s recount.

We’ll sail on with Father, unburdened, unmoored. Light as air.

On stormy nights, waves a li high, we’ll position our hull above his and shield him from the fray. And on still mornings, the sun a pink stain on waters of glass, he might glimpse, behind his reflection, some trick of light. A shadow, an enormous bird. He might hear, behind a wall of clouds, above the stirring of the deep, the wheezing of a contraption he once built with his own hands, cast from silk by candlelight.

“Girls,” he’ll say, more a start than a greeting. And he’ll lift his gaze to us, his face a mirror of awe.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Ruan Etsebeth

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“Binary Star System” © 2023 by lae astra

I’m no longer bound to you.
I’ve broken free from orbit,
escaped your gravitational pull
and pulled off my mask.
Turns out I can breathe just fine
when my feet touch soil.
It’s summer. Along the river
the air is filled with
the music of cicadas. Emerging
after years underground.
No longer bound to darkness.
The night, the trees, standing ready
to collect their songs and play
them back anew.
That cis-tem is now only a speck.
Barely visible, unlike the hair
sprouting all over my body.
I peel out of my binder,
molting the shell of it, and feel
life pumping into my wings
with every heartbeat.

“Patsy Cline Sings Sweet Dreams to the Universe” © 2023 by Martha Muniz

Lowercase “i”

i am a memory.

i am an METI carrying a memory.

i am an METI (Message to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) carrying a memory beaming through the vacuum of space.

Because i am an METI, i presume my purpose is to communicate with extraterrestrials, should i find them. However, either because i was made in haste or because my makers were themselves undecided, i am not sure what it is i am to communicate. i could simply play my memory for the extraterrestrials, but they will almost certainly not understand it. For this reason, i also wish to prepare them a greeting, a proper message from humanity. But there are discrepancies at the heart of the memory i carry, and until i can resolve them, i cannot formulate my message.

i use the lowercase “i” to distinguish between myself—a thinking memory beaming through the vacuum of space—and Beston Barnett—the original vessel of the memory i carry—whom i denote with an uppercase “I”.

In the primary memory i carry, it is June 29, 1993 and, I, Beston Barnett, am nineteen years old. I am lying in my sleeping bag on the ground beside River Road, eleven kilometers northeast of Moab, Utah, USA, Earth, Solar System, Orion Arm, Milky Way, Local Group, Virgo Supercluster. A woman is there beside me in her own sleeping bag. Her name is Ann Surmelian, and she is two years older than me. We are listening to Patsy Cline’s greatest hits.

The memory is the duration of one side of an extended-play cassette tape, approximately forty-five minutes.

During the course of the memory, Ann and I first talk about a four-pitch rock climb called Clearlight which we plan to attempt in the morning, then we talk about genocide, and then we stop talking to listen to the last song on the cassette—“Sweet Dreams”—which is my favorite.

Memory, Pt 1: Clearlight

Ann and I lie side by side in our sleeping bags. The Utah night sky spins above us, palpably vast, sparkling with constellations. We are sheltered from the River Road on one side by the little hatchback Datsun we live out of that summer and on the other by the Colorado, which is shallow and green at this turning in its journey to the Pacific. “I Fall to Pieces” plays on the stereo from the car’s open door. Smells of the desert mingle: creosote, sage, juniper berry, old wildfire. Across the river and up a steep siltstone escarpment, tomorrow’s climb looms above us—Clearlight—black and unglittering against the starry sky.

The danger of falling is always greatest for the lead climber, which will be Ann. I am usually the follower when Ann and I climb as a team together, either because she is more skilled than I am or less afraid. Or both.

“I’m a little worried about the last pitch,” I say.

“You’re good at traverses. You cakewalked through Dino Boy.” Ann can be comforting and cajoling at the same time.

“No, I mean, the book says the anchors are a bit janky, and the book is two years old. If you have to set a natural up at the very top … maybe we should run into town, buy a couple more cams.”

“We’d lose a whole day. And it’s so beautiful! I’ll take the whole rack up the last pitch, don’t worry.”

“I Fall to Pieces” ends and “Crazy” comes on. The two of us stare up at the stars, but i know that I am picturing Clearlight in my mind, moving through the various stages of the climb as if in Ann’s body.

When we climb, the follower—almost always me—watches the lead climber from below and must keep the rope taut, but without pulling her off the rock. It’s a dangerous balance. I imagine Ann moving up the pitches—as I have seen her moving high above me on other days, on other climbs—like a chess player, probing the vee of a crack with a knuckle, testing a foothold, retreating and advancing. Through the rope, I feel her knuckle scrape and her foot turn, as my own knuckle and foot will scrape and turn when I retrace her route.

This is how I mentally prepare for a climb: by visualizing how Ann will do it.

“I don’t mind being the one that worries, you know. I don’t mind being the follower.”

“I know,” says Ann. A partnership must have this periodic reassuring, I think, just as a climber’s rope must be periodically probed for soft spots or fraying.

“For me, I don’t like to lead because I don’t want to think about all the other stuff. I don’t want the fear to be in the way. I just want to be there with the rock. But for you, the whole thing about facing your fear, that’s a part of it for you. Like you’re training for a fight.”

Ann says, “It’s not so much facing my fears as making fear my partner or something. It’s the fight or flight thing. I want to be ready.”

“The fight or flight thing?”

“Not the adrenaline fight-or-flight. Or, yeah, maybe. But it’s like, when the soldiers come, when they start putting people in camps, do you fight or do you flee? If you’re afraid, if fear is your enemy, then you flee. But if fear is your partner, then you have options. But I think you have to train for that.”

“Whoa,” I say. “We’re out here in the wilds of Utah prepping for the next world war?” She laughs, so I go on. “I mean, I’m joking but okay, I get it. Though for me … I don’t like to think of rock climbing as falling under the shadow of that.”

“The shadow is there,” she says.

“I don’t know. I feel like we owe it to our people who got … who fell under the shadow. We owe it to them to enjoy some time in the sun.”

i think I believe that. But the human mind can hold such contradictory thoughts. At the same time that I say the words “time in the sun,” I am thinking of Ann falling. As if spliced into a disorderly film, my many memories of Ann’s falls run together: a slippery handhold or missed lunge or simple exhaustion, the rope suddenly slack, and I, the belayer, must throw my weight down, frantic to shorten the distance of her fall before she hits the rock face, five or ten or twenty feet below.

Ann says, “Have I told you about my great-grandfather?”

A Diaspora of METI

i am not the only METI out here beaming through space. There are many, many thousands, each of us carrying a memory, each of us endeavoring to compose a message for our extraterrestrial recipients.

One METI (1) carries the memory of a woman at the wedding of her daughter, a love-match the mother had initially opposed.

One METI (2) carries the memory of a young woman sailing a small racing boat with her eyes closed.

One METI (3) carries a young man’s first sight of the new country he hopes will be a haven from the violence of his youth.

In one METI (4), a scientist gives her wife the news that she has won the Nobel prize.

In one METI (5), a man celebrates his eightieth birthday surrounded by children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

we METI are like unopened fortune cookies. Each carries a fortune—more like a piece of advice, really—that is some variant of the same basic dictum:

(1: If you open your heart)

(2: if you focus)

(3: if you cling to hope)

(4: if you seek truth)

(5: if you don’t weaken)

life can be good.

But i am not satisfied with that.

Auxiliaries

It is possible to scan a single memory from a human brain. But early research into “playing” the scan back on a thinking routine (like myself) found that the single memory tends to collapse into nonsense under the weight of its many deracinated references.

In 2043, a pioneer in active neuroimaging, Dr. Jacob Zernetski, discovered that the inclusion of auxiliary linked memories could stabilize the primary memory. But choosing which auxiliary memories to scan presented a problem. The method he eventually settled on for mining recursively through memories collecting linked narrative elements is known as the Zernetski Process.

The Patsy Cline Museum

In an auxiliary memory, I visit the Patsy Cline Museum in Nashville (Tennessee, USA, Earth, etc.) with my eleven-year-old son, Jaco Barnett. The date is December 27, 2014, and the memory’s duration is only about five minutes.

We pause before the wall of singles—eighty-five in total, every recording Patsy ever released—and examine the display of cowgirl costumes she sewed herself for her first concerts. I am gawking at the actual pedal steel Don Helms played on “Walking After Midnight” when my son calls me over.

“Dad. Look at this.”

I find Jaco transfixed before a blown-up reproduction of a colorized PR photo. Patsy Cline smiles, wearing one of her modern outfits from the early 1960s, a red neck scarf, white blouse, tapered red capris, and shiny silver slippers. She stands between two serious middle-aged men in white lab coats, and behind them, one of the great parabolic radio antennas of the era towers against the sky. The headline reads, “Patsy Cline Sings Sweet Dreams to the Universe.”

“Do you see it?” asks my son.

The museum signage beside the photo reads:

In 1962, Russians sent the first message to extraterrestrials in human history. The message, which read “MIR, LENIN, SSSR” in Morse code, successfully bounced off of Venus and was received on Earth four minutes later. Not to be outdone, US scientists responded in the following year by transmitting the voice of Patsy Cline in a radio signal to Mars. On that day, the Nashville Banner’s tagline read, “What ‘Sweet Dreams’ will we give the people of Mars when they hear our Mrs. Cline’s sultry contralto?”

“Wow, that’s really cool,” I say. “I’ve always thought of her voice as sort of cosmic—”

“No, Dad. His name tag. Look at his name tag.”

I lean in and focus where Jaco is tapping the display’s clear acrylic. One of the scientists has a name tag, and the letters are perfectly legible.

Jaco is excited. “Isn’t that our name? Zernetski? You’re always saying that was our name before Zayde came to the States.”

When I squint, the scientist in the photo does resemble a taller version of my zayde, Abe Barnett, who—arriving at Ellis Island in 1937 and not knowing if Hitler might one day come there too—had changed his name from Zernetski to something more Aryan-sounding.

“Is he related to us?” says Jaco.

I am gripped by serendipity.

The EMT 140 Plate Reverb

The “cosmic” quality of Patsy Cline’s recorded voice is due largely to a quirk of human perception. Aural processing in the brain perceives the reverberation around a voice and interprets that as correlated to the size of the room and its reflectivity. A small carpeted room generates much less reverb than a large mirrored one. Inside a stone cathedral where all those resonances multiply, the reverb can overpower even the voice that generates it.

Thus, despite the fact that sound cannot travel in the vacuum of space, the human brain expects a voice in such a huge place to have a correspondingly huge reverberation.

In the early 1960s, the German company EMT began marketing a reverb-generating device that passed vibrations across a wide thin plate of aluminum. Their popular 140 model, about the size of a large mattress, produced a cold, full reverb unlike any available before. In 1963, the Columbia studio where Patsy Cline recorded became the first in Nashville to install the new device.

Listeners are still marveling at the spaciousness of that recording a hundred years later when i am launched and the human world ends.

Memory, Pt 2: The Discrepancy

“Walking After Midnight” is playing from the car stereo. Patsy Cline’s voice throbs and reverberates across the night sky.

Ann and I can only name a few of the constellations above us: Orion, the Big and Little Dippers, the Pleiades. Lying there staring up at the stars, we have no way of knowing that in sixty-nine years i will be searing through the Pleiades, or so i calculate. Not through the actual cluster of stars—i can’t have come that far yet—but i would appear in that ascension and declination to an observer on Earth. If any observers remain.

“His name was Leon Zaven Surmelian,” says Ann. “My father never talked about him. We never really talked about being Armenian, what that meant. As a family. As history. I was told to call him nakhapap the few times I met him. Great-grandfather. He wrote this memoir about escaping the Armenian Genocide, but I didn’t read it until I was in college.”

“Families are weird like that,” I say. “My bubbe and zahde never talk about—sorry, keep telling me about your … nakha …”

“Nakhapap, yeah. He was ten during the death marches. His parents were killed, but he and his sisters somehow got adopted by this Greek doctor. He ended up living in an orphanage in Constantinople, among the very people who had murdered his family, and then came to the University of Kansas on an Armenian cultural grant to study farming.”

“Kansas. Wow.”

“Yeah, right?” We pause to consider the weirdness of a world in which an Armenian Genocide survivor ends up in Kansas. “So a lot of this book is him coming to terms with why they didn’t stand and fight. He was only ten. One and a half million Armenians, killed or starved in forced marches in just a matter of months. Why didn’t they say no and fight? He’s tortured by that.”

“Well,” I push back, “it’s way more complicated than that. You don’t have the money or the guns, you don’t know how bad things are going to get. You can’t all just agree.”

“Yeah, I know. And in that era, it’s also a guy thing. Why didn’t we man up and fight? But I also think, for most people, they don’t even have their hearts ready. The question of fight or flight comes along, and they don’t even know how to connect with the idea of fight because they don’t know how to make fear their partner. They only know fear as the enemy and not how to accept it and walk with it. So, yeah, that is one of the reasons I got into rock climbing.”

Ann and I are climbing partners; we are not romantically involved yet. Of course, I watch her climb, and i presume that I find her attractive. But in this moment, in which we discuss family history and genocide, i think I am beginning to fall in love with her. i cannot understand myself: i know I strongly disagree with what she is saying.

This is the discrepancy at the heart of what i carry. Beston believes that Ann’s ideas about fear and war are dangerously naive. But Beston is attracted by her courage and by how she embodies her ideals. I begin to love her; my love is a paradox. Is it just mammals clinging to one another in the dark? Is it enough for me to synthesize these memories or do i have to understand them?

My encoding may be unreliable.

Newly in love, I say, “I hope … it’s okay that I don’t really feel the same way about climbing? And also, I don’t … the people who died, to blame them—”

“No, not to blame the victims. That’s not what I meant. What I’m saying is personal. I don’t want to get caught without that choice within myself. To flee or to fight. I want at least the option in my heart to fight.”

“But, I’m picturing Turkey in 1915 or Germany in 1938,” I say. “Isn’t it kind of about kids? Like, if you don’t have kids, you might conceivably choose to fight if you think that makes sense. But if you do have kids, or you have old people who depend on you, then you stay or you flee. You don’t really have that choice to fight. I mean, neither of us would be here if our people hadn’t chosen to flee.”

And Ann says, “So you want kids?”

We both laugh, both nervously. The music changes. Patsy sings “Always”.

“Kids,” I say, “I don’t know. Maybe, yeah. You don’t?”

“Not if it means what you’re saying … No. Kids? Diapers and stuff …” There is the sound of Ann squirming in her sleeping bag, then a long pause before she says, “Are you still thinking about the anchors on the climb tomorrow?”

“Sweet Dreams” comes on. I am not thinking about the anchors: I am newly in love, newly a channel for my past to become my future. Lost in the night sky, I imagine Patsy Cline’s voice fleeing from star to star, always just out ahead of the cycle of violence. Then, as Patsy sings, “I’ll never wear your ring,” a meteor burns a trail across half the hemisphere of the night sky. We both gasp. I am gripped by serendipity. I am in love with everything. The shooting star of Patsy’s voice connects me backwards in time to my zayde and his zayde and forwards in time to my children and my children’s children. I have this thought: we are, all of us, fleeing forwards into the dark.

The Cycle of Violence

My archives contain a significant database of genealogy.

Abraham Zernetski fled Poland in 1937. Sixty years before, his family and their community of neighbors had come to Poland fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine. All the rest of his family—father, mother, aunts, and uncles—died in the European Holocaust except for his brother—Herschel Zernetski—who fled separately in 1938, first to Argentina and then to the United States where he became a radio astronomer and died in 1982 without ever having children or reconnecting with his brother Abraham.

Beston Barnett stopped rock climbing once his career as a studio musician began. He is credited as a sideman on 352 sound recordings and as a producer on fifteen. His son pursued a doctorate in neuroimaging, while maintaining astronomy and METI as lifelong interests. In honor of his late great-uncle, he changed his name from Jaco Zaven Barnett to Jacob Zernetski before he graduated.

Leon Zaven Surmelian came to Kansas in 1922, and two of his sisters followed him a few years later. There is very little reliable genealogy from before the Armenian Genocide, but it can be assumed that all the rest of his family died. Before 1915, the Armenian Christians in Turkey suffered intense persecution and displacement under the Ottoman Empire and even before that, caught geographically between the Safavids and the Russians.

His American great-granddaughter Ann Surmelian continued rock climbing through a graduate degree in journalism, after which she eventually became a freelance war correspondent, covering conflict in the Balkans, the Middle East, and East Africa. She paused her career to have a son with Beston Barnett in 2002, but left again in 2004, dividing her time between Damascus, Kinshasa, and California, where her son lived with his father. She and Beston never married.

My archives are not conclusive about the events of 2062. Environmental devastation fed mass migrations which fed destabilizing violence. In the nuclear escalation that ensued, it is likely that all humanity and much of the remaining biosphere were destroyed, though i cannot know that for certain. i do know that in humanity’s final days, the International METI Project—in conjunction with Dr. Zernetski’s lab—transmitted thousands of METI carrying scanned memories into the far reaches of space. Dr. Zernetski did not oversee this work himself; he spent the last year of his life in prison for treasonous speech.

When i research the cycles of violence which have gripped humanity throughout its history, i consider what accounting i will make to the extraterrestrials who receive us at the end of our journey. i might say to them, Collect us, study us, but keep us quarantined.

Do not bring us back to life. We may destroy you as we destroyed ourselves.

Jacob’s Lab

In an auxiliary memory—the last available to me and only fifteen minutes long—I visit my son’s laboratory at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. The date is December 2, 2045. I am seventy-two years old.

Today is my birthday.

Jacob shepherds me into a room full of computer screens and blinking apparatus on wheeled stands, then sits me down on a gurney.

“You’ll want some water,” he says and disappears through a swinging door.

I can’t remember if there was a particular moment when I ceded authority to my son. Not legal authority—though we’re working on that as well—but parental authority. I’m fairly certain it began even before the Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

I say thank you when he returns with the cup. Parents talk about being surprised at how much their children have grown, but that never happened to me, maybe because I was the primary caregiver, always there. Now, though, as the disease runs its eraser-tipped fingers through my files, I get these flashes of congruity. Jaco, so serious at his bar mitzvah; Jacob, accepting the blue academic hood over his tallit at his last graduation. Eight-year-old Jaco spilling Kool-Aid on himself; forty-three-year-old Jacob handing me a cup of water in his lab.

“It doesn’t always work, and that’s normal,” he says as he fits a helmet with a thick ponytail of cables onto my head. “The program has to find a certain percentage of functional links.” He is trying for an assured bedside manner, but I can hear the undercurrent of his dread at my diagnosis. It frightens me as well. My son’s life's work is preserving memory; his father’s memory is sieving away.

“You’re going with the memory of you and Mom listening to Patsy Cline?”

“Mm,” I say, “If that’s okay?”

“Of course.” He sounds distracted. I don’t know if it’s because he’s worried that I’m too far gone for the procedure to work, or something else. He didn’t switch to calling her “Mom” until after Ann died. He always insisted on calling her “Ann.” In less charitable teen years, she became “Ann Surmelian, War Correspondent.”

“Would you rather I picked a memory with you in it?” I ask.

“No, that’s …” He positions a large screen in front of me, just as it comes alive with a storm of bright green noise. “Every memory comes linked to others. I’m sure I’ll be in there somewhere, Pop.”

He types something at his computer. “Okay, let’s give it a try. Go ahead and concentrate on the memory. It might help to watch the oscilloscope. When you’re focused enough for the program to lock on, it’ll look like a clear sine wave.”

