Zooscape

by Karter Mycroft

“The census never stops, not when the finless move around as they do.”

The finless must go down. Those are the words. The Agent mutters them to herself as she wades through the murk, reaches the door, knocks and waits. She repeats them, aloud this time, when the rock slides open. A young one, shimmerwhite with brilliant pink wings.

“Indeed they must,” he says, nodding at her badge. “You’re with the census?”

“I am. How many have you got?”

He stands up straighter, backs away from the threshold. “I live alone. You’re free to have a look around. Anything you need.”

She glances past his shoulder into the mudcave. It is small, well-adorned with shell and bone, the home of a young professional. And a true believer, by the look in his eyes. The type who’d love nothing more than to contribute to ridding the world of deviants and blasphemers. She nods. “No, that won’t be necessary. Enjoy your afternoon.”

Back through the mud to the next residence. Her twentieth today. The census never stops, not when the finless move around as they do. The next home is rocky and crusted with mussels. She slaps the door until it rolls aside to a nervous greeting. An old puckerscale with sad eyes and a tremor.

“The finless must go down.”

“Whyyesofcourse.”

“How many have you got, uncle?”

His answer is all shivers. He glances down. “Only me.”

She lengthens her fingers, stretching her webs. “Would you mind showing me inside?”

Panic oozes from his nod. She glides in, scans the foyer, takes a deep breath. She can smell others already. She follows the stench to a crevice of hushed voices, concealed behind a leafy curtain. Three of them. Adolescents. Two with ruby red neckwings, healthy and breathing. Both clutching the third, a girl with pallid skin whose neck is all stumps. All of them frightened.

Everyone protests at once. “It isn’t how it looks.” “Please, have a heart.” “You can’t take her, you monster.” “We don’t know her, she just showed up here.”

Only the girl is quiet.

“What’s your name?”

Silence.

“Please don’t make this difficult. ”

Reluctant glances, a twitch, and then—”Dry.”

“What’s your real name, Dry?”

“I only have one name.”

The Agent pulls Dry into the hall. The nubs on either side of her neck are still wrapped, swollen red around tight bindings that would have cut off circulation to the precious appendages. Freshly sloughed, by the looks of them. She would start to change before long.

The old man stands between them and the entrance. “Please,” he starts to say. “Don’t take her. She’s only done what she thinks is right.”

The Agent fingers the spear at her waist. She could arrest him as well, for lying and abetting and harboring. She is practically required to. She brushes past him into the murk.

* * *

It’s slow going. With her arms cuffed, Dry can only manage by squelching along the clayfloor. It’s a bad weatherday, foggy with silt. Forecast says no clearness until the weekend. They catch no eyes as they amble toward the Department. There it is, now, a hazy outline of sunken rotwood, the ruins of a great tree, pocked with tunnels. A security duo float outside the main swimthru, armed and watchful. The Agent pauses at the gurgle of Dry’s voice.

“I know what you’re gonna do to me.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. We all know. You’ll shut me in a room in the dark until I beg to get out. Until I am nearly done changing and can hardly breathe. Then you’ll wait longer. You’ll ask me questions. Who recruited me, where the others are. You’ll hurt me when I answer but hurt me worse when I refuse. Then you will weight my legs and send me over the dropoff, as far down as down goes, where I will drown alone in the dark.”

The Agent glances at the Department and then at Dry.

“That is not what I will do.”

Dry stomps the clay. “Why lie? We know the law and we know we break it. We accept the risks and the consequences. Alone we may be hunted, broken, made examples of, but together as one we are solid stone. We’re not afraid of you. We keep breathing.”

“You are not afraid? ”

She can tell by the way Dry’s eyes dart around, by the way her tail shivers, that she is in fact deeply afraid, her fear seeping through layers of righteous anger.

“I don’t want to die, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I would imagine not.”

“But if we don’t change we will die anyway. All of us. The lake is shrinking, the water goes to the sun and wisps away. Everyone can see it, yet no one speaks of it. There is no future for us down here, only doom.”

“And you think you’ll be safer above?”

Dry’s response chokes in her throat.

The Agent takes a deep gulp. To reject the mud, forsake the congress of one’s own birth, to mutilate oneself into a metamorphosis that should be lost to time, all for a fleeting chance of a better life above. To die for a suicidal cause. Stupidity and courage, those longtime lovers.

“Come with me.”

She grabs Dry by the cuffs and starts toward the Department. Past security scowls, into the swimthru, round the sludgepainted halls to the stocks. She can feel Dry’s heart race faster the deeper they go. They reach an open cell at the end of the hall, its walls coated in menacing black slime, barely wide enough to imagine Dry fitting into. The Agent peels back the rock opening.

“In here.”

Dry panics. All the composure and indignation vanishes when she sees the darkness and she tries to suck free, strains to wrest the cuffs from the Agent’s grasp. The Agent holds her steady, wrangles her into the crevice, ignores her gasps of protest and the sobs that leak out after. She slides the seal back into place.

With an inch left to go, she bubbles out a whisper. “Listen close. In the farback under your toes, a stone will come loose. If it doesn’t, pull harder. Beyond you will find a very slim tunnel, so slim only the finless can use it. Scrape all the way through and you will arrive many pools to the east. From there, seek above.”

Dry begins to balk, to question, to disbelieve. They always do. But there’s no time to explain. The Agent rolls the stone shut. One whisper must suffice. “Keep breathing, sister.”

She has a good feeling about this one, though she can never be sure if anyone makes it. Possibly no one has. But it’s an effort worth making, if anything is. She may not be brave enough to change herself, but the finless are right: the lake is leaving them. The Department’s suicidal adherence to tradition will change nothing. They must learn to live above or die forever.

She returns out of the prison labyrinth to the main swimthru. Back out to the census. She hopes she can find the next one before her colleagues do. She isn’t sure she can bear to watch another sinking.

The security duo wait at the exit. A chill in the mud. They are facing her, fins wide with agitation.

“Everything all right?”

A splash behind her. More guards. Spears at her neck. Cuffs at her wrists. A blow to her head. Darkness.

* * *

She thrashes in the dark, helpless in her bonds. A voice asks for names.

“I acted alone.”

A searing, serrated pain at her neck.

“Names.”

“No!”

“You accept full responsibility for every escape since you became a census-taker?”

“Yes!”

“You worked with no one?”

“No one!”

“I see. What were their names?”

More pain, so much she can no longer speak. The stench of blood fills the muck.

“Please. Please don’t.”

“What? You wanted to help them so badly. Why not be one of them?”

Pain. So much pain, colors jolt before her eyes. So much pain she calls out to her dead mother for help. So much pain she falls asleep.

* * *

When she wakes, she is standing on a ledge. At her sides, mud turns to smoke, mixing and dissipating into something blue and infinite and very, very cold. She looks down and sees two heavy rocks strapped tight to her feet, and below them, a steep drop into abyss. She looks behind her and sees the entire congress gathered—her colleagues, the guards, the young man and the old uncle with his grandkids. All watching her. Some laughing, some scowling, some with furtive glances of what might be solidarity or nothing at all. The pain on her neck is unbearable; the sensation of trying to move limbs that no longer exist is worse.

It is difficult to breathe. She twitches her neck in a panic, but only a trifle of breath tickles her insides. Her change is already beginning. She feels a strange, desperate need to get out of the mud, to go upward and outward, to suck air into her mouth and taste the outside and all the life it may bring. She can’t move.

She wonders if Dry made it. Supposedly a community of finless has established inland from the lake. If Dry found them, she might be all right. A new world of wind and sun, a world of untold dangers, but a world fighting for hope instead of against it. Hadn’t that been why she helped them escape? For hope? Was there even such a thing? Yes, yes, of course, she tells herself. Always, even in the darkest days of a vanishing world, there is hope.

But none for her.

Something presses on her back.

The voice from the dungeon calls to the crowd: “The finless must go down!”

 

* * *

About the Author

Karter Mycroft is a writer, editor, musician, and fisheries scientist who lives in Los Angeles. They write on the beach by asking the dead fish for ideas. Their short fiction has appeared in The Colored Lens, Coppice & Brake, Lovecraftiana, and elsewhere. You can find them on Twitter @kartermycroft.

by N. R. M. Roshak

“But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.”

—Shakespeare, As You Like It (V.ii.20)

 

“Were people really eating octopus to express their resentment at the hexies’ presence?”

I should have known that something was wrong when I found Teese in the back yard, staring at the sky. It was sunset and the horizon was a particular shade of pale teal. At first I thought Teese was just admiring the sunset, but then I realized he was trembling all over. His eyes were wide, and irregular patterns swept over his skin, his chromatophores opening and closing at random, static snow sprinkling his skin.

I touched his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Above us, the sky darkened toward night. Teese shook himself like a dog, blinked, looked at me. “That sunset,” he said. “We don’t—these colors—This doesn’t happen on our world.”

“You don’t have sunsets?” As I understood it, sunsets should happen anywhere there was dust in the air.

“No, no,” he said. “Of course we have sunsets, Ami, but they tend more toward the red side of the spectrum. Your planet is so rich in blues. These colors, they’re not very common on my world. I suppose I was surprised by my reaction to seeing that particular shade of blue spread across the sky.” He smiled down at me. “Anyway, it’s all changed now. Fleeting as a sunset, isn’t that the expression?”

Teese was back to his usual smooth articulateness, so I wrote it off as his being momentarily overcome by the Earth’s breathtaking beauty. In retrospect, that was pretty arrogant and anthropocentric of me. But at the time, I thought: who wouldn’t be struck dumb by my amazing planet?

* * *

That night, Teese stared deep into my eyes as we made love, and trembled, just a bit. Static flared across his cheeks as he came. His heart-shaped pupils flared wide, drinking me in, and he murmured “I could stare into your eyes forever.”

So of course I thought we were all right. We were all right. However unlikely, however improbable, what could it be but love?

* * *

The next warning sign came weeks later, when Teese painted the linen closet blue. He moved out all the towels and sheets, took out the shelves, painted the walls (and the ceiling, and the back of the door) greenish-blue, and perched on a stool in the middle of the closet. He called it his “meditation closet,” jokingly, and said that he went in there to relax. At first it was for minutes at a time, then slowly his “meditation time” grew to hours.

“The things your people do with color are amazing to me,” he said. “So many colors, and you put them everywhere.”

“What, you don’t have paint where you come from?”

“Of course we have paint,” he said. “But we use it for art. No one would think to put gallons of blue and green in cans for people to take home and spread all over their house. It would cost—” He paused. Interstellar currency conversions were impossible, finding correspondences of value almost as difficult. “Many years of my salary, I think, to paint just this closet.”

“Well, that makes sense. If you went to an art supply store here and got your paint in little tiny tubes, it would cost a lot more here too.”

“And the colors,” he continued. “I think I have told you that most of our colors are in reds and browns and oranges. Even in paintings, we don’t have so many shades of blue.”

“That’s weird,” I said. “I mean, you can see just as many shades of blue, right?”

“Yes, but—” He considered. “Ami, I think that you have so much blue that you don’t see how it surrounds you. You can make a painting with a blue sky and blue water, and use one hundred different shades of blue, and everyone sees it as normal and right. But think of another color that you don’t have in such abundance, like purple. Imagine a painting with nothing but one hundred shades of purple.”

His words triggered a memory. “I actually had a painting like that once,” I admitted. “I found it in the trash in college. It had a purple sky and a purple-black sea and two really badly painted white seagulls. It was so awful that I had to keep it.”

Amusement fluttered across his skin. “Tacky, right? Well, that’s what most of my people would think of your sea and sky paintings. But I love it. I love to be surrounded by blue.”

“Meditating?”

He waved an arm noncommittally. “Ommmm,” he said, brown fractals of laughter flashing across his skin.

* * *

Then Teese bought one of those fancy multi-color LED lightbulbs, tuned it to the exact shade of the walls, and didn’t come out for a day.

He was in the closet when I left for work, and still there when I got home. I tapped on the door—no answer. I told myself to give him his space and went about fixing dinner, even though it was his turn to cook. Teese’s diet was similar enough to ours that we could cook for each other, though there was a long list of vegetables he was better off without. I knocked on the door when dinner was ready and called his name. No answer. I ate without him.

Later, I pressed my ear against the door but heard only my own heartbeat against the wood. It was dark by then, and blue light seeped out from under the door.

Finally, I eased the door open a crack and peeked in. Teese was sprawled on the floor next to the upturned stool, eyes vacant, skin utterly blank.

I yelled his name, shook him, even slapped his face. My fingers shook as I pressed them urgently into his skin. I remembered that Teese had two hearts but I couldn’t remember where they were, or how to find his pulse. There was no one I could call, no doctor or ambulance who could help him. I was alone with Teese and Teese was gone, sick, maybe dying.

I dragged him out into the hallway, slowly. Teese doesn’t have any bones to speak of. He’s all head and muscled limbs. Normally he holds himself upright on four powerfully muscled limbs and uses the other two like arms. Passed out, he was a tangle of heavy rubber hoses filled with wet cement. I had to pull the blanket off the bed, roll him onto the blanket and drag the blanket out of the closet with Teese on it.

I stood over him in the hallway and felt terribly alone.

* * *

I had met Teese at a party I hadn’t planned to go to. At the last minute I’d let myself be swayed by the rumours that one of them would be there. A so-called hexie. Their ship had landed months ago, and while the VIPs on board were busy hammering out intergalactic trade deals, most of the ship’s crew were just sailors who wanted to get off the ship, get drunk, and maybe get to know some locals. They’d been showing up by ones and twos at bars and clubs and parties all over town. I’d seen the hexies in the news, heard about their appearances at bars and parties, but never met one in person. And like everyone else, I was curious.

I saw him the moment I stepped in the door: big head held up above the crowd, two long and flexible arms gesticulating, one of them holding a drink. His eyes swept the room, scanned over me, and snapped back. From there, it was like a romance novel, of the kind I’d always found tedious and unrealistic. Our gazes locked. He stopped mid-sentence, handed his drink to someone without looking, and started pushing his way across the room to me. My heart hammered in my chest. Of course I couldn’t take my eyes off him, but why was he staring at me?

He stopped in front of me and took my hand, coiling his powerful armtip around my fingers as gently as I’d cradle a moth.

“I am Teese,” he said. “Forgive me for being so direct, but I have never seen eyes as beautiful as yours before.”

Hackneyed words, but they sounded fresh coming from his lipless mouth.

“I’m Ami,” I stammered. “And I’ve never seen anything like you either.”

Orange and brown checks rippled across his face. Later I would learn that this meant interest, arousal, excitement. I let him lead me to a quiet corner.

We talked. He told me about his ship, the long watches tending to the cryo boxes, the vastness of interstellar space. I told him about my job at the Citgo station and my apartment and the time my cat died.

“When I look at you,” he said, “I feel things that I’ve never felt before.”

What else could I do? I took him home, and he stayed.

* * *

Now I was alone in my hallway with Teese unconscious. I stepped around his arms and closed the linen closet, and sat down on the ground next to him. Soft blue light leaked out from under the closet door. I turned on the hall light and turned off the closet light, for lack of anything more constructive to do. Then I sat down on the ground next to him and wondered what to do. Smelling salts probably wouldn’t help an alien from another planet, had I even had any to hand.

I could sprinkle water on his face, but I had no idea if that would work on him. I could pinch him.

I could sit next to him and stare at his open, blank eyes and wish I’d thought to ask him for a way to contact his ship.

I could search his things for a way to contact his ship, but I didn’t want to go there if I could avoid it. Teese had been living with me for two months, which is both a long time and not long at all, and as far as I could tell he’d never gone through my closet or papers while I was at work. I owed him the same respect.

Teese stirred sluggishly on the floor next to me.

I leaned over him. “Teese?”

His eyes focused on me. “Ohhh, Ami,” he said, half moaning. And then his skin was suddenly, completely covered in violently red spots. Across his face, all up and down his arms, from the dome of his head to his armtips, he was covered with hexagonal measles that shifted and spun.

Teese’s emotions showed on his skin, but I had never seen this one before, never seen such a violent and complete display.

I laid a gentle finger on his cheek, trying to pin one of the spots under my fingertip. “Teese,” I said. “I don’t know this one.”

Teese looked at me for a long moment before replying.

“Shame, Ami,” he said. “It is shame.”

Teese’s people feel emotions the moment they see them. If I’d been one of Teese’s people, I would’ve been flooded with shame the moment I saw the red blotches on his skin, and a paler echo would have bloomed on my own skin. It’s beyond empathy: it’s instant and direct and irresistible. If I’d been a hexie, I would have said: “Why are we ashamed?”, while my skin and emotions thrummed in synchrony with his.

But I wasn’t, and so I could only ask, “What are you ashamed of?”

Teese sighed, a sound I had taught him to make. “I spent too long meditating,” he finally said.

“Did you forget to eat?”

“Hm. I suppose I did, but I don’t think that’s why—You shouldn’t have had to drag me out of the closet.”

“I think we’re doing something a little beyond gay here,” I quipped, then wished I hadn’t as gray puzzlement dusted itself over the shame blotching his skin. “Never mind, bad joke. But if it wasn’t hunger, why did you pass out, or whatever that was? Teese, are you sick?”

“No, no,” he said. “You don’t need to worry, Ami. I’m fine.” He sighed again. “It was—I was—I just don’t know how to explain it.”

“Try,” I urged him. Partly because I was worried and scared, and partly because, as we talked, the shame was slowly fading from his skin, supplanted by the dark-orange fractal trees Teese sported whenever he was thinking hard.

“Well,” he said. “I was… I was looking at the walls and I got… too much blue.”

“Too much blue,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I thought, I am meditating, I am going deeper and deeper into the blue. And then it was too much.”

That was unusually unarticulate, for Teese. He was usually better at expressing himself in English than I was. His skin was clearing and dulling to a muddy grey.

This one I knew well. “You look tired,” I said. “Let’s get you into bed.”

“Yes,” he said. He started to haul himself down the hallway toward the bedroom, not even bothering to stand.

I covered my mouth with my hand. Teese usually stood himself up on four of his six limbs. The velvety undersides of his limbs gripped together along most of their length and the tips acted like feet, scooting him along the floor. It made him about as tall as a person, a head above the average man, and left him two limbs free to act like arms. Of course I’d known that the posture was for our benefit, that Teese’s people didn’t spend all their time standing like that on their own ship. But he’d always kept it up, even in our apartment, with just the two of us. And now—now he was just hauling himself along the floor, one tired limb at a time.

“I’ll get you some water,” I said, and fled to the kitchen.

When I came into the bedroom, Teese was in bed, head on the pillow, eyes almost closed. I fumbled for a limb-tip, pressed the damp glass into it.

“Thank you,” he said. “Ami, will you stay?”

His skin was still gray with exhaustion. “Yes,” I said. “Teese—”

He opened one eye fully, fixed its heart-shaped pupil on me. “Ami?”

I’d been about to scold him, to tell him I had had no one to call, no way of knowing whether he was near death and no one to ask. But even in the dimness of our bedroom, I could see the gray mottling his skin. If I’d been a hexie, I would have felt exhausted just looking at him.

“I was worried,” I said instead. I slid into bed with him and curled up against his arm. I think he was asleep before I’d pulled the covers up. But I lay awake a long time, watching the light from car headlights slide across the ceiling, mottling it bright and dark.

* * *

Teese was my first live-in boyfriend, although that feels strange and wrong to say. Teese was a friend, more than a friend, but there was no way to think of him as a boy or a man. I can’t say that he was my first love. He didn’t move in because I loved him. He moved in because the sex was great and because he couldn’t rent an apartment to save his life. The morning after our first night together, I learned that Teese had been couch-surfing his way up the Atlantic seaboard. Then I went to work at the gas station, and when I came home we had fantastic sex, then ordered pizza and ate it together messily on the couch and fell into bed, and the next day was pretty much the same, and slowly it dawned on both of us that Teese was staying.

* * *

I couldn’t really afford the rent on the apartment by myself. I needed a roommate, someone willing to pay me to sleep in the living room of my one-bedroom hole-in-the-wall slice of crumbling neo-Gothic shitpile. Instead I got Teese.

“I can pay you,” Teese said. “I receive high pay and long leaves in exchange for my long watches. The trouble is that local landlords do not want a hexie and I have not found a hotel who will take my currency.”

From somewhere he produced a thin, shiny rectangle. “Here,” he said. “This is rhodium. I haven’t checked the price for a while, but it should be worth at least a month’s rent.”

I took it gingerly. It was about the size of half a Thin Mint, maybe a little thicker. There were odd markings on it, presumably spelling out “YES THIS IS REALLY RHODIUM” in Teese’s language.

“Teese,” I said, “I have no idea what to do with this.”

“You could sell it?”

“Who could I sell it to? Do you seriously think I can go to Downtown Crossing with this and find some guy in Jewelers Exchange who’ll say ‘Oh yeah, this is alien rhodium, we get this all the time’ and give me a stack of cash?”

Teese waved a tentacle that was freckling olive-green with exasperation. “Well, at least you believe me. All the hotels I tried just pushed it back at me and said they couldn’t take it.”

“All the hotels—wait, did you try taking it to a bank?”

The olive-green freckles spread. “Of course I did. They told me they required a jewelers’ assay. The jewelers told me they required payment in advance for the assay. And of course they cannot take payment in this possibly worthless metal.”

I sighed. “Well, maybe you should try again next month. Sooner or later one of your shipmates is going to get a paycheck cashed, and then all the rich people will be buzzing about the dank alien rhodium and scheming to get it out of you as fast as they can.” I pushed the rhodium tablet back into Teese’s tentacle.