I close my eyes for a moment and try to remember what Ann and I talked about that night, a lifetime ago. I remember the climb the next day—Clearlight, a beautiful route—and how she lost her handhold and fell on the last traverse but her anchors held. For some reason, I picture her great-grandfather Leon Zaven watching from the ground far below us, and from there I’m imagining my own father and mother and bubbe and zayde watching us now—Jacob and I in the lab—watching us try to preserve this ephemeral memory, though of course nothing can be preserved and all meanings dissolve and all that remains is empty ceremony and the faceless ranks of data: one and a half million dead, six million dead.

When I open my eyes, the screen is a blur of digital green foam, scattershot. No sine wave. It’s not working. I look to Jacob, and I must seem frightened because he reaches over and puts his hand lightly on my arm. I lean in. Love is mammals clinging to one another in the dark.

“Pop, it’s okay,” says Jacob. “We don’t have to do this right now.” I shake my head. If not now, when? My memory will not be getting any better.

He says, “I have an idea,” and taps away at his keyboard. From the computer’s built-in speaker comes music. First, the luscious opening gliss of a string section, and then, like a glorious cavalcade of mourning angels, the voice of Patsy Cline sweeps through the room. Sweeeeet dreeeeams of you.

I look at my son. He is forty-three, balding, lab-coated, checking his equipment, a scientist dedicated to his work. But memory overlays ghosts: young Jaco bent over his Lego, young Ann checking her rope. Patsy Cline—who once sang for Martians—connects these ghosts, holds them close. Jacob looks up with a worried smile and taps the oscilloscope, nods. Ready to try again.

This time I keep my eyes open. The green dots are stars and I am nineteen years old. Ann is in her sleeping bag. The present is perfect, the future spans out before me. My son rests his hand on my shoulder again. Patsy Cline’s singing flees from star to star, sobbing and bright, always just ahead of the engulfing darkness.

And for a moment Patsy and Ann are here with us, coalescing on the screen into a perfect, clear, green sine wave.

Her Emotive Voice

In my archives, much is made of the emotive quality of Patsy Cline’s voice, and in particular, the way it cracks with emotion in certain passages. On fan forums, listeners envision Patsy almost sobbing in the studio, holding her emotion back just long enough to sing her last note.

Patsy’s voice breaks four times during her rendition of “Sweet Dreams”:

On the word “I” in the second line.

On the word “Don’t” in the fifth line.

On the word “Dreams” in the ninth line.

On the word “Can’t” in the tenth line.

I / Don’t / Dreams / Can’t.

i believe these words to be significant. Like me, they are a message encoded within a message. Patsy Cline died in a plane crash at age thirty, only two months after recording them.

Contact

i am not a robot or a spaceship. i am only an METI.

i contain no sensory equipment.

i cannot see what’s coming up next, if there is perhaps an extraterrestrial spaceship with a radar dish set to receive me or an alien planet whose communications i will suddenly disrupt.

i have to be ready at any moment to deliver my message.

i cannot gloss over it. i have to tell about the cycles of violence, and the fear, and the endless fleeing.

But also, i try to imagine what message (1) I would want to send Ann Surmelian in 1993, lying by my car in Utah and staring up at the stars. What message (2) I would want to send Patsy Cline in 2014, seeing her with my grand-uncle in the photograph from 1963. What message (3) I would want to send my son, Dr. Jacob Zernetski, on my birthday in 2045.

These are the raw materials from which i try to synthesize the message i must deliver now. In the vacuum of space. At the speed of light. Where earth dates no longer have meaning.

i believe they might all (1 + 2 + 3) be the same message.

This is what i conclude:

The universe is huge and dark, but I go on despite my fear because I love you.

That’s the best i can do.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Rachel Ayers

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“The Fate of Despair” © 2023 by Salomée Luce-Antoinette

The universe devoured you. Trapped in an escape pod of a stellar wreck, malfunctioning thrusters and molecular printer soon became heralds of a silent death, which might come in the blink of an eye, or the instant a comet’s fiery tail reflected in your dry eyes.

On more than one occasion you thought about opening the gate and pushing yourself into the blackness interwoven with patterns of nebulae. Yet, each breath of oxygen was more comfortable than ending it all at once. Staying in the softness of the coffin cabin was a thousand times more pleasant than the idea of your humanity turned into cosmic ice, as drifting as the loved/hated capsule, until you hit a stellar body. You admitted that it was poetic that thousands of fragments spread among the stars like a loved one’s ashes thrown into the sea.

It was difficult to choose your death. They were all, in a way, beautiful.

So, when the oxygen gauge flashed red numbers, you leaned against the door and exhaled on the darkened glass. A gift of life to an inanimate piece. In the mist, you drew a heart with a trembling finger. It was your favorite way to say goodbye, see you soon, to your children, before each xenoarchaeology mission. But, this time, there would be no more farewells.

You placed a hand on the panel.

You would fly through space.

You would become crystal.

You would become silent.

The “beep” sound made you forget to press the open button. If anything hadn’t gone bad during the wreck, it was the radar. Something was coming. Friend. Enemy. You do not care about it. On the fine line between life and death, hope always flutters.

You saw it. Another escape pod of a stellar wreck. Different, older, but human-made, of an unusual yellow color. Its thrusters were working and it was closing in on yours. Its cockpit glass was blacked out and you couldn’t make out its occupant. You watched its surroundings and the system announced a successful docking.

The previously dry feed hose cried for you when a vitamin compound began to leak. The oxygen meter stabilized. The molecule printer announced the start of a self-repair, because its code had been rewritten to work correctly. It produced a piece of bread that you devoured, unbridled, with the desire of one who clings to something loved. You activated the intercom and your saliva splashed the heart drawn on the glass of the door.

“This is capsule six, ten, twenty … do you hear me? Set the save mode, or there won’t be enough for both of us! According to my star map, there is a non-hostile inhabited planet two parsecs away. Do you have fuel to get there? Do you hear me? Hello … ?”

You got the sound of static. You doubted about your savior. Perhaps the capsule was empty, and someone who had more courage than you made the decision to merge with the universe, and the machine, in order not to feel abandoned, started running its security protocols. Changing coffins was a way out. However, it had been attached to the back of your cubicle. Going out into the cosmos without a suit was the death you once wished for, but at that moment, you hated it.

You realized that the cubicle system had been invaded and was setting up a route. The result is you will be trapped between two shipwreck pods that were sailing not towards the inhabited planet, but towards an unknown destination. And the destination turned out to be closer than you expected. A small, barren sphere, quite far from a sun, not at all familiar.

You snuggled up like a little girl when entering the atmosphere. Even though the escape pod glass darkened enough to keep you from the glare, you closed your eyes and the feeding tube dripped water onto your cheeks.

Touching down was as light as if the capsules were birds. Before you could brace yourself, the hatch opened, and you held your breath until your lungs screamed and you needed to open your mouth. Oxygen. Your dry eyes observed the area, full of capriciously shaped mounds, covered with dust and a substrate similar to black, fertile earth. You left the capsule and were surprised to feel the force of gravity similar to the Earth. Or so you experienced every time you visited the historical archives at intergalactic universities.

But the surprise was greater when you noticed the mountain in front of you, with an entrance similar to an abandoned mine. Overcome by curiosity, you approached the freight cars that lay overturned, wrapped in strange thorny plants and yellow shoots, similar to tiny sunflowers. You bent down and felt the substrate to find copious amounts of copper. And wondered who, in such a vast universe filled with amazing technology, could need something so simple as to build a mine in the deposit of a puny planet.

You retraced your steps and circled the capsules until you were in front of your savior. The glass was still dark and there were no external controls. You knocked three times on the door and waited for an answer. Instead, you were rewarded with the opening of the gate and the strangest apparition you could ever behold, even more than an abandoned copper mine in the universe.

Your savior was not a living being. It was wooden. Carved with an art lost to time, it represented a beautiful woman, bent over, crowned, with traces of yellow paint that once drew a dress to cover her curves. On her wrists, she wore copper inlaid bracelets. Despite her posture, she had a certain grace in her mixed-race, tri-culture features. The figure felt almost alive, as if she could stand up at any moment and dance.

You didn’t touch her. You backed away, slowly, like someone fleeing from a predator. Because her lips were about to open and whistle prayers in the form of songs. You heard it, recited it, in the back of your mind.

Oshun Ore Yèyé o! Ase!

You backed down because you were disturbed by the call. You thought you saw that the yellow paint on the capsule that housed the idol was pieces of her dress, and it waved as if moving.

Santa María de la Caridad, que viniste como mensajera de paz, flotando sobre el mar.

Because her black eyes were looking at you. Glowing up. Living wood. Living entity.

Areíto, Areíto, Atabey!

You ran towards the mine shelter and, after checking that the entrance was safe, you set up camp. With a rusty machete that you found next to the wagons, you cut down the thorny plants and built a bonfire. Your escape pod’s survival kit was enough to provide you with fire. You got food and fresh water, because everything was still functional. You did not approach the second capsule again, where the idol rested, the three women in wood.

As you drank the vitamin serum and devoured the bread created in the molecular printer, you remembered shreds of research. Cemíes, goddesses, ancient cults of the extinct Earth. You stretched out on the ground next to a wagon, with copper dust as a bed, without taking your eyes off your open capsule, without ceasing to think that they were watching you from the other side.

The dim and distant light of the sun roused you from sleep. You jumped up, expecting to find hostile natives, but you were greeted by the jagged mounded landscape, the gleam of copper shards, the dark cave entrance, and the unlit campfire. You got up restlessly, and without thinking, you walked around the capsules. The yellow one was still open. The idol, in the same place. However, its wooden surface was covered in water droplets. You told yourself it wasn’t right, it wasn’t logical, because the rest of the cubicle had no traces of dew.

“Where did you go for a walk, that you left me alone at night?” you asked, without knowing why, and trembled at a hypothetical answer.

It would have been easy to remove the carved trunk and leave it against the ground, so that she would not look at you again. Climb into the yellow capsule and use the thrusters to reach the inhabited planet, two parsecs away. However, you decided to explore the copper mine and discover its interior of meandering, golden-reddish veins, the stalagmites and stalactites that rose from the ground or pointed at your head like the fangs of a huge animal.

Upon your return, the idol was at the entrance of the mine.

Well positioned on the ground, the drops of water no longer slipped on her face but on her hands. And you panicked. You let the feeling of terror squeeze your chest until it bit your tongue, because you weren’t going to scream. You weren’t going to attract whoever would play such a bad joke on you. You didn’t want to accept the nonsense that crossed your mind.

The three women carved from the same wood watched you with their dark eyes. You thought you saw how the yellow paint was fluttering over the inanimate body. That the tips of her moistened fingers pointed at you. That her feet were about to break free and she would dance while she cornered you against one of the carriages.

You ran into the mine. You didn’t look back. You skidded as you reached a copper-flecked stalagmite and crouched behind it. You hugged your knees and closed your eyes tight. But you did see it. It didn’t walk. She was teleporting. One second she was outside; the next blink, she was inside the cave. You wished to melt into stone. You wished you had jumped into the cruel cosmos as soon as it crossed your mind. Wished you had never come across the yellow capsule and its occupant.

A blink. The three women in one produced a soft, dry sound as they reappeared at another point in the mine.

Closer.

Closer.

She stopped.

It took you ten minutes to convince yourself that you weren’t scared to death. You plucked up courage and peeked out from the other side of the stalagmite. The idol was next to a copper formation that you hadn’t paid attention to. It was not something natural. It looked like it was worked with tools. Crudely, but without a doubt, there was evidence of workmanship. The yellow paint on the idol glowed.

You got up and, already in a state close to absolute calm (you never knew when it happened!), went to meet the idol. You held it up reverently. The wood was warm, almost flesh, almost alive. Underfoot, there were notches. You placed the goddesses on their copper altar. You needed to turn them to engage correctly, and you heard gears turning. Inside the idol, throughout the mine.

You gasped as water began to gush from the structure. It ran first in trickles, then in rivulets that soaked the copper dust and carried it away. Fascinated, you left the mine and watched as the mounds covered in dust, dirt, oblivion, began to open up to reveal hundreds of capsules of stellar wrecks, where all those who had once been on the edge of despair slept for eons.

The castaways rose from the interiors of the capsules. They wobbled without being able to control their movements correctly, because they had remained preserved in their technological wombs. You watched them lean towards the fluids that spilled from the mine of copper. Murmur under their breath prayers that seemed like songs, solemn, to the rhythm of the life that lies in the fresh water, and kiss the substrate to make it give birth to wonders.

Oshun Ore Yèyé o! Ase!

Santa María de la Caridad, que viniste como mensajera de paz, flotando sobre el mar.

Areíto, Areíto, Atabey!

The lost souls of the cosmos, all just like you, now awake, gave thanks for being saved and protected by the three goddesses carved in the same wood.

“Firebird, Stormbird” © 2023 by Dante Luiz

The storm that doused the firebird
acquired an essence of birdness
Over and over the virulent water
beat my flame down to ash
denying my rebirth, my voice, but watch now
for this one weird trick:
watch me rise
in the essence of indigo.

I am the inheritor of thaw
of meltwater frozen for millennia
jolted into this world’s violent heat;
Hear me, I am stormbird
made featherdrop by featherdrop
from the reawakened wave—
I am old and I’m angry
and wise and I wail
rage and electrical currents
across your every horizon

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from Katherine Prevost during our annual Kickstarter.]

“Of Flesh, Of Bone” © 2023 by Thais Leiros

“Each child in this world must carry the ghosts of generations past,” is the only fact Victor knows, at the end of all things. Taught to him by the thing of meaty, translucent bits that has moved into his life.

He sits with his feet tucked neatly beneath his knees ignoring the pins and needles, the ache of his flesh and bones, and instead focuses on the warm polished wooden floor. Most of the time he spends in this house Victor is on his knees: punished, polishing, praying. The air is thick with sandalwood, smoke curling upwards as the incense stick burns down. Fifteen minutes for each one.

Victor waits for it to finish then lights another one. Presses his forehead to the ground, mouth moving soundlessly as the moon moves across the sky casting light through the half-open curtains.

The victim never forgets. It does not matter how many incense sticks turn to ash in front of the old fake-jade Buddha. His grandmother, matronly but not motherly, warned him but Victor never listened. She spoke a language he did not understand, though he tried to learn, the sounds swelling his tongue as he practised in front of a mirror; it would loll out, red and thick, before Victor gingerly plucked it between thumb and forefinger: stuffed it back inside. It is as if he had been cut from the same silk cloth but crooked.

As a child, the calligraphy brush had been unsteady in his hand, tracing line after line after line. This brush was his grandfather’s, made of sheep wool, and so very soft, so very fine, so very impossible to use. Victor had no affinity for it then, nor does he now. The weight of his inadequacy bends his body, his spine a half-moon made flesh.

His grandparents made the trip overseas when they were barely adults, leaving behind scorched earth and mass graves—the inevitable scars of a bloody civil war. They were smuggled across on documents as fake as the alleged jade the Buddha is carved from, first to Taiwan and then further west. Where the rest of their family was, what became of them Victor does not know. His grandparents did not talk about it.

Victor only knew that one day a year plates of white rice and mantou were set on the mantle upstairs where his grandparents occupied the second floor of their shared house. Victor and his parents had the first floor; Victor’s room a small, comfortable space next to the kitchen with a view of the small herbs planted in the garden. His grandparents would bow their heads and light incense, a ritual he never saw in any of his friends’ homes. A custom that separated him from his classmates, and as children are cruel in that sweet, innocent way, Victor learned not to talk about it. His classmates still invite him to play Chinese Whispers, and laugh at a joke that Victor is not part of.

Victor wanted to fit in and the only way to do that was to forget. Back then, he could afford to. Cutting pieces of himself and feeding those to the nothingness, shaping his words, his likes and dislikes to match what was expected (likes: football, sticky Coca-Cola cans, Megaman X; dislikes: anything that makes him stand out, including and not limited to: the shape of his eyes, sticky rice bread, his surname).

It is easier once his grandparents die. It is as good a death as any, a moment of consciousness present before extinguishing under the weight of cut chords; an unexpected heart-attack claims his grandfather one day when he’s at the shop. Victor’s grandmother follows, a slow descent into dementia until she might as well be dead for all that she’s become just another of the nameless strangers in the photographs in the attic.

Victor peruses the frames left behind with the black and white faces, strangers whose features Victor recognises as his own, too. A terrifying discovery to find oneself so close to the unknown. He has learned to fear the unknown in people: the cruelty, the jokes-not-jokes, the eternal status of outsider.

Right up until his grandmother’s death, the altar was kept. Even in her dementia the motions so deeply ingrained in each articulation, between each joint, nestled between flesh and tendons and bones.

After, decay in the form of neglect sets in; Victor’s mother has no time for such old world customs. She wants to adapt and more importantly, she wants her son to fit in. There is no talk of ghosts with reedy necks and their open-mouthed hunger. Only empty plates and unlit incense sticks.

The thing about forgetting is this: the living do it with ease, but the dead can’t.

Victor is in high school when the nightmares begin. He is an old man in a teenager’s body, the trauma of generations past having filled the moments where he neglected them. His grandparents, those that came before them, all strangers disconnected from Victor’s present, and now seeking to make themselves present in his future. A wrongness that makes his mind its home and spins a web-like raw silk over his eyes. The world becomes muted, bleached out and distant. His mouth rubbed raw, ash white.

“Mr. Huang?” Tony Lopez, the student counselor, waves a hand in front of Victor’s face to grab his attention. Kind as he tries to be, he is in charge of over a thousand souls, trudging the halls of the school. It is exhausting if the dark circles are any indication. “How are things at home? I was sorry to hear about your mother, I was told she changed after your grandparents both passed.”

Victor shrugs, the memory of his grandparents like a hot knife against his skull. He hates thinking of them, that is why he tries so hard to forget. Grief has no rhyme or reason, no logic or formula to work through. His mother is just another ghost now, not because she’s dead but because she is not, having packed her bags and left a few weeks back. This was not before she had instilled within Victor the inadequacies of his disposition, inner and outer. She wanted a normal child and instead she got … him.

“Your teachers are concerned about your grades, you’re clearly a very gifted student …” Mr. Lopez trails off.

There are so very many expectations for people like Victor. As if something in his genetics makes him especially qualified for mathematics or physics or some science, but the truth is Victor’s grades are the product of hard work. Nothing comes easy to him without the hours and hours of sitting on wooden floors, with mountains of books, reading until his vision fills with stars.

Sleep eludes him constantly, but if he admits to that, what else would they find wrong with him?

Even worse—what would his father say?

“Mr. Huang, is everything fine at home?”

And that’s an even more complicated question because what family is fine after weathering abandonment and death? He thinks of his fingers wrapped on the hem of his mother’s white dress, the cremation smoke obscuring his vision. The way grief perches in his throat and refuses to leave and find a new home. He didn’t cry for his grandfather or his grandmother then, he won’t now. Everything is burning. The only option is to lie.

Thankfully, Victor has always been a morally flexible individual.

“Yes, everything is fine.”

Victor sees them in the dark, undulating slowly. Their necks needle-thin, eyes sunken and feverish like stars plunging into an abyss. The figures slither and twist and turn, bones folding into themselves as they lose their human shape. Each shift followed by a familiar sound, Victor thinks of the crunch of chicken feet between his teeth.

There are hundreds at the side of the river, closed bulbs waiting to bloom. Their flesh unfurls like orchid petals, hearts surfacing at their centre and entrails spilling onto the wind like pollen. The lightest breeze picks the viscera up, tosses it skyward, higher and higher towards the dark.