He made the tablet disappear again. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “But in the meantime, Ami, how will you pay for the rent? Shall we get a roommate?”

“Um,” I said. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea with you already staying here.”

“It would be crowded,” he said, stippling with agreement.

“Right,” I said. “Crowded. I’ll see if I can pick up any extra shifts at work, and if I can’t I’ll short my student loan payment this month.” Again.

* * *

I had to take two buses and a train to get to the Citgo where I worked. Metro Boston, where none of the workers at the gas stations can actually afford to keep a car. But, unlike driving, the bus gives plenty of time to watch the scenery. A sign in a restaurant window caught my eye. “WE SERVE OCTOPUS!!!!” Not calamari, octopus. I didn’t know octopus had a culinary following, I thought. And then, Wait, are they trying to say they’d serve Teese? Hexies can eat there?  But then another sign flashed by. Tiny baby octopus marinated in a thick brown gravy, with thickly markered letters shouting “THIS IS HOW WE LIKE ‘EM!” “This” was underlined six times. And another: “I LIKE MINE CHOPPED AND FRIED.” And another: “OCTOPUS IS BEST DEADED AND BREADED $16.95!!!” I shifted in my seat. I was starting to feel uneasy. Were people really eating octopus to express their resentment at the hexies’ presence? It was stupid, a stupid thing to wonder and an even stupider thing to do; so stupid that I could just about see people doing it.

I shifted in my seat again. How many people on the bus with me felt the same way as the sign-writers? How many were chopping up octopus at home and calling it Hexie Surprise?

And what would they do to me if they knew I was fucking one every night?

* * *

“Ami,” Teese asked, “what are you feeling?”

I opened my eyes. “Umm,” I said. “Sleepy?”

He shifted in bed beside me, propped himself up on one limb so he could look down at me in the dimness. “Besides that. Are you happy? Are you sad? Are you annoyed? It is difficult for me to tell.”

I shifted too. “Well, now I’m feeling awkward,” I said. “I think everyone has trouble telling how someone else is feeling sometimes, Teese. Especially in the dark, you know?”

“For my people,” Teese said—he never called them ‘hexies’—”it’s harder to see feelings in the dark too. But it’s not that dark. You can see my skin, and I can see your body and your face.”

“It’s probably just harder for you than for, you know, other humans,” I said. “Like, I had to learn that when you go a certain kind of pattern of olive green, you’re getting really annoyed. And it doesn’t hit me in the gut the way it does when I see a person with a mad face. It’s like I have a, a secret decoder ring in my head that I have to check. I turn the dial to ‘olive green squigglies’ and I see Oh, Teese is feeling frustrated or annoyed. And then I can start to have my own emotions about that.”

“Hit you in the gut,” Teese said thoughtfully. “When you see someone angry, Ami, you feel their anger too?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I might feel scared, actually, especially if they’re mad at me and they’re bigger and stronger.”

Teese lay back down. “That is very different,” he said. “In my people, if I see someone who is angry, I feel their anger immediately. And they know I feel it because they see it reflected on my skin.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Do you ever get a surprise that way? Like, you didn’t realize you were angry until you look at the guy next to you and see that he’s mad too?”

I felt Teese shift to look at me with both eyes. “Why wouldn’t I know I was angry?”

“Or sad, or whatever.”

“But why wouldn’t I know I was sad? Ami, all my life I have seen my feelings on myself and on everyone around me. I would have to be—damaged not to know my own feelings by now.” He paused. “Probably there are people who are damaged like this, children who are born blind and have to be told their feelings and everyone else’s. But you won’t meet them on a starship’s crew.”

Is that how you think of me—damaged? I bit my tongue, held in the words. But I felt my body moving away from Teese slightly.

After a pause, Teese spoke again. “I feel blind with you, Ami,” he said. “I see your face change and I don’t know what it means. Or your voice, or your body. I am like that blind child who can’t read skins, when I’m with you.”

“Welcome to the human race,” I said.

* * *

After he moved the towels back into the closet, Teese asked if he could use my computer while I was at work. I told him I was shocked that he hadn’t been using it already, and showed him how to log in and how to connect to the wi-fi and how to google. He tapped the keyboard delicately with the very tips of two tentacles, like a two-fingered typist, while I got ready for work. When I left, he was browsing Reddit at the kitchen table.

When I got home after work, Teese was still in the kitchen. “I found a way for us to make money,” he called.

I stuffed my coat in the closet and headed into the kitchen. “Really? Whatcha got?”

“Look at this,” he said, pushing my laptop toward me.

“Oh, ewww,” I said. A naked woman rubbed a dead octopus over her genitals. “Are you kidding me?”

“I know, I know, just look,” he said, pulling up another page. A woman was having sex, improbably, with a horse. And then another: a man and a—pile of balloons?

I was getting a nasty feeling about Teese’s idea. “What the hell?” I asked.

“I know! There are all kinds of pictures of people putting their genitals in things and on things. All kinds of things! Animals, people, food, machines! And they get money for this! Is this news to you? It was news to me.”

I made a face. “Teese, I am not going to put an octopus on my twat for money. That’s…. ” Words failed me.

“No no, of course not,” he said quickly. “I would not ask you to do that, Ami. But there is one thing I did not see in all my searches. I found all kinds of people having sex with every kind of thing, but never with…” he paused dramatically “… one of my people!”

His big eyes focused on me expectantly. Yes, my boyfriend was suggesting that we camwhore ourselves for rent.

“Oh, Teese,” I said helplessly. “Setting aside the fact that I’d probably be lynched, that’s… that’s…” I sighed. How was I going to explain porn to someone from another world? “Let’s get delivery. That’s a long conversation.”

* * *

I got home the next night to find him swiping tentacles broadly across the keyboard and staring at a text editor. “I installed Python,” he said. “I hope that is all right.”

I stood staring at his keyboard technique. “Sure,” I said, “just ask first next time, and… how are you doing that?”

“Doing what?” he asked, covering the keyboard with two arms. Lines of text appeared on the screen as if by magic.

“Typing?” I said. “You are typing, right?” If I looked very closely, I could just see the top of his arms twitch.

“Oh! I found that this is the easiest way to operate your keyboard, Ami. A little focused pressure on each key works just as well as striking. It took a bit of practice, but it’s not too different from the interfaces on our ship.”

“It just looks like you’re hugging the computer and it’s writing text for you,” I said. “What’re you writing, anyway?” I peered over his shoulder. It looked like free verse in English-laced gibberish.

“Python!” said Teese enthusiastically. “I told you, I installed one of your programming languages. It is not terribly different from your spoken language. I am writing a program in Python. Do you know this language too?”

“Um,” I said. My nearest approach to programming had been customizing my Facebook settings. “No, can’t say I do.”

Teese lifted his arms off the keyboard and started telling me about his program. I tuned out and watched his skin. Watery gray patterns rippled enchantingly across his arms as he gestured. It wasn’t quite like anything I’d seen before, but it was familiar, reminiscent of his skin when we were having a particularly intense conversation.

“And then —” Teese interrupted himself abruptly. “But you are not interested in this, Ami?” He peered up at me.

“I’m not a programmer, Teese,” I said. “But go on. I can tell you really had fun working on this.”

Teese’s skin pinked and dimpled, his way of smiling. “I did indeed. Here, look at this.”

He hugged the keyboard again. The screen blanked, then broke out in cheesy red hearts. “I LOVE YOU AMI” scrolled over the pulsing hearts.

I burst out laughing. “Is this what you spent the day on, you nutball?” It was awful. I loved it.

Teese’s skin rippled with pinkish-brown giggles. “Anything for you!”

* * *

Teese kept up with his programming hobby. After the love note came bouncing hearts that filled the screen, blanked, and repeated. Then it was fractals, lacy whorls that spiraled chromatically across the small screen. Then seascapes where the shifting lines of ocean blended into deep blue sky.

I thought Teese was programming to kill time. I had no idea he had a goal in mind. Day after day, I came home to find that he’d built another seeming frivolity. His electronic compositions were getting bluer, though, tending toward the same pale teal he’d painted the closet.

I suppose that should’ve been the third warning sign; or maybe it was the fourth. I’ve lost count.

But I ignored it, like I’d ignored all the others, because every night when we made love Teese looked deep into my eyes and told me he couldn’t imagine life without me.

* * *

When I got home the next night, Teese was back at the kitchen table. “I found another way to make money!” he called to me.

I couldn’t help grimacing. “I think I liked it better when you met me at the door with sex,” I said.

“This is better, I promise,” said Teese. “I’m going to surprise you with it. Some of my crewmates have figured out the banking system and they are the ones who will pay me.”

“In rhodium?”

His skin rippled with brown giggles. “No Ami, no more rhodium! Cash! Wire transfers!”

I came to stand next to him. The screen really was filled with gibberish, as though someone had transliterated a foreign language into English and sprinkled it liberally with varicolored emoticons, often mid-word.

“This isn’t a program, right?” I asked. “Just checking.”

“Chatroom,” Teese said happily. “It is a non-sanctioned communication between members of my ship. There is a metals exchange in California where my crewmates have been able to exchange their pay at a reasonable rate. I have known about this, but I have no desire to go to California, actually —” he peeked up at me almost shyly “—I would much rather stay in Boston.”

“I’d kinda rather you stay here, too,” I said. “So are they going to exchange some of your rhodium for you? Like, you have a ship bank you can transfer it to them with, and then they transfer you back the US currency?”

He waved a tentacle. “Actually, shipboard regulations would make that complicated,” he said. “Private crew currency exchanges are not very encouraged. Otherwise I could already have done that. But now I have something to sell.”

“You do?” I said. “What is it?”

Teese pinked with pride. “I have created a program that my crewmates desire!”

“Really? What does it do?” I was really curious. I couldn’t imagine what Teese had cooked up on my old laptop that sophisticated space-faring hexies would pay cash for.

Teese stroked the keyboard. The screen went black, then slowly faded into a shifting, pale aquamarine. It was a seascape, an abstract, a fractal, all of these and none of these at once. Barely felt lines radiated from the center, branched, shifted, dissolved. Dozens of fractal forms shimmered and danced in the background, shifting and changing. It reminded me of waves rippling the ocean, of sand grains roiled by wind, of the patterns on hexie skin.

It was mesmerizing. It was beautiful, it was somehow alien, and something about it was hauntingly, naggingly familiar.

After a few minutes, the screen blanked. “It has a timeout,” Teese said quietly. “So that I do not become—lost.”

I sat back. “It’s gorgeous, Teese,” I said quietly. “Are you an artist? Back home, I mean.”

“No, no,” he said. “I never had any interest in this. But now I have inspiration, Ami.”

“I can see why your people would pay for this, especially if they’re all as into blue-green as you are,” I said. “But wait, didn’t you tell me that your people would find so much blue tacky? Like that all-purple painting I had once?”

Thoughtful orange fractals rippled Teese’s skin. “Actually, it is kind of tacky,” he said. “But it is more than that. Ami, you can have no idea how interesting, how appealing and stimulating this is for one of us. When I look at this, I feel—things I cannot feel without it. That’s why I put in the timeout,” he added pragmatically.

Art has always prompted strong feelings in people, so I assumed that’s what Teese was talking about. I thought it was a little weird for Teese to talk about his own art like that. But Teese clearly hadn’t been exaggerating, because the money started rolling in. He’d never managed to get a US bank account, so the money went into my account. Suddenly, rent was no problem. I paid the rent, made up all the student loan payments I’d shorted, and still we had more money coming in each week than I made in a month at the Citgo. I thought about quitting my job, but didn’t.

Teese wanted to take me out to dinner, to shows, to operas that neither of us had the slightest interest in. I demurred. We hadn’t been out together since he’d come home with me. At first there had been a steady flow of invites to parties, ostensibly for me but always appended with, “Oh, and be sure to bring that hexie who’s staying with you.” But we’d been too wrapped up in each other to go out, and the invitations had slowly dried up. Now we had piles of money and nowhere to go. I wouldn’t have minded taking Teese to a few house parties, but Teese wasn’t interested. “I’ve met lots of humans,” he told me. “Now I have met you. Meeting more humans will just be—disappointing, I think. But I want to take you out, Ami.”

“I don’t really need to be taken out,” I told him. “I’m pretty low maintenance.” And I don’t want to be lynched, I added silently. Teese might have met lots of humans, but they’d mostly been liberal, east-coast, college-educated twentysomethings at house parties. As far as I knew, he’d never even seen the “WE SERVE OCTOPUS” signs I passed on my way to the Citgo. And I wanted to keep it that way.

We compromised on a museum date in the afternoon. Boston is dripping with museums. We went to the ICA and looked at all the blue things.

“I think your computer art is better,” I murmured to him, just to see him pink.

He rippled brown with laughter instead. “I did have unique inspiration,” he said cryptically.

“Being inspired to pay the rent is far from unique,” I shot back. He just laughed in return.

That might have been the fifth warning sign; or maybe I’m just paranoid in retrospect.

* * *

The next day, I had a double shift at the gas station. I came home to a dark, silent apartment.

“Teese?” I called out, groping for the light switch. Maybe he’d gone out?

Something moved in the darkness. Startled, I dropped my coat and hit my head on the door frame. “Ow! Shit!” My hand finally found the light and I snapped it on.

Teese was hunched in the corner of the room, skin soot-black. He’d been nearly invisible in the dark.

“Teese, what’s going on? Are you okay?” As I spoke, I noticed that the little duffle bag he’d brought with him when he moved in was sitting beside him.

“Ami,” he said quietly. “No. I am not okay. I have been recalled to my ship.”

I came in and closed the door behind me. “Why? What’s going on? Are the hex—are your people leaving?” I hadn’t heard anything on the news.

“No,” he said. “Not as far as I am aware. No, this is personal. My commander is displeased with my actions and has terminated my leave.”

“Your actions—Teese, what did you do?”

“It’s about my program,” he said. “And about selling my program to my shipmates. This has been ruled, ah, trafficking I believe is the word.”

“Trafficking? Like your program is a drug?”

“Exactly like that,” he said. “I told you that it has a strong effect on my people. It has been deemed an intoxicant.”

“Your art is a drug?” I slid down to the floor, back against the door. “Are you in trouble?”

He waved a tentacle. “Yes and no,” he said quietly. “If I report to the ship immediately, it will not be so bad for me. I should have left a few hours ago, I think. But I had to speak with you first.”

“I had a double shift,” I said inanely. “Wait. Wait. Are you coming back?”

“No,” he said softly. “I will not be allowed to come back. And I have more bad news to tell you.” He was still coal-black, but now his skin blotched red with shame as well. “The money has to go back. Everything my shipmates have paid for the program must be returned. Even though I made a gift of it to you. The ship’s bank will take it back, right out of your account.” His voice had faded to a whisper on the last.

“But we spent some of it,” I said. I’d go into overdraft.

“I know,” he said. “I—I will leave you the rhodium. Perhaps you will be able to exchange it soon.”

I stared at Teese. The red hexagons spun and spun on his coal-black skin. He focused his heart-shaped pupils on the floor.

“I know the red,” I said, “But what’s the black?”

He murmured, so softly I could barely hear him, “I am afraid.”

“You’re scared of what they’re going to do to you?”

“No. I’m afraid of how I will feel, not seeing you. I am afraid of how it will hurt me.”

“I could come with you,” I said suddenly. “It’s an interstellar ship, right? And you have years-long shifts watching over your frozen shipmates? You must have some provision for bringing your partners on there or you’d go crazy.”

Violent brown lightning flashed across his black-red skin. A bitter laugh, I realized. “Take you with me!” he said. “Ami, don’t you realize? How don’t you realize? You are the problem, Ami, you are the last human they would ever allow on the ship!”

I felt like he’d slapped me. “What? Why? How am I the problem?”

The shame-red bled away from black skin that crackled with jagged, bitter laughter. “How are you the problem!” he repeated. “You’d be a walking riot. My shipmates would fight each other to look into your eyes. They’d beat each other to death to be the one to make you come.”

“Make me come,” I said slowly. An awful light was dawning inside me. All the times Teese had said he loved to look into my eyes. My greenish-blue eyes. The strange familiarity of his program, as though I’d seen it somewhere before. His greenish-blue program that was, I realized now, the exact shade of my eyes. Just like the sunset that had so captivated him, and just like his “meditation closet.”

“The way your eyes change,” he said, “Ami, the way your eyes change when you come. The blood vessels, the tiny capillaries, they dilate.”

I saw it now. “Fractal patterns moving through them, like hexie skin,” I said. “And what you see, you feel.”

“And what I see in your eyes, I have never seen anywhere else.”

Teese’s romantic-sounding words came back to me. I have never felt before what I feel with you. He had meant it literally. His limbic system responded to something in my changing eyes with a new emotion, one that none of Teese’s people had ever felt before, while his skin struggled and failed to keep up, lapsing into static.

I sat with my back against the door and thought back over the past months. Teese had only said he loved me once, in a cheesy e-valentine. But he’d told me that he loved to stare into my eyes at least a dozen times. I’d naively thought that that meant the same thing.

“I was never your girlfriend,” I realized out loud, “I was your drug.”

“Please don’t say that,” he said. But I was pettily satisfied to see red shame-spots creeping back onto his black skin.

I stood up. “You’d better get back to your ship,” I said, moving away from the door. “Just tell me one thing. What did it feel like? What did you feel when you looked into my eyes?”

He was silent for a long moment. “What is the word,” he said finally, “for a color no one has ever seen? How could there be a word for it?”

“Was it a good feeling, at least?”

He closed his eyes. “It was like nothing I’ll ever feel again.”

He paused at the door, as if wondering whether to kiss me goodbye. I stared him down. He looked into my eyes one last time, and left.

* * *

After Teese left, I pocketed his rhodium and went for a walk. I wanted to hate Teese, but I couldn’t. He’d never lied to me. He’d been telling me exactly what he saw in me from the moment he’d first seen me. I just hadn’t heard.

And what if I’d been the one given the chance to feel a brand-new emotion, one never felt by anyone before? I probably would’ve taken it. Hell, I’d let an alien move in with me mostly for the orgasms. And if I’d loved that alien later—well, that wasn’t his fault either, not really.

I fingered the rhodium. Teese couldn’t get anyone to exchange it, but that might’ve had more to do with his tentacles than with the metal’s value. I still couldn’t see myself haggling over it at Jewelers Exchange, but I could probably pawn it for a few hundred to tide me over, and buy it back when I had the money to pay for an assay.

Because I did plan to have more money. Teese might be a terrific programmer, but he’d never learned to clear his browser history. It’d be easy to find the hexie message boards where Teese had sold his now-banned software. I didn’t need the software. I’d just aim a webcam at my eyes and the money would come flooding in.

I’d have dozens of hexies staring into my eyes, chromatophores fluttering. Maybe hundreds of hexies—who knew how many Teese had hooked on his program? Enough to worry his bosses. Enough, I realized, to enforce a ban on Teese if I made it a condition of my show.

It wouldn’t be porn, not in any human sense. Not as long as Teese wasn’t watching.

I couldn’t truly hate Teese. But I’m only human. And I couldn’t help thinking of Teese, sitting alone in his quarters, skin rippling with regret, while his shipmates watched my eyes as I came. And I felt —

Well. If I had been a hexie, my skin would have pinked and dimpled at the thought. But I’m human, so I had to make do with a smile.

 

* * *

Originally published in Writers of the Future, Volume 34

About the Author

N. R. M. Roshak writes all manner of things, including (but not limited to) short fiction, kidlit, and non-fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, On Spec, Daily Science Fiction, Future Science Fiction Digest, and elsewhere, and was awarded a quarterly Writers of the Future prize. She studied philosophy and mathematics at Harvard; has written code and wrangled databases for dot-coms, Harvard, and a Fortune 500 company; and has blogged for a Fortune 500 company and written over 100 technical articles. She shares her Canadian home with a small family and a revolving menagerie of Things In Jars. You can find more of her work at http://nrmroshak.com, and follow her on Twitter at @nroshak.

by Tamoha Sengupta

“On her back, the city disappeared, part of an ancient trick her ancestors mastered while building their world—in other worlds, their cities would not be visible unless Starym songs were heard.”

If legends of lost cities were true on Earth, some credit for these tales went to the whales that lived on the planet of Starym, situated outside the reaches of the Milky Way.

* * *

Mahi swam through the endless swirls of stars and planets, the universe expanding endlessly around her.

This was the first time she was carrying out the annual tradition of Starflight. Her mother had been the previous Starflighter, and her grandfather had been the first to carry out this noble task. She was proud to uphold family traditions in something this important.

A piece of her home was securely attached on her back. It was the part of the city she adored the most: six buildings set in a circle; the arch leading towards them decorated in two thin strands of Shimmer Moni—the rarest gems of the universe, the only existing ones of their kind.

She knew why she was chosen to protect the most precious part of the city—the part that the Arras would actually steal when they invaded Starym—she was the fastest swimmer and had the best ears.

“Remember our songs”, their leader had sung to her. “Keep your ears open. When the dangers pass, we’ll sing for you to come back home.”

Mahi had sung back her consent, and with the city on her back, swam up through the cyan skies of her world and into the outer darkness.

It would take her only three whale days to reach the nearest sun system. There was a planet there, with everlasting sapphire oceans like the ones back home, and that would be the best place to hide the city till the Arras left.

Mahi wondered if the Arras would stop attacking if they shared a bit of the Shimmer Monis with them, or whether they would increase the frequency of attacks if they realized that Starym whales indeed possessed the gems.

Either way, they couldn’t risk it—for the Arras wanted the gems for the decorations of their planet, and Staryms needed it. Only when the light reflecting off the strands of Shimmer Monis fell on the Starym eggs, did the eggs hatch.