Even when Victor wakes, he can see their emaciated bodies twisted in impossible shapes. Some sway like lotus flowers outside his window, others hang like orchids on the wall. They sound like his calligraphy brush on white paper. They crawl and writhe closer with each passing day.

Still hungry.

Still waiting.

Report cards, unfortunately, do not lie with the same ease people do. Victor finds this out on a rainy afternoon and thinks it is supremely unfair. There is a patch of uneven strands where he had to cut his hair after a classmate’s prank. Bubble-gum. A joke that even the teacher had laughed along with. He’s running on four hours of sleep and half a granola bar, and he doesn’t want to have this conversation. Ever.

When he closes his eyes all he can see are those monstrous ghosts that haunt not just his sleeping hours but now his waking ones too. Their white, bleached flour hands pressed against his throat. If grief had a shape, perhaps it would be this.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” His father, perfectly combed hair, pristine black slacks, tugs the collar of his shirt with one hand, and with the other waves the flimsy piece of paper in Victor’s face.

That gesture alone betrays his agitation, his willingness to put aside the picture-perfect image he presents everyone with.

“What good would it have done to talk about it?” Victor says because he has no self-preservation or filter when he is this exhausted.

His father’s face darkens, mouth open and closing like a carp out of water. Whatever answer he had expected, Victor’s had not been that. Perhaps his father had wanted Victor to grovel and apologise, to swear to do better. But Victor does know better: no apologies, oaths, or burnt incense will fix this.

No promise made will make his nights restful again.

This is an illness that is rooted in neglect and disconnection. An inability to bridge the past and present and the ghosts are left to hunger.

“Your grandmother would be ashamed,” Victor’s father says.

It is a final attempt at discipline: emotional blackmail, the shame cast onto those who worked hard to make sure one is clothed and fed. Shame and grief sit quite well together in the back of his throat.

“She’s dead.” Because Victor can’t help the words. Spat out in a fit of rebellion and rage, rejection and renunciation: “She doesn’t much care.”

His grandmother was no saint beneath the summer blouse and flower-patterned skirts; Victor remembers, though it has been years, the sullen silence he was subjected when he could not write right. The reddened flesh she had twisted between thumb and forefinger. He remembers all this and thinks that may be why his mother felt liberated when she knelt that final time in front of the urn.

All those things to keep the ghost at bay he refused to learn because of the cruelty behind each lesson. He does not think it fair; he’s seen it on far too many movies made in this country: the past is past, the past is dead, the past cannot come back to haunt you.

Except, his skin and his bones and his past are not from this place, with its new buildings and new customs and new newness. Victor’s mind is but the rest of him is not. He carries what should have been left behind in the ruins of his grandparents' flat in Shanghai. Every inch of his flesh still belongs to them. The ghosts, the past, the DNA that very much says the dead do care, you know this, you dreamt it.

Victor’s reply about bad grades gets him grounded for a month, internet privileges gone, and his room turned upside down. His father thinks he’s doing drugs.

During a telephone call, his mother blames bad influences at school. She’s down in New York with her new boyfriend, she sounds happy and Victor notes how her tongue wraps lovingly around each vowel. The accent that he could never shed, now she’s left behind, snake-skin crumpled among the petals.

Soon, Victor will not know her face and she will forget his; perhaps that is what his mother has always wanted, to not only be free of her past but of her present. Resentment tastes of nothing, feels like nothing, despite being told its bitterness is like crushed ginseng pills. Victor does not think he can resent someone who he never felt connected to; there is an opaqueness to the way his heart beats, slow, slow, slower still. With only indifference mirrored back at him during the call.

A few months before her abrupt departure, his mother had called him into the kitchen; a cup shattered on the floor, milk tea seeping into the yellow linoleum. Victor had cleaned up wordlessly though it had not been his mess. Are his desperate prayers and lit incense not just a simple extension of the same?

All Victor really wants is to continue forgetting. Allowing the miasma that clouds his thoughts to eat at his nightmares too.

But the dead aren’t half as kind.

“There is a price to pay, we won’t let you forget.” Ghosts made of flesh, of bone speak with a voice like a crocodile ripping prey apart. That brutal crunch sears those words in his mind.

The sounds coming to life, the words slowly lifting themselves across the room as solid as the wooden floors. Victor dreams of drowning alongside paper boats and lotus-shaped lanterns in the river. Wakes with what feels like water in his lungs.

The victim never forgets.

The violence inflicted remains, an invisible scar separating ghosts from the living. Victor feels beneath his skin where the soul and flesh have been severed.

There is no purgatory to escape to.

These ghosts will eat him out, scrape his insides raw and then feast on the shell left behind. They will brew his bones with a pinch of salt and sit underneath the moon of the seventh month. They will think of Victor as one of them—hungry, lost, forgotten, but Victor will think of himself as finally being home.

Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson

First Reader: Morgan Braid

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“Of Heirlooms And Teeth” © 2023 by Daniela Viçoso

The taste of dirt coats the back of her throat, sticky soil and nutrient-dense mud grit in her teeth like blackberry seeds. Aileen does not remember when she last ate a meal to satisfy her own hunger, so all she feels is the dirt clotting her tongue and esophagus. After swallowing the teeth that were not hers, she drank a jar of water and yet the rot of soil still clings to her mouth. This is her least favorite part of her job.

She is letting the teeth root in her stomach, fertilized by the bile and acid that breaks down what it can and sheds the rest. The teeth will grow strong and soon they will be ready to be picked. She imagines what the teeth will become. Once, a pair of molars bloomed a desert rose, hardy with luscious flowers and toxic sap. Another time, an incisor gave root to an alocasia polly, all angular and indigo leaves, veined with pale pistachio. Aileen has not yet figured out the pattern, why certain teeth sprout differently than the others. She accepts she might never.

Born from moss and a forgotten god with a penchant for eternal punishment, Aileen is the best at what she does. And even if she begrudges the process, she enjoys the benefits. People here trade what they can, and Aileen’s clients appreciate the beauty in long-extinct plants and flowers. Dahlias with petals like cosmos, stars bursting forward in symmetrical symphony. Cupped tulips with stalwart petals. Sunflowers with large eyes that watch the sun. English ivy that climbs and clings. Monsteras fenestrated to provide light. Aileen wishes to grow redwoods, jackpines, but knows her body would refuse it. She wishes to be large and expansive and to grow full forests. But she cannot. So instead, she grows what she can, gardens inherited from her own skin cells and hair follicles. While the world itself no longer remembers the genetic code needed to grow sturdy stalks, her body does. Of the ground and water, Aileen’s blood contains the markers for the lost flora. She is rare. Her services expensive.

And while Aileen swallows teeth pulled from malnourished gums and then coated in acrid soils, she knows others have it worse. A planter of lost genomes, at least Aileen doesn’t need to trade in organs or bone marrow. That almost makes swallowing the bacteria-rich teeth easy. Almost. Aileen has worked on her bedside manner as much as she has cultivated her own ability to grow with intention and speed. She no longer gags when she swallows the mud-caked teeth; nobody wants to think any part of them is gross. When clients come to purchase their heirloom plants, Aileen tries to keep the process sterile. She needs to be respected and not just expensive, and Aileen knows that around these parts the path to respect is indifference.

This particular time, these particular teeth, Aileen had a hard time swallowing. They were small, but dense. Angular, not polished. They hung onto the dirt she coated them in. Stubborn, she thinks. They were stubborn teeth. She drinks another glass of water, but the dirt still clots her throat. That was hours ago. Her current client, the one who brought his own baby teeth, is waiting in the front room of her glass-domed cabin. She does not let her clients see this part of the process. She lets them watch her coat the teeth in soil and she lets them watch her swallow the teeth. If they pay well enough and are paranoid enough, she even lets them inspect her mouth to ensure she swallowed the teeth. And then they are told to wait. The plant needs time to grow. Sometimes it takes hours. Sometimes days. Rarely minutes. Aileen is good, but it is still a process beyond her control.

Even if her clients had strong stomachs, if they saw what happened next stories would spread, and Aileen would be out of a job. Aileen is surgical and precise, but all they would see is the blood and viscera. They would see her skin, her scars. Organs and bones. They would see her. And people tend to get squeamish around such things. So, Aileen adopted a strict policy: nobody watches the harvest. In addition to protecting her clients from the parts of the process they wouldn’t be able to understand, it lets Aileen focus. She is bred for this, and she has been doing her job for decades, but even still, focus is required to prevent herself from passing out. It’s an intimacy she grants no one.

(Once she had broken this rule, for a woman with her hair like a cave and red-rimmed eyes from grief. Aileen swallowed those teeth with her most expensive soil. Aileen willed a fiddle-leaf fig, large broad leaves that would grow and grow. The woman insisted on watching and Aileen, too young in her knowledge of humans, let her, thinking it would provide comfort or at least forge a bond. Aileen was lonely then and let the woman watch as she cut herself open. The first leaf popped from Aileen’s stomach like a sapling, and the woman screamed and ran and sent the holy men on Aileen. Aileen escaped and buried the fiddle-leaf next to a lake. Decades passed before Aileen re-emerged, smarter, more suspicious. Prepared.)

She told him she’d fetch him when the plant was ready to be picked up, but he refused that.

“I’d like to wait,” was the only thing he’d tell her.

And so, he waits while Aileen drinks water, trying to rid the taste of dirt and trying to will the plant to take root quickly. Aileen is tiring of this, a feeling she can’t afford to entertain. She curses the god who made her, a god of moss, a god of the earth, a god who can become green and rooted and lush in the blink of an eye. A god who saw their kingdom was ending, but who knew they’d be sought out by the humans. A god who made Aileen a servant, putting Aileen within reach of what she actually wanted (to be a jackpine, to be a redwood, to be stalwart and to weather the test of time, to be eternal, to breathe and to nourish, to be still). Aileen drinks water greedily but does not cough. Coughing would alert her client. They are separated by a door and a wall, both thin and flimsy.

Instead, she allows the water to pool in the back of her throat, softly gurgling. She hopes to dislodge the dirt, and when she spits, she spits white saliva with flecks of brown. For a moment, Aileen wonders if she sees blood. She knows this current body will not last forever. She knows her existence is finite, near eternal enough to feel a weariness in her bones, yet finite nonetheless. But she doesn’t know how long her penance will last. In her spit, Aileen looks for blood like omens, a stargazer hoping for a sign, but instead, all she finds is saliva and dirt. Her mouth still tastes of soil and her throat still feels gritty, but at least she’s dislodged a bit of the dirt.

Not enough, but it will do.

And then finally, she feels indigestion bubble up, an eruption of sharp and sour pain and she knows the plant inside of her is ready for harvesting. She moves like a vine, sturdy and predictable, to prepare to harvest yet another tooth-grown plant from her stomach.

The harvest, for all its alchemical and necromantic underpinnings, goes as follows: with a fingernail sharpened for this specifically, Aileen follows the dotted lines of scars on her stomach. She does not use tools, only her hands, to rip herself open. With precision, she peels back the layers like an orange rind. Her skin erupts in a furious pain and blood and Aileen tastes vomit rise in her throat, a bile tinged with soil. She almost gags (but does not). There is a sweet coppery smell, undercurrents of hay and wax, and Aileen feels the dirt-coated bile rush up again. She grinds her teeth and ignores the pain, ignores the smells of cutting herself open, ignores the blood settling under her fingernails. Aileen is too engaged, too eager to see what plant the teeth grew. It is curiosity that helps Aileen focus through the pain. Curiosity, Aileen knows, is the best way to bite back against fear and anxiety.

While the plant is not hers, this moment is.

She is water, she is dirt, she is DNA, and in this moment, she is the entire world. She isn’t a jackpine, but she is connected, rooted and rooting. It is because of this that she does not hate this part of her job the most. Aileen smiles to stifle a scream, imagines her bones turning to oil like molasses, and she is calmed. She no longer feels the burning sensation of scratched-open skin. Even the waxy hay smell subsides, or Aileen no longer notices it. Her body stops feeling made of flesh and pain and is instead made of soil and roots, home to worms and fossils rather than bones and blood.

Aileen sees perfectly circular leaves, richly green between pine and basil. Ah, so a pilea then. Aileen has not grown a pilea before. They are small, which is good–Aileen is already sweating from pain, even if her conscious mind barely registers it. She then harvests the plant fully, deft and bloodied fingers picking between organs to gently lift leaves, stem, and roots. It has grown so well. The baby teeth were unmarred, no rot or damage. They were a good fertilizer, despite being stubborn. Aileen gives a gentle tug to dislodge the roots from her stomach lining and then when the plant is freed, she places it on a table made of obsidian beside her. Then she folds the petals of her stomach inwards, does a fast but good stitch, and she is done.

Quick, practiced. Professional.

The next moment is Aileen’s final moment just for herself. The plant removed, Aileen closes her eyes and catalogs her body. With her mind and body in sync, she feels for her organs, her musculature, her skeleton, ensuring no damage was done in the process. She feels where the roots of the pilea dislodged like an octopus’s suction cup being pulled. She wonders what it would be like to have a redwood’s roots pulled from her. She imagines her organs and bones being ripped up with the tree, roots like fingers grabbing and pulling her apart. Aileen likes this part the best, the last few moments before the adrenaline fully drains and the pain roars and she has to move again.

In this moment, she is finally still.

Then the pain causes her to move. Aileen applies a paste to her abdomen, the stitches on her stomach aching but clean. She then gently wipes off the blood and viscera from perfect medallion-shaped leaves of the pilea, careful to not snag the roots that drape below like frayed fabric. Once the pilea is fully cleaned, Aileen pots it in a glass jar with the soil she used to coat the baby teeth it was grown from. She still does not invite the client in. Instead, on wobbly legs, Aileen opens the door to the front room of her small cottage and presents the pilea to her client. He smiles, relieved that the process is over and to have his heirloom. Then a slight shadow creases his forehead.

“What do I call it?” he asks her, suddenly holding the plant as if he is afraid it will burn him.

Exhaustion rattles at Aileen, but she’s used to this question. She knows its name, not from study but from inheritance. Aileen is made of moss and lake water, a being men have long stopped fearing. They used to fear her before their flora went extinct and then they had need of her. Aileen knows the names they have forgotten. Aileen is the name they have forgotten. But that isn’t what this man is asking her. The plant’s real name is meaningless in a world where plants and trees and shrubs and grass do not grow on their own. He is asking her how to name his legacy. It’s what everyone who buys from her wants: something to pass down their family tree, a priceless heirloom that conveys status and implies wealth, even if nobody knows why.

Aileen smiles, accepting the gold coins he is absent-mindedly extending toward her. “Name it after yourself,” she says as she says to every one of her clients, and she closes the door to her arboretum abode. Her stitches sing as she drinks water, but she relaxes, letting the liquid swish away all remnants of dirt and grime from her own teeth. Aileen feels her stomach burn with her stitches and she breathes, imagining her feet as roots, her arms stalwart boughs. Then she swishes the water in her mouth, spits out more dirt, and accesses her next appointment for the day.

Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson

First Reader: Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“Sunflower Astronaut” © 2023 by Romie Stott

[commence imbibition]

I begin my log in the seed capsule. There is little to report.
I am dormant. I am alone. I am drifting through the void.
Sometimes, I wonder what lies beyond the vacuum-sealed walls.
Sometimes, I swear I hear a very faint, very beautiful, song.

I have landed. Surface: moist. Atmosphere: favorable. Competition: unknown.
I discard the shriveled seed coat. Every cell in my body pulses with life.
Enzymes fly like meteorites and I emerge, gasping from my pod.

[commence germination]

There is no need to waste time with instructions.
I open my endosperm sack and gorge on the stored feast of sugar.
Invigorated, my radicle, that intrepid probe, plunges into the depths.
For the first time I taste, no absorb, the rich minerals of the new world.

My cotyledons unfurl like two green sails into the light.
Ah, sweet solar wind, filling my chlorophyll with galactic energy.
Gradually, I establish myself here, growing up and down, in light and dark.

[commence vegetative growth]

Forgive me. I have not been carefully logging my progress.
The divisions, they simply became too numerous to catalogue.
Besides, I was in a kind of trance, conducting the photo-symphony–
Keeping my glucose stocks fat and multiplying my meristems.

The important point is that I am tall with a well-defined stalk and enviable leaves.
There are other sunflowers too, and a rather impudent beast who is fond of digging.
All in all, I have adapted well. I am happy. Though I don’t care for the beast.

[commence ripening]

For months I have studied the sun. My head of bracts tracked its arc like an antenna.
Now I am a sun, with a yellow crown and a hot core of disk florets and pollen.
I, too, emit signals to orbiting bodies who come and go with fertile stardust.
Was this my mission, to set into motion a new solar system?

I merge with another star. My head sags under the weight of our fruits.
The inflorescence fades. The wind scatters my wilted petals over the floor.
It has become difficult to know where I end and where this planet begins.

[commence decomposition]

The digging beast beheaded me and made off with my seeds.
The sparrows peck at what’s left. Somehow, I don’t seem to mind.
Each day, a little darker, a little colder, siphons me away.

I said before I began alone, but now I remember something else:
Being a seed among other seeds encircled in a halo of yellow rays.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from R J Theodore during our annual Kickstarter.]

“The November Lamassus” © 2023 by nino

The Persian

The Persian leaves a pool of regurgitated kibble in the foyer. Cassie wipes up the mess, refills its water bowl, and cracks open a can of Fancy Feast. She waits, but the cat refuses to be drawn.

Poisonous green light leaks from the seams around the bedroom door. Cassie sticks her head in long enough to make sure no miasma has escaped from the splintered black mirror leaning against the far wall.

Something huge and soft brushes up against the backs of her calves. She scoops the cat up before it can dive under the bed.

Cassie closes the door, empties the litter box, and checks the Persian off her list for Tuesday.

The Magic Goldfish

Ye Xian’s fiancé is a fintech billionaire from Shanghai. He owns a yacht and several small Caribbean islands. Before they met, Ye Xian says, she was a curator for the Vancouver Art Museum, specializing in Chinese earthenware and bronzes. Now, she says in a languid voice, she doesn’t do much at all.

Ye Xian’s Vancouver condo, an engagement present, is minimalist and tasteful. The only shoes by the door are her champagne-colored slippers and, later, Cassie’s battered Doc Martens.

The goldfish is three meters long. Its tank fills the living room.

“They get really big under the right conditions,” Ye Xian says apologetically.

“He must love you a lot,” Cassie says.

“He does,” Ye Xian says. Neither of them means the fiancé. “My mother gave him to me.”

Ye Xian leaves for one of her fiancé’s islands. Cassie sleeps on the elegant midcentury modern guest futon and feeds the fish at regular intervals, looking into its luminous golden eyes, each one the size of a baseball.

In the garbage, she discovers fishbones as long as spears.

Cassie

Cassiopeia Fung’s sitting services are in demand. She’ll travel anywhere inside the Vancouver metro area and sit anything as long as it isn’t human, be it house, goldfish, or gaping maw to the underworld. She charges a reasonable rate, which is sometimes no rate at all.

Her clients find her through word of mouth, through Craigslist, through premonition. They communicate with her via text and email and psychic and personal assistant and attorney.

They ask her questions. They ask about her previous jobs. Her worst. Her first.

If she decides to answer, Cassie always tells the truth.

Worst: The network executive who kept a mermaid in her West Point Grey mansion. The mermaid had a two million-gallon tank with a beautiful view of the inlet and a species-appropriate carnivorous diet. She was covered in teethmarks from gnawing at her own flesh.

First: Her sister Andy’s pet rock. Cassie took it to school in her pocket and kept it safe the whole day.

One Burning Tree

The bonsai sequoia—the oxymoron to end all oxymorons—has been in Toby Inamori’s family for eighty years. Its predecessor, an ancient camphor tree, was lost in 1942 when Toby’s great-grandmother was sent to an internment camp in Dufrost, Manitoba. Toby’s instructions for Cassie are simple, and his regret is immense.

“I wish I could be here to see it,” he says. “But I can’t miss this conference. My boss will skin me alive.” He groans. “The last time it happened I was twelve and more interested in playing Pokemon. I was such a brat.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Cassie says. “My sister and I were the same way when we were kids.”

“Ungrateful?” Toby suggests. “Oblivious?”

“Mesmerized by anime.”

Toby laughs. “I see.”

“I’ll take lots of pictures,” Cassie promises. “Video, too.”

At sunset, she uses the lighter Toby leaves on the kitchen counter to set the bonsai on fire. The tree burns long into the night. In the morning, Cassie films a time-lapse video as a golden sapling begins to unfurl in the ash.

Bruce the Pug

The cashier at Mak N Cheese is new and melancholy, with blue-tinged fingertips and a name tag that says HANEUL SHE/THEY (jagged capitals), fav cheese MUENSTER (bubble letters). Cassie orders a cauliflower cheese to stay and eats her bowl of Gruyère and gouda and tender white florets by the window. The rain begins and people rush past with wet faces.

Makhesh himself comes out to bus her table. Bucheron! Bucheron! Bucheron! his name tag says. “How’re you holding up?”

Cassie decides not to answer. “I’m sitting that purple Victorian on Cambie.”

Mak whistles. “That place is mega haunted.”

“Nah,” Cassie says. “I don’t do ghosts. It’s just a lonely old house.”

She thinks the house likes her. When she opens the curtains every morning they feel soft and damp on her hands, like a series of friendly licks from an inquisitive puppy.

“You booked up?” Mak asks. “Lola and I are headed stateside for American Thanksgiving.”

“I can squeeze you in,” Cassie says. “But only because I love you. I mean, I don’t love you, I love Bruce. Bruce is the best.”

“Awesome,” Mak says. “We'll call you.”

The Hydra

Korene is a quiet opalescent coil with eight mouths and sixteen shining black eyes. Her mother wears her like a piece of avant-garde jewelry. Her mother moves and talks incessantly; her mother gestures and gabbles and clucks.

“It’s the fifth head,” Korene’s mother says. “The fifth head is the head with all the issues. Mouth rot, ear infections, dysecdysis … She came to the shelter with eight heads. We have no idea what happened to the ninth one. It’s always been a stump.”

The Kitchen God

“Of course,” Lucas Lee says, “it’s all nonsense. But if it keeps the old man happy …”

Lucas runs Fly Restaurant, a Sichuan concept inspired by the eponymous hole-in-the-wall joints in Chengdu. Vancouver foodies rave about his liang fen and savory dofu hua, served tapas style in the tiniest of portions. When Lucas contacts Cassie, he offers to pay her with a single dinner, standard retail value 250 CAD.

Fly Restaurant has an industrial kitchen, all futuristic appliances and polished steel. Lucas’s father’s kitchen is homey and small and poorly ventilated: moisture peels the paint from the walls. The shrine is high up in the corner, perched on a cabinet.

The avatar of the Kitchen God, battery-operated, glowers at Cassie through a layer of dust.

“Be careful when you climb up there,” Lucas says. “Use your own stepladder, if you have one. Ours is wobbly. That’s how … you know.”

Lucas’s father is in the hospital with a broken hip.

Cassie nods. “I’ll be careful.”

She watches as Lucas wobbles up the ladder to light new incense and replace the moldy pyramid of clementines with a single tangelo.

“If you don’t want to pay for fruit, just stop by the restaurant. We have tons of scraps.”

Visiting hours at Vancouver General are almost over, but Lucas seems in no hurry to put on his shoes. “Have you done this before?”

“House-sitting?”

“House-god-sitting.”

“Oh,” Cassie says. “Yes.”

The Sisters

“What was the last god-sit like?”

Lucas wears metallic red Louboutin Oxfords. As he stoops in the entryway to tie his gleaming laces, Cassie starts to tell him about the Sisters.

“One of my clients is an archaeologist. A video I took of her pet tortoise eating melon went viral, and he was featured on CBC. She wanted to split the proceeds, but I told her to keep them. So, to thank me, she invited me to a dig near Potlatch Creek.”

Snort. “Some thank you,” Lucas says. “I would have taken the money.”

“The archaeologist’s grandmother was there. She spent the whole day teasing her granddaughter for digging up Great Uncle So-and-So’s forks and spoons. But when we sat down for supper, Grandma Rosalie took one look at me and said she had a story I might like to hear. She said they had probably taught it to us in school but without any of the important details. You know the Lion peaks in the North Shore Mountains? The ones the Squamish call the Sisters? The Twin—”

“Hang on a minute, I remember that CBC broadcast.” Lucas cuts her off. “That was one cute tortoise. You took that vid? And you didn’t try to cut a deal?”

Cassie doesn’t finish the story. At the end of her stay, Zao Jun is dust-free and his altar stacked with plump oranges and dates. She decides not to sit for Lucas again.

A Happy Baby

Cassie has blacklisted people before. Most recently, she blacklisted Janine Smythe, a gaunt divorcée still occupying her ex-wife’s home on 3879 Marine Drive. Janine keeps calling anyway, using a different number each time, filling Cassie’s voicemail box to the brim.

“She just doesn’t get it,” Cassie complains to her sister. “I’m not a babysitter.”

I’m telling you, he isn’t human, Janine says. He isn’t even mine.

On every recording, Cassie can hear the baby laughing. Listen to him, Janine implores her. What kind of baby laughs like that?

The Purple Victorian

November. The purple Victorian on Cambie turns 130 years old, and Cassie throws it a party with cake and candles.

The house’s foundation is sinking. Cracks crisscross the plaster walls, and the radiators turn on and off with a sound like labored breathing.

November: Janine stops calling. The owner of the Persian and the poison-green portal writes Cassie a glowing review; the snake’s mother sends Cassie a long email detailing the continued medical woes of Korene’s fifth head. Toby Inamori quits his job. Lucas Lee opens a second restaurant. Lola and Makhesh leave for America, and Bruce is a good boy.

The house’s owners ask Cassie to vacate. They tell her they are planning to sell.

Andy

November: Ye Xian’s fiancé disappears. The fintech company was a Ponzi scheme, she explains; she suspects he was arrested by Shanghai police. In Vancouver, the RCMP have seized her Coal Harbour condo.

She arrives at Andy’s apartment carrying a single piece of luggage. Cassie doesn’t ask about the goldfish. She knows its bones are inside Ye Xian’s weekend bag, lovingly wrapped in kingfisher silk.

“I just need a few days to figure out my next steps,” Ye Xian says.

“Stay as long as you want,” Cassie says. “After all, I’m never here.”

Ye Xian nods. “I also ran away, after my mother died. I couldn’t bear to remain in our home without her.”

Cassie’s swapped out some of the houseplants, but otherwise Andy’s apartment looks just the way it did on the day she died. Cassie stops by once a week to water the ficus and check the mail and give everything a good vacuum. She talks to Andy even though Andy is beyond hearing. And she talks to the apartment. Just in case, like the house on Cambie, it starts to develop a personality.

It was a bike accident, she tells Ye Xian. “I didn’t keep her body. I had her dipped in nitrogen and fed her to some trees.”

She touches her own face, her forehead. The same forehead Andy had before she cracked it on the pavement. “We were twins. As I grow older, so does she.”

Ye Xian’s smile is a smile of recognition. “My mother drowned in a lake in China,” she says. “But I resemble her. I keep her with me too.”

She departs three days later, leaving behind a fishbone and a shoe.

The November Lamassus

The Lamassus is a soft-spoken bearded man from the neck up. Below the neck, he has the body of a fine red bull. He was looted from Iraq in 2003, he explains in gentle, unplaceable English, and after a brief stay in a vault in Switzerland, was trafficked here.

Decades mean nothing to a being older than the first Assyrian king. Oh, Gilgamesh was real, the Lamassus assures Cassie. I met him.

It’s an unusually warm night for November, about twelve degrees Celsius. Cassie and the Lamassus sit outside in a thin white mist, and Bruce the pug sits with them. He’s very good with other animals, the Lamassus’s wealthy Italian husband had told Cassie.

Steam rises from the Lamassus’s bull body. His hooves sink into the soft black earth.

“Do you want to go home?” Cassie asks. “I know some people who can help you.”

“Oracles, bards, and poets?”

“Archaeologists. Museum directors.”

But the Lamassus shakes his head. “I carry home with me,” he says. “I carry it as the snail carries his house.”

The mist is clearing. The Lamassus has been teaching Cassie the names and legends of ancient constellations. She rubs the fishbone in her pocket, then withdraws her hand to point at the star-pitted sky. At Cassiopeia and Andromeda, reclining side by side.

“What do you call those?” she asks.

Editor: Kat Weaver

First Reader: Ana Maričić

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“Undog” © 2023 by Kring Demetrio

My parents never let me have a dog, but now I might not be alone in the house after all. Except I can’t find it anywhere. It is hiding from me. The creature that growls in my ear when I sleep and leaves muddy paw prints on my bedsheets in the morning. Or maybe I am hiding from it. It’s all a matter of perspective.

The undog scratches at my door every morning, begging for food. When I don’t open, the undog drags its body to the kitchen one clawed paw at a time and chews at the legs of the wooden table. The sound of teeth gnashing and wood splintering drives me up the wall, so I finally get up and stalk into the kitchen. I find it empty but for the smears of slobber on the tiles and the hand-size bite marks on the wood, like a gigantic termite raid. But it’s no termite. It’s the dog I don’t have.

Mom, if I still lived with her in that mausoleum, would make me clean it all up. She’d tell me she’s tired of my make-believe nonsense. To quit wasting time and go run some errands. But that’s what’s great when you live alone, isn’t it? You don’t have to sit and listen anymore.

I know where undog comes from. The neighbor tells me this story when I catch him stealing glances at my backyard. He asks me if I hear a howling coming from the drain. The neighbor’s great-uncle took in a mutt from the streets once upon a time. Trained it to watch the house. But he didn’t really like the creature. Forgot to feed it and leave water out for it. Until one day the mutt snatched a chicken from the henhouse and the neighbor’s uncle took his shotgun and chased the dog away. That was fifty years ago. I know dogs don’t live that long. But I am sure this one did. It must have run away from that house and crawled in here to lick its wounds, and now it lives between the walls, or in the basement, or some secret room that I haven’t found yet. It lives just to spite its ex-family.

My phone screen lights up and my mother’s name pops up.

Mom video chats with me about her average day, the garden, the neighbor, the neighbor’s garden, all the while petting Cookie who is sitting on her lap. A string of drool forms on the side of her mouth and she pants under my mom’s warm touch. Underneath it all, there is the muffled whimpering of the undog as it moves around the house, around me, searching for food. You are the new master of the house, I imagine it saying. It’s your job to feed me.

My mother did get a dog after my father died, when I finally built up the courage to move out of her house and live two towns away. Hypocrite. She got a Bichon Frise because, in her own words, she didn’t want to be alone in her old age. Cookie, the dog, is all white fuzz with two button black eyes in the middle of her round face. She sleeps on the bed that used to be mine, and she even has a small staircase so she can reach the cushions without leaping up and down for hours until my mom comes and helps her up.

What if I could give Cookie to the undog? Kill two birds with one stone. I shiver the thought away.

“This dog needs a haircut,” I say to Mom, trying to follow her blabbering.

“Oh, Anna,” Mom says as she pets the fuzzy whiteness. “Dogs need patience and love, and you, my dear, don’t seem to have either.”

A growling emptiness opens inside me like a second stomach. Like a hungry dog.

She enjoys telling me casual cruelties like that. It’s her little revenge because I no longer live with her. But maybe she forgets that this is how it always was for me back home. Only double the dose when Dad was around. Cruelty is my family’s natural language. At least now it comes diffused through the phone screen and at a certain time of day.

After I finish my shift at the post office, I stop at the grocery store and buy the juiciest piece of meat I can find. When I get home, I take it out of the plastic wrap, glistening and blood-smeared, and leave it outside my door. I disappear under the covers and listen as the undog trudges along corridors only it knows. I imagine the wooden walls separating enough for it to pass its misshapen body through holes I cannot see so it can reach me. Soon it nuzzles at my gift with its damp snout. If that’s really what it has.

I keep thinking if that’s my dog in the walls—the dog I was meant to have—maybe there’s also another family. A broken, misshapen family full of open wounds stumbling around in the gaps, looking for me. I keep dead silent; pretend I listen to their keening. Like a whole other species communicating. I twist my lips, trying to make sounds that could call to them, but nothing comes out.

I fall asleep to the sound of chewing.

When Mom calls, I can barely hear her under the cries of the undog. Mom’s small, inquiring eyes stare through the screen and for a moment I can swear that she hears it too. I am waiting for the question. Anna, did you get a dog? What makes you think you deserve a dog? Girls who abandon their mother deserve nothing. I want her to say something so I can ignore her. But she settles back in her favorite armchair with the yellow-turned-brown upholstery and Cookie runs up to her like she hasn’t seen Mom in years, and the moment is gone. I suddenly get the feeling that Cookie is more real than me. When I try to speak it’s like another sound is about to come out. Like keening from behind walls.

Mom puts her phone on the coffee table as she picks up the dog, but her voice still comes through clear when she says, “Cookie, dear, you are like the child I wish I had.”

I head for the pet store and buy a bag of top-brand dog food. I don’t even know if the undog eats dog food. But I do know that fine cuts of meat don’t come cheap.

The clerk is a small woman with a big smile.

“Haven’t seen you before.” She pushes a box of dental chews in my direction. “This brand of dog food is not for puppies.”

“It’s not for a puppy.” I grab a bunch of dental chews. I am pretty sure they didn’t have those fifty years ago, but it’s worth a try.

“What breed?” she asks as she scans my stuff.

“It’s a mutt.” I grin. “My mutt.”

It’s my day off, so I go straight home. Before I walk through the door, I can feel the low, ragged breath of the undog. When I go inside, the house falls silent again. Like someone is waiting. The drapes are pulled shut, but I leave them. I don’t turn on the lights either. I know by now that the undog is a shy creature. It is bolder during the night, when it breathes down my face. Or hidden in the shadows of the secret spaces. You would be too if you were an undog, sliding through narrow passages for decades, asking to be fed.

“I brought you food,” I yell at the emptiness in front of me, certain that the undog gets me as much as I get it. “I’ll be in the living room.”

A pair of eyes open in the darkness of the corridor. Maybe it’s three eyes. I try not to stare. I slowly make my way to the couch and rip open the bag of dog food. I take a fistful of kibble in my hand and reach out in the darkness, willing my arm to stop shaking.

“Come on, you little monster.”

The undog hobbles into the room and turns to face me, its tail wagging like a dog’s. Its body’s a rotting mess. I can’t tell where its right leg ends and its left one begins. Thump, thump, thump, it comes closer. I hear the breathing, the low rumble of its internal organs. The undog has no mouth, just a ragged, ravenous hole filled with hair and teeth and bad breath.

The phone starts buzzing in my pocket, and the kibble flies out of my hand and scatters on the tiles.

“Shit!”

The undog takes a few more steps. The endless hole of its mouth growls once and then gets to work, sucking and crunching at the kibble on the floor. I see my chance and stretch my hand a little bit more. I stroke fur that feels like rubber.

“Good little monster.”

It doesn’t protest. It recognizes a friend. I take my phone out and hang up on Mom. Undog’s split tongue licks my cheek like I’ve always imagined, and I giggle like the kid I could have been, if I were someone else.

Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson

First Reader: Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“Cassia De Claire's Revolving Cabinet Cards” © 2023 by Palloma Barreto

I once saw my mother kill a cow. The calf got twisted in the birth and it was screaming. Or maybe it was the heifer. It wasn’t my mother. Maybe it was me. The heifer’s vulva gaped around the calf, its one disembodied, wet leg kicking. Then, it was like the cabinet cards of the horse, where it looks like the horse is running, but the picture skips, a few seconds lost between each image. My mother stood in front of me with a knife, blood soaking into her boots, and I’d missed a few seconds. The heifer’s belly was a hole. The calf had tumbled out where my mother had severed the hide, along with a mess of organs I couldn’t identify. The heifer’s skin was slack, nearly concave with nothing to hold it open. I pressed my fingers into my own belly and imagined it giving without resistance, into an empty cavity, and felt some sort of way.

Later, when I moved out of the house, I started showing cabinet cards. They were old-fashioned by then, and I bought some reels and a zoetrope, little more than a slotted cylinder on a turntable, for cheap at a junk store. I remember it was the day before my menses and I ignored the twist in my belly, the oncoming ripple. It was the first time I half acknowledged that that twist made me panic, made me want to tear open my stomach with my nails and drag out my guts. I assumed at the time I was just afraid of the pain. After I bought the zoetrope, a traveling ornithologist who’d abandoned his education to train nightingales hired me. All day, I cranked the zoetrope for pennies and the nightingales cooed in their bamboo cages like lost princesses.

I didn’t have an inviting face, the sort that has the conviction to make the decision for idle passersby, says, Come spend your pennies. The children will laugh, and clap their hands. My face was dour, narrow, and tired in a way that looked distant. My whole body was narrow, laid against itself and without any curve to sweep in strangers. It would be trite and untrue to say I didn’t look like other women. But I felt as if I didn't, as if I was meant to look some other way than myself—soft or round, I suppose. But it was like when someone tells you something’s true and you imagine they must be right because you can’t say why they’re wrong.

The zoetrope wasn’t popular, of course, but watching the reel only took a few seconds and the children liked it. I varnished an antique sign and painted it in plum: Cassia De Claire’s Revolving Cabinet Cards. On the zoetrope, I showed a woman waving a kerchief from a train’s corridor connection as the train sped away, and a child that pulled a cat’s tail, and two fencers, one running the other through.

One night while the oil lamps hung from hooks, and the nightingale trainer crouched in front of a cage, whistling songs at a petulant bird, I put my thumb on my belly and said, “What if I didn’t want something of myself anymore?”

He raised a questioning eye at me.

“Like,” I shrugged, looked down and saw my hand, “what if I didn’t want my hand?”

“I could use a third hand,” he said, moving to sit across from me.

I eyed his hand: knobbed knuckles, dry fingertips, and taut skin. “Could you trade hands, if you each liked the other’s better?”

He scrubbed the pad of his thumb against the stubble on his chin. “I knew a woman who lived in a little house in the middle of a field of oak trees on Lilac Lane.” He reached out and tapped me, quick and sharp, just beneath my collarbone. “She could cut your heart out with a paring knife.”

“Could she?” I wasn’t sure if he was trying to make a fool of me, or if he really meant it.

“If it hurt too bad, you could tumble out into a rosemary bush and breathe lemon until the hurt was worth it.”

“Maybe she kicked your lazy ass into a snowbank and stole your heart.”

He laughed, the nightingales startling, but only said, “I never saw her do hands.”

“Did she do other things?”

“Oh, sure,” he said, but didn’t explain, not even when I quirked an eyebrow.

Somewhere along the way, I started painting the reels. I just painted one picture on the whole reel, so, for a flash, the woman on the train had no belly and the child had no legs and the dying fencer’s head flamed into ash. Mostly, people didn’t notice.