Mahi’s eyes shone in the light of a billion stars as she swam. The survival of her species rested on her back. Literally.

* * *

When Mahi saw the blue world for the first time, it had curtains of green and red dancing over it, softly waving in the stillness of the skies.

The leader’s words swam in her head.

If you sees sky lights, dive into waters beneath it. Less chances of discovery there.

She followed the lights towards the oceans below, and she stopped for a moment in surprise—the waters really were as blue as those back home.

On her back, the city disappeared, part of an ancient trick her ancestors mastered while building their world—in other worlds, their cities would not be visible unless Starym songs were heard.

She crashed through the surface ice. Underneath, the world was cold and dark, and Mahi felt the first aches of loneliness rush through her.

She hoped that the Arras would leave quickly, but time passed differently in different planets, and she wondered how long it would be before she could go back home.

* * *

There were other singers in the waters, but they spoke in a different language. They swam past her, calling out to each other, nudging and playing in groups as they did so.

Mahi thought of her friends and the skies and the oceans where she swam, and she thought of Starym songs, similar and yet so different from the songs of these creatures.

Sometimes, she was afraid that she would forget her own language, and so she sang too, her voice muffled in the lonely blue.

No one answered her, but above her, the city came into existence, its Shimmer Monis glowing in the dark. It gave her hope that it was all real, that she was not really alone, that a part of her world was always with her.

She was careful to keep the songs short, to make sure that nobody saw the city.

But rumours started of mysterious songs and of waters that glowed, if only for a moment, in the chilly waters beneath the Northern lights.

* * *

When we sing for you to come back, reply that you are safe, that it has not all been in vain.

The day Mahi heard the song, there were disturbances in the water. Species with four limbs were swimming towards her, pointing. Mahi did not know what they shouted to each other, but she knew that they were after her when they started throwing things towards her.

She backed away slowly, trying not to sing out in panic. Were they Arras? But no, they looked different—

A song broke through the universe, and Mahi froze. They were calling her back!

But above her, the city had started to glow softly, and the noises behind her increased.

Mahi swam upwards, as fast as she could. In Starym waters, she would have been faster. Here, she was slower, but still faster than the creatures behind her. As she broke through the surface, she sang back, telling them she was safe, that she was coming back home with the gems that gave them life.

* * *

That night, the explorers in the Arctic ocean stared up in wonder as a glowing city rose up into the skies, carried by a creature that looked like a whale, yet had stripes of colours they had never seen before.

And then the creature vanished, and the skies held only the dancing lights.

 

* * *

About the Author

Tamoha Sengupta lives in India, but is happy to have visited many places on Earth and beyond at the expense of words. Her fiction has appeared in Abyss & Apex, Daily Science Fiction, The Colored Lens and elsewhere. Once in a blue moon, she tweets @sengupta_tamoha.

by Koji A. Dae

“Someone had to dash her hopes, or she’d grow into a fanatic, raving about magical octopuses.”

Each morning the summer my sister was born, I followed the rest of the girls from my village to the beach and watched the breaking waves explode into hisses of foam. I collected seashells and traded stories my aunts had told me. But I no longer believed an octopus would come on our shore and snatch me to the source of the ocean. They try to get people when they’re young. Compact. Easy to transport. Twelve was the cusp of never. I was shooting up in height, growing breasts, and putting a layer of fat on my childish hips—too old to believe that an octopus would lure me to the deep.

“Your hair’s too short, Kayla,” Bonnie told me. She was a neighbor girl, barely four years old. “Octopuses like braided hair. My aunt said so.”

“Oh, if your aunt said so.” I held up my palms as if to ask what she would have me do about my boyish haircut.

She was too young to understand sarcasm. Her wide, brown eyes believed everything her aunts told her. “I’ll braid it for you.”

I sat on a rock as her fingers, still sticky with baby sweat, stumbled through a couple of tiny braids. As she tugged, I daydreamed about summers on the mainland: empty boarding houses, except for the other kids who couldn’t afford to go home, no one to talk of octopuses or braid my hair.

Bonnie kissed my cheek and I touched the lumpy, uneven braids.

“Thanks, babe. Let’s go find you an octopus.” I stood up, took her hand, and spent the rest of the afternoon splashing in the shallows with her.

When she went home for supper, I stayed in the warm water and swam out to the depths where there was nothing but salt, seaweed and me. I dove deep, opening my eyes to a world of blue-green. Not an octopus in sight.

* * *

Tempers grew short in the dry heat of summer, and come September everyone was irritated by someone. I was irritated by my aunts for lying about octopuses, my baby sister for crying through the heat of the day, and my mom for having my baby sister.

When Angela was seven days old, my mom constructed a tight wall of sheets around the porch and put her bassinet outside.

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “You’re not going to leave her out all night.”

“It’s tradition. I did it with you, too. That’s why you will carry the wisdom of the ocean, even when you leave this island.”

“It’s a stupid superstition.”

Two aunts came over to keep my mom from going out to Angela as she cried for comfort. Between her screams and the frantic pacing of my mom’s bare feet, I couldn’t sleep.

By morning my irritation reached a boiling point, and I stomped off to the beach without breakfast or a goodbye kiss.

I let the waves lick my feet, but I didn’t submerge myself.

“Come in with me!” Bonnie pulled at my arm, nearly yanking it out of the socket.

I dug my feet into the sand. “Go in yourself.”

“But what if an octopus is waiting for you?” The girl always spoke in screeches and exclamations. It had never bothered me before, but that day I wished she would speak like a normal person.

“There’s no octopus waiting for me.” I jerked my hand away from her. “Or you. It’s a made up story. You’ll see when they send you to the mainland.”

Her smooth face wrinkled with pain and confusion. “I’m going to get one. Mama had a dream.”

The brown sand tickled beneath my fingernails as I traced swirls in it. I grunted, hoping to leave it at that, but curiosity got the best of me. “A normal dream or a water dream?”

Normal dreams could be ignored. They were the fantasies of mothers or fever from the sun. But water dreams—a murky future seen by a submerged dreamer—were worth listening to.

She jutted her chin forward and looked me square in the eyes. “Water dream.”

I threw a pebble into the waves. “Even water dreams can be wrong.”

She stuck her tongue out at me before trudging off on her own.

Someone had to dash her hopes, or she’d grow into a fanatic, raving about magical octopuses. That would do her no good when she was sent to study with the mainlanders. She’d spend her last summer stripping away the silliness pounded in during her childhood, like me.

I continued throwing pebbles until Bonnie’s high-pitched shriek sounded from far down the beach. The other girls, all dark from the sun and in various states of undress, looked at the sound, but no one moved. I groaned and pushed myself up to run through the wet sand to the rocks where the beach curved around the cape.

“Bonnie, what’s wrong?” My words fell between huffs of short breath.

Her eyes were even wider than usual. She pointed with a trembling finger. “Kayla. Is that a…?”

In a large tidepool lay a pile of rust-red limbs with purple undersides. They floated like jelly, as if the octopus might be dead.

I leaned close to the surface of the pool. “I think it’s hurt.”

“But is it one? Really one?” Bonnie whispered, her voice finally tempered by awe.

The legs were too tangled to count, but I was certain there were eight. “Yeah, it’s an octopus.”

It wasn’t just an octopus though, it was a huge one. Like the ones from the stories. It could easily carry Bonnie, maybe even me.

I looked from the tidepool to the ocean. “I think it’s stuck here. Maybe we should move it into the open water.”

Bonnie didn’t move, so I stepped forward and reached my hand into the shallow pool. The octopus oozed towards me. My fingers brushed over its rippled skin, and it shuddered, like a happy dog. I moved my other hand beneath it and a sharp pinch made me draw back.

Drops of blood fell from the back of my hand. “That thing bit me.”

My mind clouded over, as if I were deep under water. Bonnie’s words were impossible to make out. But other words came to me. Let me take you.

“Stand back.” I sheltered Bonnie behind me—half to protect her from the violent creature, half to have it all to myself—and reached into the water again.

The creature jumped out of the pool. The webbing between its tentacles stretched taut as it skittered towards me. I pushed Bonnie away and two powerful tentacles, thick as my arm, wrapped around my waist and knocked me over. The beast dragged me over the hot sand and plunged into the water.

I gasped and floundered as its webbing compressed my chest and pulsated, forcing water into my lungs. The creature darted forward, and I hung limp, like an extra set of arms dangling from its head.

The sun stopped illuminating the water. My blood turned to icy slush, no warmer than my captor’s suction cups. It twisted and swirled, and we spiraled down to the depths where cold and darkness put me to sleep.

* * *

When I came to, the sun was shining on my shivering body, and I was on a different beach, with white sands instead of brown.

Sputtering, I sat up and pushed my hair from my eyes.

“Greetings, sister Bonnie.”

“Bonnie? I’m–”

“It’s been a long journey. I trust Phearidus kept you from harm.”

“Phearidus?”

The speaker had long black hair and dark skin. She looked to be about seven or eight. Her eyes were muted green instead of brown, but she could have been from my island.

“It’s confusing when you first come here. I’m Shauna. I’ll help you.”

Shauna guided me through a cool pine forest to a small village filled with girls dressed in long-sleeves and pants going about their daily chores.

I rubbed my hands briskly over my arms, trying to warm up.

Shauna guided me to a fire and motioned to one of the girls nearby. The girl looked down at a bundle of clothes in her hands then scurried off.

“We thought you’d be younger,” Shauna said.

The fire thawed me. “I’ve never been so cold.”

“The source of the ocean is further north than most people think, but you’ll get used to it. You’ve been chosen to be Phearidus’ rider.”

Bonnie was chosen. I just happened to be protecting the little girl at the right time. I should have said something, but my teeth chattered from the cold and that was my only answer.

The girl returned with pants and a long-sleeved shirt. They were dull brown, not the colorful rainbow outfits I’d imagined for the girls who bore the secrets of the sea, but they were warm and comfortable.

After a bowl of soup, Shauna took me to a hut. Inside, a spring bubbled up from between flat rocks. The water pooled about a foot deep and ran back down the rocks around the edges. The scent of rotting eggs made me hesitate, but Shauna waved me next to her. Around the walls of the hut hung several empty vials tied with braided ropes of seaweed.

“This is the source of the ocean. It contains the secrets of coexisting with the ocean. Once you build your water-suit, you’ll carry these secrets to babies born on our islands.”

Like Angela, crying all night last night. I thought forcing a baby to spend the night alone, wailing in the dark, was cruel faith. But it was true. Octopus riders weren’t some stupid myth. I was one. Or Bonnie was.

Somehow I kept not telling Shauna what my name was. When she introduced me as Bonnie, I didn’t correct her. I learned to turn quickly when someone called me Bonnie. As I wove seaweed, colored by the spring of secrets, I became Bonnie.

* * *

My suit crafted itself, my fingers numbly twisting until the green threads turned purple and red. Not my favorite colors, but they sparkled and shone, creating delicate webbing throughout the fabric of the suit. I tried to remember what Bonnie’s favorite colors had been. This suit was meant to be hers. But it slipped over my body and held me close, warm and snug like a hug.