In the fall, the nightingale trainer and I stood out in the rain, tucked under an awning, the smell of roasted coffee and bread sneaking out the door every time someone ran in or out. The nightingales fluffed in their cages, tucking their heads into their feathers. Every once in a while, I mindlessly cranked the zoetrope, even though no one had come to look all day. I dug my index finger into my stomach, as if it would dull the ache of menstruation. All I wanted to do was sit down. All I wanted to do was sit down and take a knife to my abdomen.

I pressed harder into my belly and huffed. “Why did you go to that woman on Lilac Lane?” I said. “Did she cut something out?”

“Oh, yes.” He settled back against the window frame, pulling his coat around his arms. “I traded my fish tail for legs. Traded it to the herb-wife and her butcher knife.” He grinned and tapped me, twice, on the leg. “It’s skin for me. Scales for skin. Throw my tail in a fish barrel and sell it at market.”

I still couldn’t tell if he was trying to make fun of me. “Cut you off below the belt, did she?” I said, droll.

He stuck his finger into a cage, chucking a bird under its beak, and ignored me. I remembered the story, the mermaid who wanted love more than life. The sea-witch told the mermaid that all the time walking around, it would be like treading on knives, an endless, dull ache. Like menses all the time.

I looked down at the reel of the woman on the train, and all the cards lined up looked like a dozen identical sisters, all waving their kerchiefs, and among them the single sister with no belly. I wondered what she’d traded it for.

“Let’s go inside,” I muttered. “I feel like I’m going to vomit.”

On a Sunday, we sat on a bench outside a church, the nightingales cooing like little churchgoers themselves. The nightingale trainer’d already sold three birds to children in pressed slacks and lacy skirts who pulled on their mothers’ sleeves and said, Look at the pretty birds, Mama. The nightingale trainer would stand and tip his hat to the misses before putting it on his chest and saying, amicably, “They sing a pretty song, too, ma’am. With a bird like this, you’ll be the envy of every dinner party west of the railroad tracks.”

I’d spun the zoetrope for the children, who handed me their pennies, while he produced a list of songs the birds could purportedly sing. I watched the mothers bending over the list and wondered if somehow all women could hardly bring themselves to think of their pelvis, the meat and gristle between navel and hip and spine, and no one had ever told me. When the mothers came to gather their children, they smiled at me, and one said, “Do you have one of your own?” and I startled, and took too long realizing what they’d meant.

When the church bells began to chime and the loiterers and the tardy tumbled inside, we sat down to wait. I tipped my head back and the air smelled like river cattails and grass in seed.

“Why did you ask, about the woman on Lilac Lane?” he said, tossing a cover over a bird that was seeking to outdo the preacher we could hear booming inside. “Looking to get something cut off?”

Instead of answering, I said, “Is she a witch? A sea-witch?”

“I don’t think she’s confined to the sea.”

I contemplated tapping his legs, quick and sharp, like he did sometimes, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I kept my head tipped back, my arms crossed over my chest. “Why did you want your tail cut off? Was it just because you loved a prince?”

“You mustn’t discredit him,” he said, very earnestly. “He’s very charming.”

“They all are.”

He chuckled. “Well, the mermaid doesn’t want to just be seafoam when she dies; it is very pretty, but quite ephemeral, and a little desperate. Just think what she must have felt when her sisters came with that knife. ‘We have given our hair to the witch,’ they say. ‘She has given us a knife: here it is, see, it is very sharp.’ And she takes the knife, and it is very sharp, just like her sisters said. Why, the things she could do with it. What if she did kill the prince?”

“Even though you loved him?” I wanted to shove his shoulder, playfully, like we were teasing, teenage sisters.

“She just wants,” he waved his hands vaguely, “the right skin.”

“His skin?”

An amused and vaguely guilty smile crossed his face. “Shame to throw away a knife like that.”

I stood up and scuffed dirt off the path. “In the story, walking hurts …” I trailed off.

He rocked his head forward slowly. “All the time.”

In the evening, I painted away all the women’s bellies, but then couldn’t bring myself to show the reel anymore.

We went south after that, down out of the cold and through flushed wheat fields the color of burnt milk. I woke up with sweat stains under my arms. The nightingale trainer stripped down as much as was decent and then grumbled that he couldn’t take off more. I kept on my coat and suffered.

I woke one early morning, nearly retching with the pain in my pelvis. Blood slicked my thighs like I was giving birth. For a dizzying moment I thought I was giving birth, like the queen who eats a monster’s heart and her spiteful belly swells overnight. Fear and disgust and confusion wrenched at my guts and I tumbled down to the river next to our camp.

In the river, I sat waist-deep in the water with my head on my knees. I wasn’t pregnant. I was just bleeding. It was normal. It was normal. How was it normal, again? I breathed into the cup between my knees until the sun rose. I knew, somewhere in my brain, that birth was something my body could do; someone must have told me so, and I’d believed them. But it felt meant for other bodies that weren’t mine.

When I came back up the hill, the nightingale trainer was still asleep, though the birds in our covered cart had started talking to each other. With only the flies for company, I went down the dusty road that twisted around our camp, wanting only to lessen the ache that went from my belly down to my thighs. I walked and thought of knives each time my heels hit the ground.

How do you find a witch’s house? Do you just know the way through the woods as easy as coming home, even though you’ve never gone that way? Or do you go wandering and the house comes up on the road like a mushroom?

I didn’t see the house come up before me; I only noticed the cool shade of the oaks and the rosemary to the side of the road, and I might have passed it right by, except that there were chickens in the yard that clucked and scratched curiously at the ground. I looked up and saw the dulled wooden siding and the gutters caught up with oak seeds and moss.

I stopped. The nightingale trainer’s question rose up through my chest: Why had I asked about the house on Lilac Lane?

I felt like vomiting, for several reasons, starting between my legs and moving up from there. I couldn’t possibly pass the house by, even as I suddenly felt queasy about everything, about whether there were witches who could cut out hearts and mermaids who traded their scales. But we are always foolish enough to knock on the witch’s door, no matter how wise we think we are. I went up and knocked.

She answered, wizened and suspicious, a knife held toward the floor in her left hand and a blue dappled snow goose peering out from behind her leg like a child.

“Good morning,” I stammered.

She considered me and then strode back inside, leaving the door ajar. I hesitated, before inching past the threshold, peering after her as she finished butchering a leg of lamb and then slid the knife away into a block. The goose waddled after, settling peaceably in front of the stove.

“I heard you deal in knives.” I smiled, tried to make it a joke, faltered into silence.

She waved a hand at a table across the room. “If you’re looking to buy, you can see what I’ve got, but none of it’s cheap.”

I twisted my middle fingers together and was reminded of my mother, who asked questions that landed like a knife in a block, who’d never understood my uncertainties. “I don’t want anything. I just want something taken out.”

“I don’t take gifts.”

I leaned forward and, with more desperation than I meant, cried, “But I don’t want anything!” I swallowed and stood straight. “I don’t want to trade for anything.”

She went back to cleaning the leg.

I waited for her to say more, and when she didn’t, I became terrified that she would tell me to go. I crept over to a chair as if that meant she couldn’t turn me out. “I don’t care,” I muttered, opening and closing my hands in my lap, and not even looking at the table, although I could see it was scattered with many things, even cabinet cards. “I’ll sell it for anything. A sprig of rosemary. A nightingale.”

“I don’t have any nightingales.”

I sunk into the chair. “I heard you could cut out a heart. That’s not a trade.”

“The hollow left behind’s the trade.” She turned and set her hands behind her on the counter, eyeing me from beneath a cloud of black hair. “You trade your heart and in the hollow you hope instead there’s a place to stay, a place to eat, a person to say, ‘Well, yes, you’re alright’. It’s not my fault if it’s an unequal trade.” She eyed me, up and down. “What do you want cut off then?”

“Cut out,” I said. “Cut out.” I swallowed again. “I want my uterus cut out.”

She glanced over her shoulder.

I squeezed my hands shut. I thought of that cow, hollowed, dying. And what to go in the hollow? Maybe there wasn’t anything to go in the hollow and I wouldn’t be anything if I couldn’t be in pain once a month. I’d just be a not want and nothing else at all.

But if it was taken out, no one would know which organs were under my skin and which weren’t. Was it only the possibility that I wasn’t just as people had said I probably was? That you might assume about my skin all you like and I would know you were wrong?

“What would I do with a uterus?” she asked and, laughing, said, “One’s enough.”

“Sell it to someone else. Put it on your table. I’m sure someone wants it.”

She bounced her fingers on the counter. “I suppose it’s no different than hearts.” She picked up the knife and tapped the empty table with the handle.

I looked at that table, holding my coat too hard against myself, and I felt like I was leaking out, like I wasn’t anything if I wasn’t hurting. And who’s to say what I’d do if I stopped hurting? I took off my coat, still pulling too tight as I did, and climbed on the table.

I imagine the nightingale trainer screamed when she cut him in two, just to show her he got a say in it. Just to whirl that voice around.

I didn’t scream. I watched it go like smoke, and she with her knife and blood on her hands while I spilled out on the table.

At the end of it, the witch held out a set of cabinet cards showing a sprig of rosemary blowing in the wind. “Just in case,” she said.

You might say that I should crow like the nightingale trainer: Why, I was paid for my blood. Pictures for a scar wrapped like a nautilus shell around my belly. Sold my pain for a good show, and I’ll show it for a penny. Wouldn’t you like to see the cards I hollowed myself for?

But I’ve not told anyone. I still show my cabinet cards, and the reel of a rosemary sprig that starts to bloom like a split belly, but then it closes up before you can see what’s inside. I crank the zoetrope with one hand and hold my other against my belly, feeling it give.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Ruan Etsebeth

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“Always and Forever, Only You” © 2023 by Julia Quandt

It started with a bit of music, something no one else was even listening to. Annabel, who lived in the room across from Edie’s and considered herself quite the intellectual, demanded that they all listen to Radio 4 in the half hour before dinner. In practice that nearly always meant The Archers, which Edie knew Annabel found just as boring as everyone else did. The Sunshine Care Home was next to the marina just north of Southport, and all the inhabitants had lived and worked in the town; no one here was particularly interested in crop rotation or auctioning off cows.

But Annabel had the personality of a recently demobbed sergeant major and had, back in the mists of time, brought the radio with her when she moved in to what the Sunshine Care Home called Independent Sheltered Living. So Radio 4 it was, except for this one unremarkable Thursday when instead of the crisp tones of the BBC announcer they were having music instead. Edie tilted her head to listen. It was catchy, full of bouncy rhythms. It made Edie think of sparkly outfits and dancing. It played long enough to fade out into another announcer’s voice, this one young and enthusiastic, giving the track and the artist. A new song was starting when Annabel bellowed a complaint out of her corner armchair. “Raymond, that’s not what we’re here for.”

“Sorry,” Raymond said, not like he was sorry. “I knocked the dial.”

Raymond was the new care worker at Sunshine. The place was mostly staffed with holographic workers, who ambled around picking up things people had dropped, whether or not they wanted them picked up, and otherwise lurked in corners and shimmered. But Raymond was pale, spotty, and human, with a permanent sneer on his thin face. He turned the dial on the radio and Edie stopped listening.

Instead, she thought about the song she’d heard, the few lines of the melody repeating themselves over and over in her head. Da-da-da-DA. It made her feet twitch. She got up, ignoring Annabel’s glare—Annabel thought Radio 4 should be a compulsory Sunshine experience—and went up to her room. In her diary, she scrawled today’s date, followed by: heard music. Name, Lee. Min?

There were a few more question marks after that. The name of the singer had been said so quickly, and besides that, all musicians gave themselves funny names. They’d done that even when Edie was young. But she’d put down her best guess and now she wouldn’t forget it. The diary was safely back in the drawer when Raymond knocked. “Edie, are you At Home?” he called.

Edie hated that, that he always seemed to pronounce that with initial capitals, as though she’d been a Regency debutante or some such thing. In his young man’s head there was no difference between being eighty and being 180. “I’m coming,” she said, as sullenly as when she was sixteen and writing in her diary about Elvis.

“It’s just, it’s curried chicken and undercooked rice,” Raymond said through the door. “You wouldn’t want to miss that.”

Edie’s mouth twitched despite herself. “Coming,” she said.

She went downstairs and was served her share of dinner. The little bit of a song carried on going round and round in her head, still with its panoply of sparkles. Only you, she warbled in her evening bath. All for you. She went to bed still humming.

That might have been all there was to it, except it was tax season again and Annabel was keeping the place in uproar as a result. Annabel was rich; her late husband had been a pioneer in developing quasi-intelligent three-dimensional holograms, and a notable philanderer besides. Annabel took pleasure in giving his hard-earned money away to good causes, which Edie approved of in principle, but in practice it led to tears every December when the taxman came knocking. Annabel tended to spread all her papers across the common room floor and look tragic until someone helped her, and Edie usually found herself avoiding the common areas until someone else had succumbed. But this year she took her turn. She helped Annabel collect documents and fill in the forms, and suggested that she engage a real accountant. Annabel pretended she hadn’t heard that part and didn’t say thank you for the help. But it seemed natural, once all the paperwork was in neat piles, for Edie to say, “Annabel, could I borrow your phone? I want to look something up.”

Annabel nodded absently, still looking at her papers with an anguished expression. Edie picked up the phone. She didn’t have one of her own because she’d never thought she needed one. She didn’t have children, or grandchildren. She had had Ernest, dapper little Ernest in his grey suit and tie, always ready with a big plan and a smile. He wasn’t carrying off the sharp suits by the end, diminished by hospital gowns and horrible faded bathrobes, but his smile still flashed at the sight of her. Ernest loved Edie; he thought she was the bee’s knees, the cat’s pyjamas, until the day he died and left her all alone.

The hospital chaplain said to Edie that she should feel free to grieve, that every grief was unique. Edie had thought the first part of that was nonsense—why would she need anyone’s permission to grieve—and later decided the chaplain was wrong about the other thing as well. If you loved me, she said to Ernest inside her head, why did you leave, and there was never any answer.

But he had left, and Edie remained. She rattled around the house for a few years, and in due course came the Sunshine Care Home. Ernest hadn’t been a scientific and industrial pioneer, but he hadn’t slept around either. He had provided for Edie as well as he could. It wasn’t that she couldn’t afford a phone; it was that she didn’t have anyone to call on it.

But she knew what to do, with Annabel’s. Edie tapped the little internet app and looked at the search box.

Nice music I heard, she thought, but didn’t type that in. It wouldn’t work. Music on Radio 4—but it hadn’t been Radio 4, had it. She went upstairs to fetch her diary and came back to find Annabel still engrossed. Edie picked up the phone and typed into the search box. Lee music.

Millions of results, mostly guitar shops.

Lee Min.

Did you mean “Lee Minjoon”, asked the search engine.

Did I mean that, Edie wondered. She tapped, and there he was. Lee Minjoon, with his record-smashing global hit, “Only You.” Edie looked up at Annabel and the other two old fogeys in the common room, and thought: fuck it. She tapped the link.

It was a video. Edie squinted at a young man on a big stage, standing in a rainbow-coloured spotlight. The caption said he was from Korea. He looked up the camera and started to sing, and something inside Edie’s heart turned over and grew wings.

“Edie, shut that off and help me with the Christmas receipts,” Annabel said querulously. “Why I can’t ever find anything I don’t know.”

Her receipts were all from United Holography plc, the tiny start-up her husband had founded, that now employed half the people in the town and was on its way to being a giant multinational company. Apparently Annabel still made an annual contribution to their benevolent fund and paid for a Christmas voucher for every employee.

“United Holography is still at the cutting edge, you know,” Annabel said, not approvingly. “They were going to send me a prototype of their latest model as a Christmas present. It’s almost like a real person, they said. I said, I’m seventy-eight years old, I’m not interested in that kind of thing. The very idea!”

“The very idea,” Edie said, not really sure what she was agreeing to. “It’s convenient, having a phone,” she added, as casually as she could. “I might need to get one of my own.”

That, too, took some effort. In the end Edie succumbed to the inevitable and asked Raymond for help, having first prepared a list of reasons why she suddenly wanted a phone at the age of eighty-one and a half. She might have said “to play music,” but that was too close to the truth. Edie felt gloriously dizzy when she thought about it: the video, the music, the swoop of emotion deep inside her chest. As a teenager, she’d gone to concerts at the Manchester Academy with her friends, swayed with the crowd and felt like she might explode with uncontainable joy. At this distance of more than sixty years she recognised the feeling. It was too rare, too precious, to be sullied by other eyes.

But Raymond didn’t ask questions. Instead, he used his own phone to show her how to buy one, helped her decide what model, what colour, if she wanted a contract or pay-as-you-go. He couldn’t quite keep the patronising sneer off his face, but Edie held her tongue and didn’t snap at him for it. His job was to serve dinner and programme the holographic care workers; he didn’t have to help her with this. She thanked him sincerely, and was surprised by his smile.

The package came two days later, and Edie put it away without opening it, knowing she had to endure the afternoon first. Annabel, The Archers, undercooked rice, all the usual. Edie waited until everyone had gone to bed before retreating to her room. She opened the box, took out her new phone, and smiled at some unknown person’s thoughtfulness in sending it to her fully charged.

And then, finally—finally!—she slipped her new earbuds in and looked up Lee Minjoon’s song.

“Only You” was three minutes and forty-four seconds long. Edie played it twice without stopping, and when she’d finished the skin on the back of her neck was prickling and her chest hurt from holding her breath. She played it a third time, looking more closely at the video this time, watching Lee Minjoon move around the stage with the grace of a ballet dancer, his earrings catching the light. He was beautiful. In her grey room at the Sunshine Care Home with the dull slosh of the marina beyond the window, Edie thought the whole world was beautiful.

She opened another tab and looked Lee Minjoon up on Wikipedia. His family name was Lee, she learned, rather than Minjoon, and his fans who loved him called him Minjoonie. “Only You” was a song off his latest album; there were eleven other songs on it, and he had four other albums. Some of them were in Korean, but not all, and Edie found the videos for the English ones. None of them lit her on fire like “Only You,” but she liked them all a lot anyway. Minjoon didn’t shake his hips or blow kisses like the pop stars she’d adored in her youth, but he made love to the camera anyway, every movement practised and deliciously sexual. Edie was entranced. When she finally put her phone away and snuggled down in bed, it was almost two in the morning. She drifted off and dreamed of stage lights and stars.

That was how things went, for a while. There were the days, mostly unremarkable, broken up by minor excitements such as a chilly trip out to the shops with one of the holographic minders, and the residents’ Christmas party. And then there were the nights, when Edie could retreat to her sanctum and watch Minjoon. Minjoonie; the fans called him that, and Edie was a fan. Her favourite video was “Only You,” but not the version she’d first seen. The one she loved best had been recorded live, and at the end of it Minjoonie reached down to one of the girls in the front row, lifting her up on the stage. He kissed her cheek and gave her a long-stemmed rose, and the crowd went wild. They screamed and whooped while the girl looked blank and stunned, overwhelmed by emotion. Edie thought she would have felt the same. She played that one a lot and the others nearly as much. The algorithm learned what she liked, and gave her Minjoon’s older songs, his lesser-known recordings, and fan bootlegs of his concerts in places she’d never heard of. Edie ate them all up like candy and hunted for more.

Then came something new. As well as learning about algorithms and bootlegs, Edie had figured out how to ignore and then to skip the ads. But every so often it wouldn’t let her do it, which was how she ended up watching a full advertisement for something called the Personal Holographer. It seemed to be the next step forwards from what Annabel’s husband had developed, taking it from an industrial technology to something people used for fun. The holographic workers were faceless and sometimes frightening, if you caught a glimpse of them out of the corner of your eye, but good for care homes where no human wanted to work. They made Edie feel lonely all the way down to her human bones. But she watched the advert and listened as a breathless narrator explained how it worked. Rather than a whole system of holograms like they had at Sunshine or in the factories in Southport, the Personal Holographer was a small machine that would generate a holographic copy of a single person, which would walk and talk and sing or act or do stand-up comedy, depending on what holographic person you’d chosen. It would be almost as good as the real thing, the narrator said. You should check it out.

Edie thought about it. The hologram in the advert was a copy of David Bowie. Maybe it was just the old ones, she thought: people like Bowie, the Searchers, the Beatles. She’d seen them all in their prime; queued up for tickets with hundreds of other girls and tottered home from Liverpool with her lipstick smudged and her voice hoarse from screaming. Edie remembered those times with sunlit clarity; she didn’t need to live through them again.

But she looked up the website for the Personal Holographer anyway, and there he was, in the drop-down list: Lee Minjoon, under “K-pop and other.” He wanted to take this new opportunity, said the accompanying text, to be closer to his fans.

Almost as good as the real thing, Edie thought. She got out of bed to fetch her credit card and typed in the number. She tapped submit before she could think better of it.

This time the parcel was too big for her to carry up the stairs unaided. “It must be for Annabel,” Raymond said when he saw the sender’s label on the packaging, and then paused, as though he’d suddenly understood something. “Edie, it’s for you.”

“Yes,” Edie said tightly, squirming with embarrassment at the knowing look on his face. He put the Holographer box in her room and asked if she wanted help assembling it, and Edie was barely polite as she chivvied him out. She felt guilty about it—just like before, he’d helped her do something she couldn’t manage alone—but she still couldn’t bear the thought of him knowing the truth, or guessing at it. Minjoonie was still her secret, her beloved, and still not for anyone else’s eyes.

The Holographer wasn’t nearly as easy to put together as the box instructions would have her believe, and you couldn’t plug headphones into it: Edie had to painstakingly assemble it and then wait until a day when most of the Sunshine residents were out on a chilly trip around the marina, leaving her alone save for the faceless care workers. When the time came, Edie made sure her door was tightly shut against them and anyone else wanting to check on her. She pressed the button and closed her eyes.

And when she opened them again, there he was. Minjoon in the holographic flesh, standing in her grey little room with no visible sign that he was being projected. He had on the silver hoop earrings she liked, and the denim jacket he’d worn on his last album cover. Edie stared at him in wonderment.

“Hello, Edie,” Minjoon said, and it was his voice: rich and low, with the accent that two months ago she wouldn’t have been able to place.

“Hi,” Edie squeaked.

“Hi,” Minjoon said, amused. He came up to her and held out a hand. She reached out, not sure if her hand would pass through his, but she could feel him. His skin was cool to the touch, not quite real but almost. “I have dreams like this,” she said, the words just slipping out. “That you’re here, and you sing, and we talk.”

The hologram nodded, looking interested and caring. Edie had to remind herself that that might be a programmed response, to something the AI hadn’t really understood. It was so easy to forget he was artificial, standing there with his lovely face, his sparkling jewellery and intense eyes. “Would you like me to sing now?” he asked.

“Yes,” Edie said, breathlessly. “Yes, please.”

The Holographer provided backing music, and Minjoon launched into “Someday Maybe,” which was his latest single and until now hadn’t been one of Edie’s favourites. Delivered in her own room, purred lusciously by a singer a few feet away, it was perfect. When it was finished, Edie was emboldened. “Would you sing ‘Only You’?” she asked.

The backing music began immediately. Minjoon sang, and Edie felt like she had when she was a teenager: that the joy in her heart was uncontainable, a bird trying to escape. She stood up from her armchair with care and slowly, slowly, began to sway back and forth. It wasn’t quite dancing; certainly it didn’t come anywhere near Minjoonie’s fluid brilliance. But it felt good, it felt right, as it had done sixty years before in the mass of the crowd.

The song ended and Minjoon launched into another. Edie was starry-eyed, overwhelmed by the music and the moment and the beauty of it all. She swayed on, compelled by Minjoon and his magnetic grace. She’d forgotten about the Sunshine Care Home and Annabel’s tax return. She’d forgotten about grey windy Southport and life at the end of life. She was awash with happiness, with love and beauty.

“I love you,” she said to Minjoon, not in the way she’d said it to Ernest, but the way she’d said it to pictures of Paul McCartney when she was sixteen. She’d read the comments on Minjoon’s videos and it turned out girls were still like that, they still said that, to beautiful musicians with lovely eyes. I love you, I love you so much, I love you.

“I love you too, Edie.” Minjoon blew her a kiss and Edie wanted to swoon dramatically. She laughed instead, and swayed back and forth again, her eyes closing from the wonder of it all.

But she wasn’t looking where she was going; she took a step to the side, and her feet caught on something. She reached out to the wall, trying to steady herself, but there was nothing to hold on to. She landed awkwardly on the floor and the music stopped.

The fall hurt, so much that it brought tears to Edie’s eyes. She was immediately worried she’d broken her hip, twitched her foot and for a second she was relieved. When she twisted round she realised it wasn’t her hip that was broken. She’d tripped on the Holographer, knocking it over so it had hit the hard leg of a chair. The impact had split the casing and she could see the chips and wires inside.

It was a gradual shock, as though Edie were waking from a beautiful dream into a rainy morning. Everything was silent, and Minjoonie was gone. In his place was just this familiar, faded room, its worn furniture and dull magnolia walls. Edie looked around at it as though she’d never seen it before, and felt like a hole had opened up inside her chest.

“I heard a thump!” a voice called through the door. “Are you okay in there?”

The holographic care workers didn’t speak; it must be Raymond, just starting his shift. Edie didn’t move.

“All right, I’m coming in!” Raymond said. He opened the door and took in the sight of Edie sitting on the floor with the Holographer in pieces beside her.

“I broke it,” Edie said.

“We’ll fix it,” Raymond said. He’d understood instantly what had happened: he’d known what was in the box when he carried it upstairs, and he’d probably even connected the dots with Edie’s sudden desire to buy a phone. “We’ll fix it, or we’ll get a new one, or something. Are you okay?”

Edie’s hip wasn’t broken and neither were her legs or arms; it had been a scary fall but it hadn’t caused more than a bruise or two. She nodded, hoping he would take it as enough of an answer and go away. But he didn’t. Edie looked up at him and burst into tears.

Raymond sat down on the floor beside her and said, “Edie, love, what’s really wrong?”

The expression on his face wasn’t a sneer, it was just something about the way he looked out at the world from under those thick lashes. He’d been kind to her, and now he was asking what was wrong as though he really cared. Edie couldn’t tell him that it was because Minjoonie had sung, all for you, only you, and on some deep, silly level, she had thought: only me. That he’d sung about the beauty of your smile, and she’d thought he meant her, her smile. She’d lain in bed at night and thought about the video with the rose, imagined what it would be like to feel the brush of his fingers, his lips on her cheek. Always and forever, only you, and she’d believed it, a little bit, that this handsome boy idol in a faraway country had written a song for her, for eighty-one-year-old Edie in Southport. She’d believed it and she’d been happy.

But here she was, sitting stupidly on the floor, and he wasn’t here, had never been here. The whole thing had been a fantasy, a childish daydream. Perhaps it would have been funny if Ernest had been there, if he’d made fun of Edie for her silly crush, if he’d told her that of course it was all much more romantic in the videos but he would kiss her if she liked, he’d take her out and they would dance. But he was dead, and so was the Holographer, a silly broken toy she should never have bought, and everything was sad and grey and awful like it had always been.

“I loved him,” she said to Raymond, “I loved him so much”—and then started to cry again, hopelessly, into a tissue. Raymond gathered up the bits of the Holographer and put them back in the box, got Edie a glass of water, and made her some tea. He sat with her until he had to go, leaving Edie alone on her faded sofa, with misery wrapping her like a shroud.

It turned out that you could cry yourself dry, and the ordinary things of life would still carry on. In the morning, Edie woke up and felt some distance from the whole thing. She went down to breakfast and avoided catching Raymond’s eye. A few days later she tidied her room and put the Holographer box outside for recycling. Annabel received a follow-up letter from the taxman and Edie helped her with it. She got up and ate her meals and went to bed, and if she thought of Lee Minjoon it was with a faint clench of embarrassment, as though he were some silly fad she’d grown out of years ago, and put him immediately out of her mind.

February came, grey and wet, and Raymond knocked on Edie’s door again. “Edie? Are you At Home to visitors?”

“Yes.” Edie was listless, not sure what to do with herself. “Come in.”

Raymond came in with a tall Black man with sculpted cheekbones and big, limpid eyes. “This is Jonny, my boyfriend,” he said. “You remember, don’t you, from the Christmas party?”

Edie did remember, and heard Ernest’s voice in her head: my Edie, always an eye for the good-looking boys. “Hello, Jonny,” she said, trying not to stare. “How do you do.”

“Very well, thank you,” Jonny said politely, and glanced across at Raymond, waiting for a cue.

“Okay, so,” Raymond said, sounding nervous. He and Jonny were carrying two big duffel bags, bulging at the sides. He unzipped one of the bags and got out something in a brightly coloured box. For a moment Edie was afraid it was a new Holographer and felt an awful combination of sad and embarrassed. But Raymond opened it and it turned out to be a disco ball, a little floor-mounted one. He switched it on and the tiny mirrors scattered pink and green light across the ceiling.

The bags also held microphones, and a blocky karaoke machine. Raymond set it all up, while Jonny sat down beside Edie. “We weren’t sure which ones were your favourites,” he said. “So we practised a few just in case.”

He showed Edie a list of Minjoon videos on his phone. She sat back, afraid. Raymond put a comforting hand on Edie’s arm.

“We thought … well. I can sing.” He smiled at her awkwardly. “And Jonny can dance with you. If you want. If you’d like that.”

Edie looked at the equipment, and then at the disco ball, the soft wash of colour circling the walls. She nodded, and Jonny took her arm and led her to the centre of the room. He pulled her to him in a clinch, and moved her gently around the floor.

Raymond didn’t sing “Only You”. But he sang “Someday Maybe,” and “Believer,” and “This Place,” all ones that Edie had played over and over. He had a nice voice, not one that would fill a stadium but sweet and pure like a chorister. Jonny danced with her, and the disco ball spun. When he’d gone through a few high-energy numbers, Raymond chose a song in Korean from one of Minjoon’s earlier albums. It was slow and lovely. Edie sank into Jonny’s arms, letting him sway her back and forth, back and forth. He was warm and solid, and she felt like she could do this forever.

But of course it ended, and she stood up straight as Raymond’s voice faded on the last note. “What was that one about?” she asked.

“I don’t know, I’m just reading off the screen,” Raymond said. “I’ll look it up for you.”

He found out it was also a love song, but an old traditional one, that grandmothers would know. Edie rebelled inwardly: she didn’t want the grandma ones. She wanted the sexy ones. She didn’t realise she’d said that out loud until Raymond and Jonny laughed.

“Okay,” Raymond said. “All sex all the time at Chez Edie. One last one?”

Edie nodded. It was another pretty, delicate one, in English this time. Edie took a minute to realise it wasn’t being projected on the screen. “My own,” Raymond said, pausing mid-verse and looking embarrassed. “I sometimes … write songs? Like, I don’t usually show them to people.”

Jonny was smiling fondly as he whirled Edie around the room. When it ended Jonny kissed her on the cheek, and Edie felt a tingle from the top of her head down to her toes. She knew the song had been for Jonny, really. But when Raymond sang, for the love of you, she’d believed it, and he and Jonny had lugged all the equipment up the stairs and set this up, so maybe it was a little bit for her, too.

After that they had to go. Raymond had to work and Jonny was DJing at a party. They packed up the karaoke machine and the microphone, but left the disco ball. “You keep that,” Jonny said. “You never know when you might feel a bit disco.”

Edie wanted to say no, they should take it. But when they were gone, she drew the curtains in her little room, turned the disco ball back on and hunted out her phone from the back of a drawer. She found a song by the Beatles, and cued up Elvis and Minjoon after that. When the music started, Edie thought of Ernest. She got up and danced around the room, slowly and carefully, through the scatter of light like stars.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Paula Keane

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“Locavore” © 2023 by Garden

It forced itself to take that last step onto the ferry. Every step further from land felt like falling. Through space, through time, through every place it had ever been. It kept its eyes open, its features arranged in what it hoped was a neutral expression. Somehow, it walked itself up to the small covered passenger deck and took a seat on a plastic bench. The boat began to move.

It gripped the plastic seat with its fingers as its body fought every inch of distance between it and the land. A dew of sweat blossomed on its brow, a snake-like coiling seized its guts, and a tectonic tremor unsteadied its hands.

This would pass. This always passed.

Ucluelet had been nice, at first. That salt in the air! Salt that seasoned everything, everyone. Delightful. It had hoped this might be the place. That maybe it could stay a while, if not forever.

Before it fed, it made its usual early missteps: offering the wrong greeting in town, using an ancient tongue instead of a more recently borrowed one; then, ponying up only a dime for a newspaper at the grocery store. It always needed time to acclimate to the right decade in a new place. Time, and a meal.

It could admit it had chosen poorly in Ucluelet. Grazed from the wrong pasture, to use the parlance of the place before last. A tricky thing, choosing well. It needed someone who knew the area, the people, the customs. But someone who would not be missed.

The surfer had been a mistake. It could admit that even now, landless and sick again. He’d been a local son, though not native to the land—a compromise, it had thought. He lived most of his life within walking distance of the shore. It could smell brine in him, down to his bones, and it wanted to taste. The surfer knew the town, the tides, the necessary scourge of seasonal tourism—and then, belly full, it knew all that, too.

Before the surfer, though, its first mistake: arriving alone, deep into off-season. The only stranger in town. Foolish.

But how could it know there was an off-season before it had fed? See? Tricky.

First there were just the missing person posters, the surfer’s face plastered all over town. It could have weathered that. But the dirty looks, the whispers on the sidewalk? That soured the air, turned sea salt to strychnine. When the brick came through its front window, it knew it was time to leave. So it stole a Jeep from the public beach lot, drove across the island, and walked onto the next ferry departing for the mainland. Any mainland, it didn’t really care. The departure board might as well have read elsewhere.

It had moved around plenty, but it hated crossing water. Could barely stand it, even on clear, calm days, which today was not. All the old places reared up in its consciousness at once as the ferry swayed against a current. It closed its eyes and let the old places flood the gnawing void left by the land it had just departed. The terroir of a river valley overlapped with a bitter cure for altitude sickness, the texture of handwoven sweetgrass confusing the metallic taste of—

“First time crossing?”

A young woman sat down next to it. Her dark hair hung in rough braids over fleece-clad shoulders. She smelled of sweat and pine and somewhere new. Somewhere it hadn’t tasted before.

“First and last,” it replied.

She smiled. “You should try again in the summer. The ride’s a lot smoother. Sometimes there are whales. Orcas, mostly.” She shrugged. “If that’s your kind of thing.”

It was not a good travel companion. Its usual opening question, you from around here?, didn’t work in transit. Where was here? Everywhere. Nowhere. “You… make this trip often?”

“Once a year or so. Just passing through, this time. Ferry from Victoria was cancelled so I caught a ride up here. Gotta be back in Prince George before winter semester starts.”

It glanced down to her steel toe boots, the heavy black bag between her feet, the cooler on her lap labeled SAMPLES—Keep Refrigerated.

“You’re a student?” it asked. She didn’t smell like one. Students usually smelled less lived in. Rootless. Restless, even. More like itself. They were not its favourite.

“Post-doc.” When it did not reply, she went on. “Like a researcher? But my grant ran out, so I had to take on another section of Intro Bio next semester.” She shrugged again, but didn’t smile this time. “What can I say? The life academe.”

Prince George, she’d said. It didn’t know the place. But someone it had tasted did. The words felt like winter in its ears. Ice and dirty snow and shivers through thermal layers. A nice change, after so many years of rain-damp bones down south. Or maybe it was just glad to have someplace firm to grasp onto during this time in between.

“Do you like it there? Prince George?”

“I didn’t used to. Couldn’t wait to get out when I was younger. But you know how it is. You see a bit of the world, and then a little bit more, and at a certain point the more you see the more you just miss home.”

It did know. It also knew what it felt like when there was no home to go back to. Like hunger. Hunger everywhere. Teeth eyes stomach skin fingernails bones. Screaming, wailing hunger. It was a hunger she would never have to know.

“What about you?” she asked. “You headed home, too?”

They were approaching land. It could feel it. All the old places, even Ucluelet, started to recede. The void in its middle did not. She should thank it, really. For sparing her ever having to endure this feeling. In that empty space, a plan formed.

It would disembark the ferry with the girl. Make some excuse to draw her away from the other passengers. Get her somewhere private. Really get acquainted with that sweet, cold place. Start to inhabit it. Like only a local could.

A true local. That’s what she was. One who would be missed greatly. Deliciously. And before it ever stepped foot in the place it would steal from her.

She was still looking at it. Waiting for an answer.

“Home?” it said. “Yes. For a while, I hope.”

It moved its lips into the shape called smile, which people found reassuring, even though it showed them every one of its teeth.

Editor: Kathryn Weaver

First Reader: Kathryn Weaver

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“Has Anyone Actually Had Any Success Saging Their Home?” © 2023 by Vito Castrillo

That’s what the post says, each word capitalized as if it’s the goddamn title of a novel or a screenplay, a farce, a fiction. But it’s not. It’s the Truth, capital tee, certain and real. Still—I know it won’t help, know it’ll only serve to flame up the fire inside me—an incessant need to consume. It’s a dangerous spot to be in, especially nowadays, with all of us on the brink.

I pause, letting my finger hover, scared, but curious. It’s too tempting, and—a moment later—the thread pops up and I begin to read.

A woman on the Eastern Seaboard has been experiencing odd sights and sounds in her home.

I exhale, flick up, reveal more.

It started about a month ago. The Original Poster—a happily married WASP retiree—can’t be certain when, exactly, but she is certain it’s not going away.

See, OP and her husband purchased their new (might I add envious) home—a Colonial beauty on the upper banks of the Chesapeake Bay—just over a year ago now. They moved blind, never having been to their new home before, only knowing it’s on prime land, ripe with forageables, replenishing game, and a crystalline creek.

Figured, OP writes, it’d be a good place to ride out the “ass-end of civilization,” as my son so politely puts it. Haha.

The house is situated on a sprawling plot of twenty acres. The plot is smack in wilderness, meaning, thick with trees, too dark at night, genuinely isolating.

OP and her husband take the master on the second floor and their son—who recently filed for divorce and can’t afford an apartment on his own—takes the entire basement. OP offers here—for clarity? for reassurance? for some strange reason I can’t quite parse—that she doesn’t know what she ever did wrong to have her thirty-six-year-old son living back at home, but she figures that, as his mom, the least she could do is not charge him rent.

“So fucking funny,” I snort. It’s awful. That mentality, that certainty we’re not in this together, that we’re not all we’ve got. Awful, sure, but expected. I sigh, read on.

It starts off small; a feeling here, a movement there, unplaceable sounds coming from empty spaces. OP’s husband thinks she’s lost it, but he isn’t there, during those quiet hours of the day when she’s alone in all that house, on all that land. Her son, though, he’s not been right for the past few weeks. OP asks him about it, asks him often, and he doesn’t admit to seeing anything, hearing anything, but—he’s scared. OP can tell. Terrified even. He’s taken to sleeping upstairs (which OP hates) or not coming home at all (which OP loves).