It took all winter—a season I had never known—to finish my suit. By spring, when the snow on the island melted and the days warmed to an echo of my life as a child, I was ready for my first ride.

Shauna presented me with a vial to carry the water, and I filled it from the hot spring, carefully corking its secrets.

“Phearidus will take you to your first child,” Shauna told me, standing on tiptoe to kiss my forehead.

I waited on the beach alone until the heavy red and purple octopus washed ashore, dashed to me, and carried me into the current.

You’re not Bonnie. It thought to me as it dove deeper, spinning in a slow spiral.

No. I admitted. Are you going to tell them?

It swam faster, until I grew dizzy. It was my mistake.

When Phearidus surfaced, the sun was dipping down over my own island. I gasped as several boys and girls boarded a boat at the pier. One of them, with a jutting jaw and dull eyes, shared the same flat nose and pouty mouth as Bonnie. But this girl was twelve, heading to school on the mainland.

It’s not possible. Bonnie is just a little girl.

Octopuses don’t just travel the depths of the oceans, but the depths of time as well. When you ride with me, I will take you to the future and the past. Wherever and whenever you are needed, Phearidus explained.

She unwrapped her tentacles from me and I floundered in the water, reaching for the safety of her embrace until she pushed me into the shallows. I waited for the boat to leave and the sun to set before going ashore.

Once on land, my feet knew where to go. The wailing of the newborn guided me to a rickety porch. I climbed through the sheets and found a baby in a bassinet with a full head of black hair and dark, curious eyes.

He stopped crying when I approached. I smiled down at him and opened my vial. I poured three drops over his head—one to understand the creatures in the ocean, one to understand the waves in the water, and one to understand the history of his people. Then I kissed his forehead and left. He was crying again before I reached the shore.

* * *

Phearidus took me from island to island to anoint the babies. I didn’t know what year it was, or even the season. Most islands I didn’t recognize, but Phearidus took me to my island a few times. I always stayed a few extra minutes on the beach, my toes in the familiar sand. Eventually she would crawl out of the ocean and bring me back to her magical world without mentioning my homesickness.

When my vial was empty, Phearidus returned me to the source where Shauna and the rest of the riders waited for me.

I took off my suit and it disintegrated.

“You had some long rides, Bonnie,” Shauna noted.

“Huh?” I was slow turning around. I’d gotten used to Phearidus thinking of me as Kayla.

“You’ll need to weave a new suit.”

I shivered at the thought of staying on the tiny pine forest island for months. But at least it was summer, and I wouldn’t freeze through another winter. I’d have to ask if Phearidus could always drop me off at the beginning of summer.

As if reading my mind, Shauna shook her head. “We’re like the octopuses, pulled out of time.”

I wanted her to explain more, but though she knew everything the source could tell us, she didn’t understand how the octopuses’ magic worked. Not even the octopuses did.

I spent the strange out-of-time summer on the beach, weaving a new water-suit. This one was also purple and red, but threads of dark blue like the sky before a storm began to show up towards the end of summer.

My favorite color, I told Phearidus, who had taken to splashing around the shallows while she waited for me.

* * *

My next ride felt longer, though it was impossible to tell for sure. But Phearidus seemed to keep us underwater longer, selecting our targets more carefully.

Is something wrong Phearidus?

The octopus hugged me tighter and spun with precision. I’m getting old. I got you too late.

Got me too late or got me too old? With the real Bonnie would she have had more seasons? She didn’t answer.

When she took me to my island, I stayed outside the window of the house where I anointed the baby. The mother was pacing inside, talking to two other women.

“She’s crying. It isn’t safe out there. Let me go to her.”

“It’s okay Sabina. She’ll be fine. You went through this, too. All babies go through this.”

“Not on the mainland. It’s a stupid superstition.”

The third woman cleared her throat. “At least you still have this superstition. Bonnie will have her baby next month. A baby that will never learn of the ocean, that will never know where it comes from. Better to leave your baby to cry for the night than to forsake your home.”

The mother quieted. As if understanding what was going on, the baby on the porch stopped crying too. I was the only one left crying, silent tears streaming down my face.

Can you take me to Bonnie’s baby?

Bonnie’s baby? Phearidus released, and I almost fell out of her arms. No. Bonnie never has a baby.

Yes she does. Next month. I just overheard.

Phearidus rippled her suction cups—her equivalent of a shrug. A baby born on the mainland isn’t one of ours.

But Bonnie’s from the islands. If I hadn’t taken her place, she wouldn’t have a mainlander baby. Of course, she would have been a four-year-old forever and never had a baby, but I didn’t think about that. Only that I stole something from Bonnie, and finally I could give something back to her. Take me to her.

Phearidus took me to a shallow, stinking bay, filled with ships and bustling with cars. It made me shudder, and Phearidus was slow to let me go. Don’t do this, Kayla.

I pushed her arms off me and swam to shore. People pointed as I got out of the water in my dripping, skin-tight suit. I ignored them and asked my feet to carry me to Bonnie.

They took me further away from the ocean than I ever imagined an island kid could go. I walked through the city, through the wilderness, and into the next city. I was exhausted when I found Bonnie’s small apartment building, which took me three tries to scale.

The baby wasn’t laid out for me, of course. I had to ease the window open. Bonnie was sleeping in the living room with her baby next to her. I crept on tiptoes to them, trying not to wake her.

But Bonnie shifted and stirred, letting out a high scream.

I covered her mouth and recognition dawned in her eyes. “Kayla? Impossible.”

“I’ve come to bless your baby.” I held up my vial and uncorked it, but Bonnie snatched her baby close.

“You died. Got carried out to sea by an octopus.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t die. I became a rider. You always believed in us. What happened?”

Her tense biceps relaxed enough for her to lower her baby to her lap. “The mainland. It’s hard to keep believing in all the backwards island ways when faced with everyday reminders that they can’t be true.”

“But they are true. And your baby will know them.” I measured out three drops of stinking water onto the baby’s forehead and bent down to kiss it. “But it’s your job to keep them alive, too. Tell them to your child. Help them grow in her.”

Bonnie, wide-eyed as ever, nodded.

* * *

After that, I demanded Phearidus only take me to the mainland babies—the ones who came from the islands but would never know their roots. She argued with me, dragged me to the clean shores of islands. But I refused to go to the babies until she gave up and carried me to the polluted shores of the mainland.

We spent the rest of our season spreading memories of the islands to babies born out of place. I touched some of the mothers too, reminded them to keep the stories in their hearts and on their lips, begged them to take their babies, just once, to see their birthright islands.

When Phearidus returned me to the source island, she was weak. She no longer zipped through the water, and she was a pale yellow instead of her usual vibrant red.

“I think Phearidus is sick,” I told Shauna.

“She’s dying,” Shauna said. “It’s her time. You’ll get a new octopus after she passes. She’ll send one to you.”

“Let me take her on one more ride.”

Shauna said she was too weak, but I filled my vial and insisted.

Phearidus. Take me to my baby sister. Angela.

Phearidus pushed off from the rocks and floated to the depths of the ocean, letting my weight sink us rather than propelling us forward herself. She barely had enough energy to surface, and I had to kick to help us reach the beach.

I went to Angela, kissed her head, and blessed her. My heart pounded as I heard my own mother pacing the small living room. I could go to her now, see her and tell her I would be alright. But I didn’t.

I waited on the cape while the sun rose. Phearidus was too weak and tired to force me into the water. She floated next to me, and I stroked her rough head.

There Phearidus. A group of girls scattered along the shore. There’s Bonnie. You could take her now. She’s younger. Has more life to give you.

But you… Phearidus faded to white at the tips of her arms. I can’t leave you.

You were never supposed to take me. It was always supposed to be Bonnie.

Phearidus pushed an image into my mind. It was me, going to the mainland for the first time. You were the only one who would insist. Keep insisting.

I clung to the image, but her thoughts faded from my mind and her body floated limp next to me. I bit my trembling lip and released her body, letting the current take it, and a piece of my heart, back to the depths.

Before my sorrow could blossom, another octopus rushed up to me. It wrapped too hard around my waist and pulled me to the depths without pause. It bit my neck and blood spilled out behind us as we went on to the next baby.

You do Phearidus no honor by struggling.

I relaxed into a sulk. The new octopus was right, Phearidus wouldn’t understand why a human would need time to grieve. I only work with mainland babies.

I know, Bonnie.

I didn’t tell her my name was Kayla. That was Phearidus’ secret.

 

* * *

About the Author

Koji A. Dae is a queer American living in Bulgaria with she/her pronouns and anxious depression. She has work published in Daily Science Fiction, Short Edition, and Third Flatiron, among others. Her first chapbook, Scars that Never Bled: A study of Frankenstein Through Poetry, was released in August of this year. For more information, check out her website kojiadae.ink.

by E.D. Walker

“She’d lost her mate, and all her last clutch of eggs but this one bright, beautiful girl. She wouldn’t let some monstrous set of wings take this child too.”

The sky was a vibrant pink, like a sea fish newly ripped open, and the beach sand was cool and soft under Swift Shadow’s feet. Her hatchling scampered a few strides ahead, lashing her long tail and snapping her neck forward, biting the waves as if the sea were prey to be devoured.

Shadow sighed as she watched the hatchling dart into the waves. All things end and all things are eaten by the earth. Truly, she wouldn’t be able to call her young one a hatchling for much longer. Her clever girl had outlived all her siblings and Shadow’s own strong mate. Soon her youngling would enter her third year, which meant she would finally have her Naming. If only I can keep us alive that long.

Shadow nosed at the dirt, looking for some shells to crunch, to suck the slick, squishy meat free, but this was a singularly barren beach.

Meals had been scarce the past few days, and Shadow had led them toward the sea, hoping they might find something washed up and rotting. An easy meal to fill their aching stomachs. That seemed to have been a foolish decision. Shadow clicked her teeth together, then opened her mouth wide enough to call the hatchling back. They would look for their next meal elsewhere.

Darkness passed over the sky, and Shadow’s heart sped. “Get back to the trees!” she called at the hatchling, fear making her chirps into high-pitched croaks. The hatchling turned at once, the salt water brushing her knees. She trilled back confusion just as the dark silhouette plunged from the sky, diving fast toward Shadow’s hatchling.

Shadow shrieked alarm and anger both and charged as the large winged creature arced toward her young. Her hatchling threw herself into the waves, and the flying creature missed its grab. It had to swoop upward, circling to try again. The creature was huge, all massive wings and beak and a huge head with a long red crest.

Fast as a lightning strike, the beast plunged again, the stabbing sharp beak angled straight for Shadow’s hatchling.

“No.” Shadow threw herself at the creature as it plunged, and knocked into its side. She sank her long sickle claw into its neck. The beast flapped and cawed, churning the water. It’s massive leathery wings beat Shadow all about her body until she couldn’t catch her breath. She’d lost her mate, and all her last clutch of eggs but this one bright, beautiful girl. She wouldn’t let some monstrous set of wings take this child too.

The beast rolled, its massive body knocking her backwards into the water with a shock of cold that made her gasp and then gag. She flailed, trying to free herself, but the creature was too heavy. It moved to shake her off its neck then to peck sideways at her. The waves washed over her snout, making her hack and cough, but she didn’t let go of her talons or her foreclaws. Another wave rolled over, and panic gripped Shadow as she tried to surface and found she couldn’t. The beast atop her was slowing down, sluggish from loss of blood, but it was too heavy for her to shift.

A sharp-pitched shriek filled the air, and the weight above her shifted. Shadow flung herself out of the water in time to see her beautiful daughter perched atop the giant wings, snapping and slashing at the thing. Great sprays of blood gushed forth to mingle with the salt water. Finally, the winged beast stopped moving.

Shadow fumbled forward and rubbed her snout against her daughter’s. The two of them leaned on each other for support, with Shadow twittering comfort in a low tone.

Once both their heartbeats had slowed, they worked together using their jaws to drag the winged beast out of the water and onto the soft sand. They couldn’t leave the bleeding carcass in the sea or they’d risk attracting one of the great animals of the deep. And those creatures were all snapping jaws and quick strikes. A dark shadow of death hiding under calm water.

Shadow and her child ate their fill of the dead winged creature. It had recently feasted so it’s belly was full of strange oily fish with crunching bones and slimy skin that easily slid down Shadow’s famished gullet.

Once their bellies were distended from their kill, they sat in the shade and groomed the blood and sand out of their feathers.

“You did well,” Shadow said.

Her daughter butted her head against Shadow’s neck. “I was taught well.”

Shadow snorted. “I think the time for your Naming has come. Any child who can save their parent from certain death deserves a name.”

Her hatchling swallowed and sat on her haunches, breathing fast, and her brown feathers half-puffed up in anticipation.

Shadow cocked her head to the side. A proper name would be something like Scourge of the Sea or Wing Killer. But the tenderness in her heart for her last chick made her say something far different than the usual Name. “Solace,” Shadow murmured. “Your name shall be Solace.”

“Thank you. It’s a good name, Mother.” Solace huffed a breath out and stood, tiptoeing closer until she could lean her haunches against Shadow and hum comfort.

Swift Shadow leaned back and closed her eyes, and for the first time in a long time, her heart felt lighter. The crushing heaviness of her grief lifted as if she and Solace were sharing the weight between them.

All things end and all things are eaten by the earth, but for now Swift Shadow had her solace.

 

* * *

About the Author

E.D. Walker, a native of Los Angeles, is the author of The Fairy Tales of Lyond Series that begins with Enchanting the King. E.D.’s short fiction has previously appeared in the USA Today bestselling anthologies Pets in Space 3 and Pets in Space 4. You can find her online at www.edwalkerauthor.com and on Twitter @AuthorEDW.

by Jordan Kurella

“Kitrita, queen of the wake, watched me as I watched the crow. Her hungry eyes (ever vigilant, always searching) cast disapproval over me.”

The crow was beautiful when she ate: all black sheen and viscera. Her beak slick with spoils as it tilted back, neck bulging, bulging with her quarry. The quarry meant for us. We vultures.

I watched her. We all watched her. This solitary crow, separated from her friends, her loved ones, her family. Her murder.

I wondered sometimes, if she were lonely. Solitary as she was. As I was lonely. Perched on this stone ledge, high above a narrow street with my own friends, my own loved ones, my own family. My wake.

My loneliness crushed my hollow bones. The pain of it echoed in the wail of the wind, the wind between the tall and huddled buildings. I felt it as I watched the crow, preening her feathers over the humans we’d intended to take as ours. The humans spilling out of the vehicles hemming either side of this narrow street; the humans scattered across the sidewalks, once warm in their winter coats, now strangled by their own scarves.

Kitrita, queen of the wake, watched me as I watched the crow. Her hungry eyes (ever vigilant, always searching) cast disapproval over me. So I shuddered. I shuddered to shake the wind away, the pain away, the loneliness away.

Was it possible to be lonely?  To be so shaken when shadowed by Kitrita. She who once called me her sister? Her favorite? Who told me she’d never let me go?

My heart told me it was.

As it ached for the crow.

* * *

“The world belongs to us now,” Kitrita said to me the next day as we fed on a once bustling city street, now strewn with corpses and bullet casings. This city we traveled to, when we heard the feeding was good. “It is our responsibility.”

On either side of us, buildings loomed with windows. Windows like mirrors. They echoed back to us the riches of the street below. Echoed back to us, us. Me, Kitrita, the rest of the wake, listening, listening. Coyotes some distance away, howling, howling. Crows in conversation above, cawing, cawing.

A single solitary crow once again captured my attention.

Kitrita once again watched me watching her.

But it was time to feed. My attention was now captured by the rip of fabric as Kitrita’s talons gripped firm around a human arm. She tore free cloth and cloth and cloth. Pieces of coat and patterned shirt. Then, the exposed human skin. A signal for the rest of us to eat. We would all follow her lead, all of us. Her bald head shining in the winter sun, red and glorious. Its sheen unmatched among the rest of us.

Kitrita would eat last, as she always did.

Even that day.

When I moved in to feed, Kitrita moved her great black body in front of me. Her white wing feathers marred by street filth. “No, Takrata,” she said. “None for you today.”

She looked to the crow, and then held her wings wide, blocking me from my quarry. My feeding. Blocking me from what she had won for me, for us, for all of us. What we had won together, she and I; what we had scouted. It would not be the last time she cast me out.

But I still had hope.

The feeding was good in this city, which it had not been in our travels here. The smaller towns we passed had been barren. Dotted by boarded up houses that smelled of delicious decay (but we could not get inside). Roads with vehicles on them with open doors, but the bodies too far gone for feeding. Destroyed by highway sunlight. Destroyed by coyote bitemarks, and others who’d come before.

This city was flush with corpses. Littered with carrion eaters. Littered now with Kitrita and her ire for me. I saw it in her eyes, in the way her body blocked me. Blocked me from feeding.

I heard it in the wail of the wind beyond.

Kitrita and I had once been one, together. She welcomed me into the wake. Called me her sister, her friend. But no more. Now the crow called out to me. She called once, before she left. Her voice a new music over the slash of beak against bone.

Kitrita had a cruel desire. One that’d become familiar; now taken from me. Her proud hisses and talon-like hold on my attention were gone. I was no longer welcome as her shadow.

All my affection tossed aside, for a few glances at a crow.

My reflection echoed back to me in a window now. A window beckoning me to the image of the wake feeding. Feeding to such finery. Their eyes sparkled. Sparkled as their necks tipped back with their spoils. But my eyes were not the same. They were dull, deadened by loneliness, by grief.

In the reflection, I was a filthy, discarded thing. Rotten and spoiled, as the wake fed. My red head hung low, its sheen cracked and dusty. The wake? With their slick beaks and hungry eyes? Jewels in comparison.

Takrata? Me? I crouched counterfeit to the side.

* * *

Winter sun arrived late and left early, but it was warmer now than it should be, so said Kitrita. This she knew from the stories. Stories passed down from wake to wake, from queen to queen. She was our guide and our keeper, and she had shut me out.

I had not eaten in two days.

The stories said that the city fell slowly, so slowly. Fell by lies told and believed, until one day, the world’s people could not feed each other any longer. So they fought. The world wanted to breathe, so said Kitrita. So it made the people angry. It gave itself back to us: its scavengers.

On the first day I saw the crow, she was listening to our stories. Her head tilted to one side, black eyes shining, blinking, curious. She was perched on a window sill with curtains still shut.

The details of a life so human, they remain. Long after those human lives are gone.

* * *

“Takrata.”

I heard my name whispered through Kitrita’s rasp of a throat. Through the carrion taste of her breath. Untucking my head from my wing, Kitrita was so close. Her beak could scrape mine in the sunlight. My own wing was no protection. I was now marred from street filth. Three days of scouting. Three days of not eating. Three days of Kitrita’s ire reflecting back, back at me.

“Takrata,” she said. “Go scout the northern end of the city, away from the water.”

She said, “I give this task to you, and you alone.”

Alone.

We do not scout alone.

I could see by the lack of hunger in her eyes that she did not want me anymore. She was banishing me from our balcony. Our balcony with trees that still held their leaves so deep in winter. Our balcony covered in our own down and other treasures we could carry.

It was done.

I would leave this place to find my own, if I could survive that long.

Setting to the sky, I saw the sun cresting just over the wide, wide river. It lit up the ripples in such brilliance. The sight set my heart rippling, rippling alongside it. The taste of the air on my tongue, the feel of the wind on my feathers. I was alone. Alone. I was no longer a shadow of Kitrita. The once fluttering beat I had felt in my throat for so long was now gone.

My heart had returned to my chest. It beat in tandem with my breathing. My wings took on a new steadiness. A steadiness as I soared, soared high over the river. Taking in the beauty, the beauty of what I had claimed: such calm, and such silence.

Such silence but for one solitary cry.

A crow’s.

* * *

Her name was Rak, and when she brought me to the train station (in the northern part of the island), we settled on a bench. We chatted until darkness. When the night grew cold, she curled against my wing. That first night, she tucked her beak into my feathers. Settled this way, she ran the crest of her head against the baldness of my own.

“I like this,” Rak said. “I like this. I was curious about this; about you.”

As the winter wind set in around us, I heard doves cooing together. Rak brought her smaller body close to me, her beak up to mine. They touched, our beaks. Hers black and beautiful and glorious. Clean, because she always kept it clean. Mine white and hooked. I ran it over the edge of hers for the feel of the smoothness of it.

It set my feathers to shuddering.

Shuddering now not to shake away this moment with Rak. But to keep it. To keep it close (with the wail of the wind singing in the hollow of my bones).

“I wanted this,” she said, her eyes closed. “I wanted this so much.”

We kept at it. We kept at it as the doves cooed, as the wind sang. As the night continued on despite us.

* * *

The world belongs to us now, Kitrita once said. Said to us on that city street. Before she cast me out. Before she denied me so much. But there is a weight to the words still. In my dreams, in my memory. She said, standing upon that human’s back, she said, It is our responsibility, yours and mine.

And it was, then. It was, at that time. But how, but how.

* * *

The train station was a sanctuary. To not only Rak and myself, to not only the doves and the sparrows, but to more. The station itself was a strangeness: Rak and I were a pair; mourning doves were mated in threes and fives; sparrows nested in their down with their pigeon partners. And most oddly, a coyote run had made its home inside the abandoned train cars. They offered their yawning doors to more than just themselves.

Among the motley tucked inside were two dogs. One, a golden retriever with a coat like copper, whose muzzle had long ago gone white. He limped up the stairs each evening, carrying food for the day, but not only for himself. For his friend, the three-legged basset hound. A basset hound with white-dotted spots and red-rimmed eyes. He had a howl so sad he made the mourning doves sing.