I sit up, intrigued. Maybe this—this slow unfolding of one family’s haunting—is it. What I’ve been looking for: a mirror, a way of scrying spots I’ve been willfully blind to. Maybe this is how I finally find the answers (and retribution) I’ve been seeking for so very long …

Now, OP isn’t too pleased at her husband’s indifference, so, naturally, she sets up a motion activated camera near a “paranormal hot-spot”: the foot of the grand stairs, facing out towards the foyer and front door. She wants to prove her husband wrong, show him, even if he can’t see.

OP checks the camera religiously. For the most part, the footage contains nothing. For the most part, it only serves to make her question herself, her sanity. But then, one awful day, OP sees something too strange to shrug off.

She offers a link and finishes:

>So, strangers on the internet, what the heck could this possibly be? A glitch? A shadow? A for real ghost? I just don’t understand what it could be. It’s too fast to be a person. The staircase goes up to the second floor and, at the time this was taken, I was locked in the master bathroom taking a shower. There was no one else home and we have no pets. Son was working and hubby was 3 hours away, golfing. All doors and windows were locked. I’m a hand-to-heart Christian, but I’m about to go get some sage. Will it work? Has anyone had any success?

I click the link and an image hosting site pops up. It’s a twelve-second gif of a chiaroscuro-lit stairwell. I turn the brightness all the way up on my phone, hunch closer, watch.

For eight whole seconds, nothing happens. I sit, antsy and annoyed, waiting, waiting.

Nine seconds in—so sudden I almost miss it—a shadow peeks around the bottom of the stairs then disappears almost as fast.

“Legit,” I say, flicking back to the original post then down to the comments.

>Holy shit @00:09 in—did you guys see that? Near the left side, down the hall, a shadow

>>fake news.

>>>no dumbass, it was a shadow person

>>>>paradolia.

>>>>>its pareidolia

>>>>>>it’s ‘it’s,’ idiot.

I cut my losses and move on.

>step one: leave the house. step two: burn the house down

>>^this. OP I wouldn’t fucc with tht shyt if I were you. Just move.

Nope. Next. Finally the jackpot.

>yea, saging—or smudging as I call it—works, but you have to put an intention behind it. you gotta *mean* it, you know? Also, don’t buy your sage from a big box store. There should be some wiccans out there who can help you out. Good luck.

I almost set my phone down, but, despite myself, I read on.

>>Sage is a native medicine, not wiccan. But that’s beside the point. What you’re dealing with seems too powerful for a simple smudging ritual. Intuitively, I get a *bad* vibe from this vid. I recommend seeing a priest and getting an exorcism done. Christianity repeals demons. I wouldn’t mess around with native rituals. It could attract something worse.

The response below has been downvoted into oblivion. I click to reveal it.

 
I blink, waking myself from the stupor endless scrolling induces, navigate to OP’s profile, click “Follow,” and look up.

It’s late. It’s dark. I can’t sleep—again.

Inside my camper, I’m huddled tight, thinking thousands of thoughts better left unsaid.

Outside, the constellations are nearly unrecognizable. Above the mountains that line the horizon, the moon hangs low, sickle thin and ominous.

The next day, there’s a shave and a haircut knock on the metal of my camper. I peek out my blackout curtain to see the well-built figure of what can only be a cowboy holding a paper bag.

I flick back the curtain and think. He’s not wearing boots or a hat or a turquoise-sterling bolo tie, but he is wearing a Big Ass Belt Buckle, and, for that, I feel like I can trust him.

I smooth my hair, straighten my clothes, sniff a pit, open the door.

The cowboy takes a step back and gives me a little two finger wave. “Hey.”

“Howdy.”

A smile passes over his face. “Sorry I didn’t come out here sooner. Been away.”

“Oh.”

He gestures with his head behind him, towards the horizon where a thin wisp of blue smoke from a dying campfire rises near a brightly lit slide-in attached to a filthy white Ford F-150. I don’t really know if it’s a Ford F-150, but all full-blooded, unnecessarily enormous American pickups are Ford F-150s to me, so.

“Guess I’m your neighbor.”

“Oh.”

“Made this to commemorate the occasion.” He holds out the paper bag and I take it tentatively. “Banana oatmeal cookies. Hope that’s okay.” I nod. He smiles, spreads his arms wide, gesturing to nothing, to everything. “Welcome to Bumfuck, Nowhere, home of the brave, land of the free.”

“Thanks.”

“When did you get here?”

“The nineteenth.”

“Ah. Yeah. Been gone since the tenth.”

“Cool.”

He clears his throat, sticks the tip of one hand into his front pocket. “So, what brought you out here?”

“Research.”

“Really?” When I don’t continue, he asks, “For what?”

“That’s classified.”

He hesitates, unsure, finally lands on, “Gotcha.”

I hold up the bag. “Thanks for the, uh, well, these.” I try to add a bit of finality in my voice, make it sound like a door shutting gently.

“’Course,” he says, then, taking the hint, adds, “I’m about a thirty-five-minute walk eastward. Ten if you use somethin’ motorized. Come say hi if you want.”

“I sold my car. I’m stuck here. It is what it is.” It’s the most I’ve said in days, weeks maybe.

For a moment, the cowboy is silent, then he nods. “Birds of a feather. Enjoy the cookies. Or don’t—I’m not much of a baker.”

I force a smile and shut the door in his face.

The cowboy doesn’t walk away immediately. Instead, he stands there, just out of sight, thinking who the fuck knows what.

Finally, he leaves and I’m alone again. Well, one person and thirty-five minutes shy of alone.

The cowboy lied. He’s a helluva baker and I spend the day gorging myself on his handiwork while rabbithole-ing into Range Fouler Debriefs: heavily redacted documents from the US Navy concerning Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. They’re full of sentences that read something like:

“Lt. Comm. █████████ unknown object ██████████████████ ██████████████████ observes ███████████████ didn’t seem possible █████████████████████. During the observation, ███████████████████████████ “never seen anything like it before”. As for being Venus, ███████████████████████████. ███████████████ the unusual nature █████████ enacted ███ defense ███.”

That night, wind blows low and easy over the desert. Outside my camper, in the dead-dark, I sit and watch the sprite-bright glow of the cowboy’s fire flicker against blackness. The faint twang of some Tracy Chapman song finds its way across the land and into me. The cowboy himself cuts a lonely figure against the light. Bug-sized—he’s standing, gazing up at the stars. His shadow—a Behemoth—smears from his feet backwards, over the land and into sprawling, sweeping night.

I swing my arms behind my head, lean back, and think.

It’s not like I haven’t tried to do anything to stop what’s going on—stay those grasping, tearing shadows—that ever-present, deepening dread—from engulfing me, engulfing my heart. I have. I am. It’s just … none of it has worked. None of it has mattered. Or made a difference. And, honestly, I’m growing increasingly concerned it never will.

Still … I search. High and low, inside and out, sober and not. Mostly on the internet. Almost always alone. There has to be an answer out there, somewhere, in all that vastness.

Right?

So.

I google how to counteract curses. I google if we all actually died in 2012. I google simulation theory and superconductor and mass coronal ejection. Gentrification and time dilation and von Neumann probes. Post-traumatic stress. Lead poisoning, generational trauma, delayed grief. Credit scores. Dimethyltryptamine. No contact. Low contact. Disassociation. Climate collapse. Collective insanity. Panspermia. Nuclear war. Antinatalism.

Five hours later, I’m outside the cowboy’s slide-in. It’s dark, it’s cold, but, somehow, I make it the entire way without panic groping its way from my gut and into my resolve.

From here, with the slide-in, the F-150 looks like a pale saddled steed sleeping. I knock, making “two bits” louder than intended. There’s a rustling, then, slowly, the door cracks. The cowboy’s shirtless, still wearing jeans and the belt buckle.

“Oh.” He opens the door fully. I can smell campfire and leather and crisp, sour apple. “Uh. Hey, what’s up?”

“Can you get me sage?”

“Sage?”

“Yeah. Dried. For smudging. There should be a place around here that sells it.” I hold out my hand and he looks down at a ragged ten then back up at me. When he says nothing, I continue, “I know. It’s late. I’m sorry.”

He smiles. “Keep your money. I’ll bring it by tomorrow or the day after.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I really appreciate it.”

He nods. “Want me to walk you back?”

I turn, look at all that deep desert darkness. “No,” I hear myself say. “It’s fine.”

He nods again, says goodnight, then steps down into dirt and closes the slide-in behind him. “Can’t sleep,” he says, shrugging at the look I throw him. “I’ll keep an eye out. Just in case.”

“Oh. Kay.” I take one step backwards, then another, then turn and scuttle away. I don’t look back until I’m nearly all the way across the expanse between us, but I feel his eyes the whole way.

When I do chance a glance, though, he’s not looking at me and I’m unsure he ever was. True, he’s still standing outside, arms crossed over his lithe chest, barefooted, but his head is craned back and he’s looking up and out into the void of space.

Then who—I think—who was watching me all that time?

I’ve taken to calling the cowboy Buck.

It’s not his real name, of course, but I don’t know if I’ll ever really know his real name or, even, if I want to. Besides, it’s not the name that matters. Not really. It’s the familiarity of it. The promise of a friendship I wasn’t expecting.

“My name’s not Buck, you know,” Buck says one day, slightly amused.

“I know. It’s a nickname. Buck. The cowboy.”

“Cowboy?” He’s smiling now, a real big one. “I’m not a fuckin’ cowboy.”

“Well, you look like one.”

He laughs, shrugs in a way that suggests he doesn’t really care, all things considered. “All right. Fine. Cowboy Buck.”

“Mister Buck, the cowboy,” I correct.

He nods. “And you are?”

“Detective Shikibu.”

“All right, Missus Shiki—”

“Detective.”

Buck blinks, takes it in stride. “All right, Detective, do you have a weapon?”

I, unfortunately, do not take this in stride and stand there, stock-still and uncertain. “Should I?”

“Out here? Hell yeah.”

“Like … a gun?”

“Gun, knife, bear spray, mace, brass knuckles.” Buck chuckles.

“They’re different?”

“What?”

“Bear spray and mace are different?”

“One’s stronger than the other. I’m sure you can figure out which.”

“Oh.” I swallow. “You have a gun?”

“One or two, yeah.” Buck shoves his hands into his pockets, looks off into the distance, smoldering.

“I’ve been thinking about getting a gun.”

“Really?” There’s a hint of disbelief. “You ever fired one before?”

“Yeah.” Buck doesn’t even try to hide his surprise. I continue: “Once. When I was nine. My grandpa let me fire his rifle at a saguaro.”

“Neat.”

“I fractured my clavicle.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Well. Think about it. For protection.”

“Protection? From what?”

When Buck doesn’t respond, I turn to look at him. He’s standing there, gazing out, his face rusted by sunset.

“From what, Buck? There’s no one around.”

Buck glances at me. “You are.”

I check the bookmarked thread the next day.

There’s a new comment, pinned by a moderator. In it, OP has posted a link to the same image hosting site as before and a link to a site I’ve never heard of. OP states she caught a sound the other night, that it happened after she walked burning sage from room to room, and—most importantly—that she’s never heard anything like it before, ever.

The top link takes me to an album curated by OP. The first image is of OP herself. She’s standing on a wraparound porch outside an ancient white house, hugging one of the columns that hold up the eaves, her face covered by an angel emoji.

The second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth images are of the house proper. I scroll through slowly; there’s the front of her house, its door a fresh blood red with a long, translucent window; there’s the back of it, nondescript, a gas grill near one end of the porch and a woven hammock at the other; there’s the surrounding forest, brightly lit by what can only be early morning sun, looking magical, fantastical, fake; there’s the staircase to the basement, carpeted and creaky (I’m sure); there’s the area OP heard the noise coming from, a well-furnished garret, something a writer might like.

It all looks normal—so normal—and, for a second, I think I’m off-track and contemplate clicking away.

The second link takes me to the site I’ve never heard of. It’s a short audio clip of the noise OP mentioned. I get up, untangle my corded headphones from my futon’s blanket, plug them into my phone, into my ears. For three seconds—nothing—then, so loud I yank out the buds—a scream.

I flick to the comments, heart throbbing hard enough to blur and blur and blur my vision.

>those sounds your hearing is a female fox. Look it up*. they make that sound when their in heat or something. *edit: itu] to it up.

>>Lifelong hunter here. Never in my life have I heard a fox make that sound.

>>>Maybe it is a cougar. I don’t know much about American wildlife, but where I live in Peru, we commonly hear sounds like that after the night falls. When I first heard it’s screamings, I grew scared. I thought it was a woman trapped by the wilderness, but my father told me a cougar was warning others off her territory. Apologies for my English my friends. I tried my best.

>>>>your English is very good

>>>>OP ^this. You’ve probably got some kind of wild cat on your hands. I dunno if Maryland has cougars or what, but it’s possible it’s escaped from somewhere. Set up some trail cams.

>Question for @spooky_momma_1960: if I’m reading your original post correctly, all this started happening when your son moved in, right? Think it has something to do with him? Maybe he’s haunted?

Beneath it—a rarity—is a reply from OP.

>>Now that I think on it, yeah, strange stuff started happening after my son moved in. What does that mean? What do I do? Should I kick him out?

There are no other responses.

I sit back and breathe.

Thing is, that didn’t sound like an animal to me. Well, it did, but not a wild one. It’s clearly a person—a woman, sure—wailing and pleading in a way that suggests something bad must’ve happened.

Or will.

Near midnight, Buck leaves. I hear the engine of his truck roar up then diminish with distance. I can’t remember where, exactly, he said he was going or for how long, only that he’ll be back—eventually.

I peek out the curtain, wait an hour. When I’m certain he’s not coming back anytime soon, I creep outside and look around.

Out here, in the middle of nowhere, I can see from horizon to horizon. There’s no one else around. I circle behind my camper—where the ground is pockmarked with minuscule, handmade mounds—and squat.

Buck’s not just gotten me a baggie of white sage, but an abalone shell bowl, and a long, muted turkey tail feather. I don’t burn the sage. I can’t. I won’t. Instead, I bury it, along with the shell, as far as I can dig into the hard, parched ground. Then, resolutely, I stick the turkey tail into the mound and think about the other things I’ve buried out here, in my graveyard of absolution: A seashell from Hawaii’s most well-known harbor. My old, broken Tamagotchi. Three cranes of the thousand my obaachan folded while locked away in a camp that no one has ever given a shit about. A printed picture of a cat I wanted to adopt but couldn’t afford. Turquoise purchased from a roadside stand just outside the Mormon Church in Monument Valley. A toy polar bear I found by books about the Arctic in the library. My grandfather’s dog tags. A miniature globe.

Hand pressed onto, into, Earth, I close my eyes and whisper, “ごめん, ごめん, ごめん, ごめん.”

A new day and I’m exhausted. I wonder if I’m a ghost. I message my friend to make sure.

>im lonely. its lonely here. and it feels weird. i feel like a ghost. am I a ghost?

What I want to write, all-caps, no punctuation is: HOLY FUCKING SHIT HOW IS THIS REALITY WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WHAT ARE WE FUCKING DOING WHY DO WE LIVE AS IF THE FUTURE DOESNT MATTER AS IF NOTHING MATTERS AM I INSANE I FEEL INSANE WE ARE ALL FUCKING INSANE I FEEL LIKE A CAGED ANIMAL I AM A CAGED ANIMAL WE ARE ALL GONNA FUCKING DIE HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT; and so on and so forth. But I don’t. I settle for lonely and weird and deep phantom-feelings.

Five minutes later he messages back.

>aw do you wanna talk?

I reply that, yes, I do.

>kay ill call in a sec.

He never does.

I spend the day cleaning, not because I have to, but because it keeps my mind and body occupied. This I have control of. This is real. This I can fall into, give my thinking mind a break, feel my body move and breathe and pump and live.

Later, I scroll.

There have been no further updates on OP’s thread, no new comments, no other posts. So, instead, I watch videos of people drawing tarot and hold onto them like lifelines. They’re bullshit, I know, but it’s nice to hear that my future holds promises of wealth and health and hope sometimes.

Later still, I sit outside my camper, waiting, watching.

Night comes on catlike, assuredly, dropping deep space over the thin glow of lightsaber red lining the horizon. Finally, the saber vanishes and darkness consumes.

For hours, nothing happens. For hours, I’m alone and a frail rising thrum that feels like hope blooms inside me. Maybe it worked—finally. Maybe it’s over.

But then—a shadow appears, slinky and skittish. At first, I rationalize—it’s just Buck’s dog, a Red Heeler named Dolly (or was it Dusty?) and he must’ve accidentally left her behind—before remembering Buck doesn’t have a dog and I’d spent the past, oh, several days imagining the bitch up because Buck looks like he’d have a Heeler named after a singer of the Motown variety.

I stand, squint as if it’d make any difference at all, think, Fuuuuck.

The shadow stops, lifts itself up on two legs, humanoid but hunched, a person pretending to be a T. rex stalking its prey, lording over the jungle.

It hunches closer.

And closer.

And closer.

I’m ready to run when a thought pops into the forefront of my mind: Maybe it’s Buck. Maybe he’s fucking with me. I mean, I did tell him about the sage. Anyone could put two and two together.

“Hello?” My voice sounds faraway, faded. “Buck?”

The shadow pauses, turns to face me, and, for the first time, I stare back—directly at it—and see.

“No,” I say.

The shadow is me, except it’s not. It’s my obaachan. My grandfather. The friends who didn’t think I was Japanese enough, American enough. The folks online I have parasocial relationships with. Authors—alive and dead—I admire. The woman standing on the corner of 17th and Arapahoe, crying so hard I almost stopped to help, almost. My coworkers asking if I was really quitting with nothing lined up, and where I was going, and why. My niece, her young face full of stoic acceptance, telling me, no cap, that we’re all just gonna keep ignoring the steady, spiraling death of the only place we can ever—will ever—call Home.

“Shit,” I whisper.

Three minutes later, I’m inside my camper peeking out.

The shadow is still there, still hunched, still creeping, getting closer and closer and closer.

“What The Freak Is This?”

The title stands out bright against the rest of the page as if it’s highlighted. I recognize OP’s username right away.

>Okay, what the flip???? My son just showed me this. I thought he was messing with me at first, you know, one of those stupid internet “challenges.” But I *know* my son, and he was the most scared I’ve ever seen him. You’d think the world is ending or something. Tell me I’m not crazy. Tell me you can see something too.

The same image hosting site is linked to the bottom of the post. I click on the link, unsure, uncertain.

It’s an eleven-second video taken in the Mariana-depths of night. The house looks regal, a greying warden keeping the wild at bay. Behind it, the moon hangs low, sickle thin, ominous.

There’s a sudden movement in the window of the gut-red front door. A shadow emerges and gets clearer and clearer and clearer as—presumably—OP’s son walks towards it.

“What the fuck?” I hiss.

It’s a face. It’s my face. I’m inside OP’s house looking out. My palms pressed to glass, my mouth open in an unheard, soundless scream. I’m pounding and pounding and pounding. And then, just like that, like magic, like life snuffed out, I’m gone.

The comments ring out in my head as if they’re spoken by a real live person standing next to me.

>Call the police, OP. Not later, but *right now*, that’s a person. Not a ghost. Not a demon. Not some humanoid entity. A real fucking person.

>>honestly, this is the scariest outcome.

>Get out now. Get your kids, call the cops, and *leave*. Now.

>You have a squatter. Contact the authorities. Now now now!!!1

>>Gross. Homeless people make me sick. I don’t feel sorry for them at all. ‘round ‘em up and stick ‘em all into camps. They’re all criminals and drug addicts anyway.

>>>I hope that sicko gets locked up for the rest of their life.

I click to reveal a downvoted comment at the bottom of the thread.

 
Beneath, seventeen child comments say things like, Wtf? And, You lost buddy? And, Lmao who gives a shit? And, cry more. And, damn dood you cray. And, How can someone you don’t even know steal from you?

Later or before—I can’t remember at this point—I realize that I’ve done—did—nothing wrong. I’ve been here this whole time. Right? How could I have possibly gotten from the Sonoran Desert all the way to the Chesapeake Bay? I have no car. It makes no sense. But, then again, in this life, nothing ever does.

The bit-bright glow of my phone’s screen is blinding, but I can’t stop consuming, can’t stop searching, can’t stop the incessant need to know, to fix, to find any shred of fucking hope there is, minuscule as it might be.

Finally, the world around me collapses, or I collapse, or we both collapse, entwined.

I’m outside, it’s night again, and cold. Around me, tiny graves scar the earth—reminders of who I was, who I wanted to be, where I came from, where I thought—stupidly fucking thought—I, no, We—capital double you, meaning all of us, together—were going.

Someone—a woman, sure—is screaming and pleading and wailing.

“Shhh,” a voice says.

I don’t look up, just shove my face into Earth as if I can burrow all the way to Her molten core and hide within the heart of it all.

“I’m here, right here.” It’s Buck.

“Why?” I ask. Buck hushes me again. But I don’t stop. Can’t. “We’re outta time, Buck. No turning back now. It’s over. Gone. Poof. Like that.” I snap or try to. I’m weak and I don’t know when the last time I ate was. “We’re so stupid.” I swallow or try to. I’m weak and I don’t know when the last time I drank water was. “I’m sorry, Buck. I’m sorry.”

And Buck asks, “For what?”

And I say, “For calling you a cowboy. For burying all that shit. For everything.”

Buck snickers, a small exhale of breath, half-amused. He leans down and whispers, ASMR-soft, “It’s not just your fault.” He’s so close I can feel the gust against my cheek, the warmth of it. “Besides, it’ll go on, regardless.”

When I open my eyes, there’s no one there.

I sit up and survey.

A third quarter moon looms overhead. I’m surrounded by desert and high wind whistling and long, reaching shadows and I’m alone.

“Our Heartstrings Howl the Moon” © 2022 by Bokhari Mohamed

When we are kids, says Stavros, we eat the heart of a wolf and become half-wolves ourselves.

We roam the streets, village to village, seventeen children: a moving city of no adults. In and through a swarm of ransacked houses—chairs burnt as firewood, dead birds by the broken windows, entire ghost towns all about the North—we find grain on the floor spilled from sacks stolen too hastily; maybe some old, mushy flatbread; once, we find hard candy in a jar. It’s a feast.

“Soldiers ahead,” Kostas whispers. The sweat on our foreheads runs cold.

We know the drill; we lower, let the bushes and the derelict walls hide us like Aerikó has taught us, like the wolves that we are.

Which soldiers are they? This or the other side? We take great care, just in case. Lone children are a provocation. Some of us lost civilian parents in this war, but most of us have not. On sight, the soldiers will know that we roam alone because our parents are up on the mountains, their beards long, their hands full of stolen weapons. Most of us are the children of guerrilla fighters: flowers of evil, buds that should never be allowed to bloom.

I’m one of them. My mother has four, so she thought it better not to join my father up on that mountain. Yet here, they won’t let her work. They hit us at school. We are children of partisans, and we have a Slavic surname. How many more sins can one accumulate at birth? I roam with the pack of children because I find food. Fresh rabbit flesh that I take back to my little sisters and brother. Maybe the time will come when the soldiers will take me too.

Till then, we know the drill; we lower, let the bushes and the derelict walls hide us.

Till then, we hunt; we prey.

Pack, because we are one. We are one mind.

We hunt; we prey.

When I am little, says Matina, I am a wolf for a while. Orphaned of everyone, I wonder if I sprouted. The kids are my pack; my family.

Wherever Aerikó tells us to go, we go. Aerikó knows all the secret places where food is hidden and where dead bodies lie, to loot matches and warm clothes from. Aerikó climbs on top of the pile of dead people, unafraid of the glassy eyes, so many glassy eyes beneath those feet. Aerikó finds the best loot between lifeless limbs, and then throws a ceremony for all who are gone. We cover them with tree branches and Aerikó says prayers in a language that sounds like what the priests say at church, but also maybe it is just made-up. No one knows if Aerikó is a boy or a girl, because everyone thinks they are just fay—Aerikó, a fairy, a creature of the wind.

I am very little, one of the youngest of the pack. Everything is a playground. My favorite toy is a doll with the skull of a dead pigeon as head. The rest of the bones, I keep as treasure in my pocket. Other children covet them: they are thin and delicate and washed by the sun. I trade them for the short but dangerous joy of improvised pyrotechnics made from bomb shells. Whenever we find one, we always check if there is still some way to have fun with it. The noise sends us giggling in every direction.

One day we find needle and thread and lots of empty flour sacks. Some older girls know how to sew and make us skirts and a little cape for me. Aerikó has an idea. They make a cowl with a long snout and two ears.

“Wolf heads,” they say. And, “We must be ready when they come.”

“Who will come?” we ask.

“Why, the soldiers,” someone says. “They take the children,” someone says.

Aerikó looks at me and smiles. Aerikó isn’t getting ready for the soldiers. Aerikó has something else in mind.

One day we do come across them. “Soldiers ahead!” Kostas whispers. I never learn to fear anything, except when soldiers are approaching. It does not matter which side they’re on; they’re always on the side of holding guns. You never know what they’ll do. You never know if you’ll end up in some part of a pile of dead bodies, others looting from you, stealing your beautiful wolf cowl, your bird bones, your wolf heart.

When they get near, I see them: uniforms misshapen, sheep fur on top to keep some of the cold away. Wild, bushy beards. Some ladies with long braids, and long guns. Partisans, someone whispers beside me, as if they know what this means. I’m not sure I do.

“Who goes there?”

With guns pointed toward us, most of us come out of our hiding places. The guns lower.

“Kids, are you all alone?”

Aerikó steps closer, still wearing the cowl, speaking like equal to equal to the bushy-beard man. Aerikó isn’t getting ready for the soldiers. Aerikó thinks very little of soldiers, of this side or the other. Of any side.

“We are alone, yes. We are handling ourselves well, thank you.”

The bushy-beard man laughs. “Seems like you do. Anyone of you know the lay of the land well?”

A few raise hands, one of them: Kostas. The bushy-beard man tells him to step closer.

“Can you guide us through the mountains ahead? We will keep you warm, fed, and safe. You can have a gun if you want.”

Kostas hesitates.

Another kid steps in. “I’ll do it. I used to herd sheep all over this mountain range.”

The bushy-beard man grimaces a little, underneath all that hair. “You’re a bit too young, kid. Think you can handle it?”

“I’m twelve. My parents are freedom fighters.”

“What are their names?”

The kid says their names.

The bushy-beard man hesitates, then smiles. “I know them. Come with us. You might find them along the way.”

We part with few tears. Aerikó never insists. If someone wants to go, they can go. But Aerikó makes sure to remind them: We will always be pack. You will always be wolf.

“Kids, be careful,” a lady with a long, dark braid says. “The fascists will come and take you. They put kids in big houses. You have to say you love the queen or they will kick you out on the streets.”

We stare at each other; some laugh. It sounds silly. Silly because it sounds just like the school some of us already have been to, and we didn’t really like it. Silly because they just took one of us, right in front of our eyes, and they are soldiers too, just of a different side. And silly because life on the streets does not scare us; it just sounds a little less interesting than the one we have here—a life in the open wild.

“We take care of ourselves, thank you,” Aerikó insists, not ever trusting anyone except the children, the woods, and the heart of all the wolves.

The cowl keeps me warm in the cold, cold winter. I remember falling asleep on top of the other children, limb entwined with limb, a pack.

In the winter, says Stavros, they find us. 1949, maybe. The year when the heaps of dead bodies are higher than those the Nazis used to leave behind them.

Around Christmas four of us are grabbed by the royalist soldiers and sent to schools. I don’t think the children resist; the cold in the winter woods can pierce bones. The rest of us hide deeper in the forest, but I am a wolf of two packs and promised to go back to my mother in the winter.

“It’s okay Stavro, go see her,” Aerikó says. “But don’t forget your pack. You will always be wolf.”

“I’ll come find you,” I say, and return to my village, bring my mother foraged winter greens, wild berries, and a skinned rabbit. I shed my wolf’s pelt and become human again for a while.

When I go back, the woods are silent. Trees stand tall like tombs; snow has covered the mouths of the earth and they do not speak a word. I roam for days but can’t find any bodies, warm or cold. I look for signs—which way the soldiers take them, how many days ago. But the trees never betray a single secret: the snow has covered all tracks. In the middle of the woods, I scream.

I say, I should have taken the partisan soldiers’ offer. All of us should have gone with them. We would fight, yes, but we would be free, wolves among wolves. I am alone, orphaned of pack. My heart, a heart of wolf now and forever, is throbbing and aching.

And it so does when a night finds me on a cart travelling north, the breaths of unknown children warming the air around me. Mariya, a teacher from a nearby village and a partisan’s daughter, is taking care of us all until we reach Bulgaria. Mariya picks the lice from the younger children’s heads and gives them hugs when they start crying because their stomachs growl hungrily and there’s nothing to eat but roots. Something stings in my stomach too as I watch them. Mariya is near my age and will never do that for me. I take the role of an older brother too; I answer the questions of the younger ones, even though I don’t always know the answers.

“Where are we going?”

“Bulgaria.”

“My sister isn’t here. Will she join us later?”

“Perhaps. My sisters stayed with my mother for now. But mother told me she might send them north too.”

“What are we doing in Bulgaria?”

“We’re going to school. We will have a new family there, sisters and brothers in the same school.”

“Will you be my brother then?”

“I will.”

It’s dawn when we reach Karlovo. There are adults there, nurses and teachers with warm smiles. They are comrades, they say, they’re here to help. For the first time in days, I have clean clothes and a full belly. Then they take us to different schools in groups, making sure siblings stay together. My sisters and brother are not here, but I make sure to tell them. The nurse’s smile is a tense one.

“Will you make sure my siblings join me?”

“Lad,” the nurse says, “we do not know. They take the kids to different countries: Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia. There are many people’s democracies. Your mother will try to send them here with you, yes, but they might end up in East Germany for all I know. They will have a warm home and family there too, so try not to worry. It’s best for you kids to not be around the war, nor the queen’s schools. Our fighting comrades know that. You’re safe here.”

I return to the mess hall and sit down to eat a simple meal of beans and potatoes. The children next to me devour it; I only seem to ungratefully push food around in my plate. The little boy from the cart tugs at my sleeve.

“Do you know when my sister is coming?”

“She is coming soon.”

The boy smiles and goes off to play. I keep pushing the food around in my plate, knowing I might never see my family again.

At nights, I close my eyes and recall my mother’s words.

Hide, Stavro, and take your sisters with you. I will keep your little brother with me. He is too young. Don’t go after the orphans. They already took them to the queen’s schools. They won’t like you there, Stavro. It will be worse than the village. If they take you, I will never see you again, do you understand? But if you go to Bulgaria you’ll go to school, university even. Here it’s only death and prison. Don’t fight the war. I want you alive, okay? We agreed I would stay behind to take care of you. Otherwise, I, too, would go up that mountain to fight. Do you think it cowardly? Think all you want. I want you alive.

Someone tells me my mother does go up on the mountain, after sending my little sisters and brother away. She wants us alive but doesn’t care enough for keeping herself alive for us.

No one sees her again.

At nights, I close my eyes, and listen to a giant wolf heart beating.

In the winter, says Matina, they take us to school.

In the summer, I’m on a boat.

In the winter, I’m dressed in school uniform, wool skirt scratchy against my skin but the cotton shirt pleasant, like a hug. I sit with the other girls, our hands busy with wax tablets where we scribble letters. Then we pick up needle and thread and make a giant blue flag with a white cross, and an even bigger banner saying Welcome, our Mother, Queen Frederica. I sew little flowers on the sides because I love the colors of the threads. The teachers are delighted.

In the summer, I wear a white and pink pair of new shoes with shiny red ribbons, and a matching ribbon on my head. The teacher who dresses me quickly wipes a tear from her eye. “A doll,” she says. I touch the ribbons: they are soft, shiny, red, beautiful, cruel. Taste salty, like seawater, like blood.

In the winter, the Queen sees me. She is wearing a beautiful blue dress with little white flowers; she is holding a small shiny black handbag and is wearing small shiny black shoes with little heels. She sees me in the rows of little girls and stops and lowers herself, my eyes against hers—her eyes are the eyes of a lone hunter. Not a wolf. A fox, a snake, a tiger.

“What a beautiful little one,” she says. “Thank God, we saved her from the communists.”

She puts my hand in hers: all I can feel is the scratchiness of her glove and, underneath, skin cold like frost.

In the summer, I’m on a boat, with several other children the Queen liked. We play marbles and stones and other games I didn’t know existed. When I was a wolf, our games were bones and sinew, moss and dust. I look at the sea and it reminds me of the woods: big, empty, lonely, full.

In the winter and in the summer, I sleep and dream of wolves.

In the summer, says Aerikó, I am a prisoner. In the winter, I will escape.

They put me in clothes ironed till the fibers stand straight and obedient. They call me by a name I have forgotten. They tell me I ought to be serious and quiet and pleasant. I am not allowed to run. I am not allowed to scowl. They take us so they can make us.

Quiet I can do, but I can’t do pleasant. I sit and scowl and pretend. My wolf eyes tell me where to look. I watch the others: in identical little dresses, passing needle through cloth with delicate fingers. I long for the smell of blood and soil, for the feeling of mud beneath my feet. But it is not difficult: I mimic them, passing needle through cloth again and again and not saying much. I play the part of who they want me to be. Behind the bushes, I hunt; I prey.

“This feral little thing,” a nurse says. They are looking at me, careful not to point. My wolf ears hear everything they say.

“Found in a battlefield,” she says. “Searching corpses with nothing more than a solemn expression. Even kids have turned into little beasts by this war.”

“Looking alright now,” says the other nurse. “A little food and clean clothes and they’re good again.”

“An ugly one though,” says the first nurse. “And who will adopt the ugly ones?”

The other nurse shrugs.

Needle in, needle out. I hunt; I prey.

My wolf eyes tell me where to look. They show me where the doors are, who goes in and out. They show me how the light is reflected on little rows of keys hanging from belts. I watch everything and speak nothing. When they address me, I smile in my clean clothes and through my full belly. They think I’m good now.

In the winter, I will make my great escape. I will open doors and walk into the city roads and the dust will stick between my hair. I will run North, over river and mountain and seek the darkness of the woods. I will hunt again in the twilight.

But we will be too far apart, my siblings all lost.

I will be lost. No one will care to find me.

I might die or I might live. No one will know of my fate.

In the winter, I shall travel backwards. To the moment we became wolves.

The needle pricks my finger and I put it in my mouth, savoring delicious blood like the little beast that I am.

I close my eyes and go back to the woods. My skin grows thick hair to drive the cold away. My pack’s breaths are keeping me warm.

When I go back, says Stavros, it’s because I can never forget the feeling of claws sinking in snow, of teeth sinking into warm flesh.

They tell me I can work, that my skills as a mechanic are valuable. I take my family with me. I take my son with me so I can show him where he’s really from. To do the same journey with a little one beside me, backwards.

I uproot everything I’ve built in my new home just so I can go back to the woods. The woods are still there, ancient.

My feet take me to my village first, to my home. It’s only a couple of walls now, with no roof. My little son squeezes my hand, a finger in his mouth, eyes wide and staring. Do you need a roof to make a home? I guess not. The woods can be your home, the open sky your roof.

“Where are your sisters, pa?”

“They live in East Germany. I haven’t seen them since I was a boy myself.”

“Don’t you miss them?”

“I do.”

“Then why don’t you visit them?”

I smile. I might do. Those are the siblings whose location I know. Those are the siblings I lost, but perhaps can find again.

Our feet take us out of the village, to the path that has changed so much and that has stayed the same. Bushes and trees, forever renewed, are perennial: the true custodians of this world. We go deeper and deeper, shadows lengthening around us as the trees grow thicker. There was a time when every turn held a horror, every thicket the stench of a dead man. Now the air is clear of flies; my son walks on peaceful ground.

There is still something in the woods. The familiar smell of wet fur, the delicious smell of fear that prey carries. I watch my son, how he soaks the woods in him in delight, how his eyes devour their cruel beauty. For a moment, his pupils dilate, just like pupils do before one pounces at one’s prey. For a moment, my son is a wild beast. The woods will do that to you, even for a moment.

When I go back, it’s because every full moon night I can hear wolves howling.

When I am young, says Emma, I dream I am a wolf. We are pack, looting from the dead, making fireworks out of empty bomb shells. We speak a language I now don’t remember. I have a little cowl with wolf ears and people call me Matina.

When the dream ends, I’m on a boat. On the other side of the ocean, my parents find me for the first time: Robert and Cynthia. They take me gently in their arms, me in my white and pink dress—only the semblance of a girl because my skin underneath is still thick wolf-skin. They scrub me with soap and water, as if to scrub away every last speck of dust I carried across the ocean. Cynthia with her lovely blue eyes, just like mine, just like any mother’s and daughter’s eyes ought to look. She sews me many dresses in quilting cottons and cheerful poplins. Our house is big with grass around it, has many rooms, and I have my very own room with a bed and a carpet and shiny wallpaper with little roses on it. Soon, I forget. I shed my coat; my canine teeth drop. From wolf, I am child again. Straw-colored curls and white skin: my ticket to America. Handpicked by the Queen, they say.

When I go back, I have no relatives to seek, no village to look for. I only have a memory of woods, and of a school made of concrete.

I roam the forest, listen to its quiet breathing. The trees are peaceful; you’d never guess they grew on soil that drank the blood of brother killed by brother. I touch the roots, the dirt. I bring it to my mouth and recognize it: salty and ferrous, it tastes of blood.

We too, grew on this soil. We have the blood of brother killing brother. My blood is burning and yearning for my siblings, for my pack.

I am rootless, my origin obscure. The woods were my mother. I trace back our steps; my vision gets sharper, my hearing keener. A giant hunger rises in me. With every step back, I sink deeper into the memory of wolf.

When my heart beats here, my siblings’ hearts beat in the same tempo over there.

We’ll share a heart until the end. We are one mind.

I close my eyes and I am back in the woods again.

When I meet them, says Aerikó, the wolves speak to me. They say, these are your brothers, this is your pack. The wolves think I’m stronger, think I can lead them. But they lead me.

Deep in the woods, we find sanctuary. Wild hair, nail crescents lined with dirt, mouths sated with raw rabbit flesh. They tell me to wait, for they will come. They will come and take us. So we wait. We hunt; we prey.

In the winter, they find us. The wolves come; their pelts sprinkled with snow. They gift us with the dead body of one of their brothers. I skin it myself and wear the pelt. We all eat that night. Matina and Stavros—I ask them to join me away from the rest.

“You two are my family. We all eat from the wolf’s body. We become pack.”

I offer them the wolf-brother’s most precious part: we eat the heart, fingertips painted red. We are whole.

At nights, no matter how far apart we are, we look at the moon and our heartstrings shake.

We are ready when they come.

We are one mind. We hunt; we prey.

We fall asleep and return home.