The groups of doves cooed together every night. Every morning a sparrow hopped alongside their pigeon partner. We were a home, all of us together. We misfits of the north.

And each night, Rak and I would return to our bench. Our bellies full of spoils, our talons full of treasures. Rak would curl her black body under my wings, both of us cleaned from winter rain and one-another’s grooming. We were no longer marred from the city; no longer marred from neglect.

We had one another.

We all had one another.

Mismatched as we were; loved as we were.

* * *

Winter continued. Seven times, the sun rose and set; for seven days the bodies lay in their slow, cold decay. We would have to move west, this I knew without the help of Kitrita, without the help of my wake. My knowing crept up on me; like the longer days had; like my happiness had. The things I’d learned from watching Kitrita, from being a part of the wake had transferred to me, to Rak and I as a pair.

I no longer needed those who no longer needed me.

Rak ate beside me, always beside me. She flew beside me, always beside me. She collected small treasures and returned with them to our bench at night: a plastic jewel here, a pretty stone there. Once, a ring. For me, all for me.

She wanted to be with me. And that want, that desire to be with me was greater than any false kindness that Kitrita had ever given. Ever once, ever ever.

On an afternoon where the sun shone bright and bold, Rak and I fed at a large park in the city, around a still pond. A still pond surrounded by concrete and abandoned food carts (the ground tacky with melt and rot). Toy boats lapped against the pond’s concrete embankment. Their white hulls and sails waving, waving, in the breeze. My talons pulled cloth and cloth and cloth away from a human leg, and Rak dove her beak to the flesh.

I always let her eat first.

The ghost of Kitrita only haunted me. I had banished her to memory; turned her into a phantom. A phantom held only in memory. A phantom that haunted me in my dreams, accompanied by the beating of so many wings, accompanied by her wake (my wake). I thought, I thought as I heard the hiss of her voice above me, calling out to me, from the blinding light.

A phantom. Only a phantom said, “Takrata.”

The phantom Kitrita said, “Takrata, you did not report back.”

But Rak looked up, black eyes blinking, blinking, blinking. Curious as ever. Not a phantom. Kitrita was here, surrounded by so many like her (my other brothers and sisters, my family, my wake). Her red bald head more glorious than ever, but her black feathers were dusty, unkempt. Her white feathers long ago gone grey and tattered.

She even looked like a haunted version of herself.

“We were waiting for you,” Kitrita said. A lie, her eyes not hungry, not wanting me. The wake loomed, watching us, wanting us. “We could have died. Selfish, Takrata. You’ll never change.”

And yet they were all hale from the bodies of the southern and central city.

Kitrita’s own eyes may not have been hungry, may not have been wanting me, but they burned with something else. Something I recognized in my own reflection in that fated window.

Kitrita’s eyes burned hot. Hot with jealousy.

* * *

The world belongs to us now, I remembered Kitrita saying. We scavengers, we cast offs, we carrion eaters. Those of us who pick up the leavings of those left behind. Those of us who were left behind.

Abandoned. Discarded. Cast aside.

It is our responsibility, she said then.

No. No.

It was mine. It was Rak’s. It was hers and mine.

* * *

One night as Rak was tucked beside me on our bench, I watched as the copper-furred golden retriever brought food for the basset hound, and the two curled up together. The basset hound’s back against the golden retriever’s belly. Then I watched as the coyote run returned for the night. As the last one went in, a younger one, an adolescent, I stopped her.

“Why do you allow the dogs to stay with you?”

The coyote shrugged, glancing at me, glancing at Rak.

“Why do you allow her to stay with you?” she asked back.

A fair question. One that deserved a fair answer.

“We’re stronger together, she and I,” I told the coyote. “She makes me better than I am alone, than I was before.”

The coyote grinned at me.

“Same,” she said. “Big same.”

* * *

The toy boats continued their undulant sway against the concrete embankment. Like them, Kitrita spread her wings and sent her shadow over us as she soared, circling us both. As if Rak and I were decaying things. As if we were already dead, or dead to her. Long cast out. Long forgotten.

But we were not.

Kitrita desired us both.

When she landed, she spread her wings wide. Dark, dark wings against the concrete. Against the waning sun. She was queen of the wake. She held the power here. Kitrita, my former sister, the one I looked up to, was now looking down at me. Her eyes once again hungry, wanting, desiring. Jealous.

“You did not return,” she said again. She hissed, and the wake hissed along with her.

Black tongues visible in their white, white beaks.

“You took up on your own,” she said. “You abandoned us. You abandoned me.”

The hissing stopped suddenly. Abrupt. Bringing with it a silence so thick with the smell of decay and pond muck that I could not quiet my mind. All I thought of was Kitrita. How she fed me, how she protected me. How she once told me that all she did (all she ever did) was for me.

But at a price.

I had not noticed (I did not notice) that Rak, in all her defiance, had walked up to Kitrita. Her sheen now black as rot in Kitrita’s forced shadow. Her beak was tilted up, head tilted to the side.

“But,” Rak said, “but Takrata didn’t abandon you. Did she? Did she?”

All attention was on Rak now. Kitrita’s and mine. She did not seem to mind. She stood as if the attention was what she wanted, what she sought out. She looked Kitrita over: the filthy white feathers, the cracked beak, the red sheen of her head. The wake became silent; they became shadows of themselves.

“You were the one who cast her out,” Rak said. “You. She did not leave on her own. You, you, Kitrita. You made her leave. You abandoned her. I took her in, we took her in.”

It was Kitrita’s turn to tilt her head now.

“We?”

“Yes,” Rak said. “Yes. We.”

* * *

“The world belongs to us now,” Kitrita had said once, as the humans had only begun to fight. “You and me, Takrata. It is our responsibility.”

Then, her eyes lit upon me with that same cruel desire I’d come to know as familiar. They’d been that way since she brought me into the wake with an outstretched wing and proud hiss. I was hers; I would always be hers.

And she made sure of that.

I did what she wanted, when she wanted. I was forbidden to do anything else. The wake followed in her stead; in our stead. As she and I soared high above the trees, high above the farmlands, she marveled at the beauty of our shadows.

“We will cut through this world like talons,” she said. “You and me, Takrata. You and me.”

But I was never such a thing: a talon, her destroying thing. My heart was never so sharp. My shadow always broken by a tree branch, by a sun shaft, by the reflection of a thousand windows.

I could never be what Kitrita wanted me to be. I had found another who matched me (not in size or feathers or beak) in generosity and spirit. But Kitrita had seen how my heart beat in my throat with Rak’s curiosity so near, so she had no choice but to cast me out. Now, as her own heartbeat did the same, standing so close to me, she remembered. She remembered why she kept me so close at all.

* * *

A howl pierced my concentration, one so sad it set a cote of doves to singing. Then, a cacophony of wings as birds surrounded Rak, surrounded me. The mourning doves, the sparrows, the pigeons, all of them. All of them coming to us, joining us. The familiar sound of the golden retriever’s heavy panting, the basset hound’s three-legged plodding, and the click-clack-click of the coyote run’s claws on concrete coming toward us.

We are stronger together.

We misfits of the north.

“What is this?” Kitrita asked. Jealous eyes now alight with fear. “What have you done?”

“Once,” I said, “I had a wake. You shut me out of it, banished me, tossed me aside. I was alone within it, but now? Now I am not.”

The wake shuddered: clattering of talons on their perch; a collective shudder of disapproval. Kitrita was also not alone, but her posture betrayed her: she spread her wings wide once more and hissed. Her hissing borne of fear and spite, her eyes pinned to the heartbeat I could see fluttering in her throat.

“They don’t want to attack you,” Rak said. “We don’t want to attack you.”

“Then what do you want?”

“To let us be,” I said. “To let us be and never come back.”

The undulant sway of the boat sails now danced to the coyote howls, the barking of dogs, the cooing of doves, the singing of sparrows. Kitrita did not wait. Her throat fluttered a dozen more times before she took wing. She soared off into the park’s trees, her once crisp shadow muted by dappled sunlight, cast into a thousand pieces by the winter sun.

With a second cacophony of wings, the wake, too, took flight.

Rak tipped her beak up to mine, so I brought mine down to meet it. This was what I wanted, this was where I belonged. Rak and I did this together, we all did this together. All of us.

But it was Rak, most of all, who was strongest.

* * *

That night after I brought back food for the coyote run as a gift (for the golden retriever, for the basset hound) Rak also brought me a gift. A coin with an eagle on it. Its wings were spread while it held arrows in one of its talons, a branch in the other. We sat close together on the bench, so close. Still, she nudged the coin to me closing the small space left between us.

“That’s you,” she said. “That’s you.”

“No,” I said.

I said running my beak along the crest of her black feathers. Running the hook of my beak across her sheen, through her down.

“No,” I said. “It’s both of us.”

 

* * *

About the Author

Jordan Kurella is a queer and disabled author who has lived all over the world (including Moscow and Manhattan). In their past lives, they were a barista, radio DJ, and social worker. Their work can be found in Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Strange Horizons. Jordan currently lives and writes in Ohio with their service dog.

Welcome to Issue 7 of Zooscape!

If you’re reading this issue of Zooscape, then you’ve survived the long, hard spring that lasted ten thousand years.  You’ll need some provisions before continuing on your journey.  So, please, take these stories with you on your way…

* * *

The God-Smoker by Dylan Craine

Maker Space by Adele Gardner

When the Horse Came to the Open House by K. C. Mead-Brewer

Love From Goldie by David Steffen

Riding Through the Desert by Laurence Raphael Brothers

Fur and Feather by Ingrid L. Taylor

* * *

Each of these stories is a journey in miniature, and the characters are changed by the end.  Much as you may be changed, hopefully for the better, by reading them.

As always, if you want to support Zooscape, we have a Patreon.  We’re closing to submissions for the summer, but we’ll see you in September when the season turns!

by Ingrid L. Taylor

“The hummingbird flew to the coyote and hovered above his muzzle, which was flecked with shell fragments and sea salt.”

The meadow had been hers for as long as it had taken the flowers to pass through one cycle of blooming and fading. She had defended against the larger birds, the crows and the sparrows, as yellow sun had given way to the pale autumn. The memory of her mother’s nest had dimmed, and she learned to treasure the solitary rustle of the grasses and the slow darkening of days. The coyote came with the smell of rain. She heard him at night as he passed around the edge of her meadow, keeping to the shelter of the trees.

Though it was not in the hummingbird’s nature to seek companionship, she felt a fascination for the coyote that slowly grew into love as the sleeting winter rains faded into the warm drizzle of spring. She loved him for his lonely howl that rang clear and mournful on the cold nights when she was tucked away in her nest, and she thought that someone who made a sound so beautiful surely couldn’t be bad. She was a creature of the daytime, of sunlight and flowers and sweet nectar. She was flighty as well, dashing from one flower to the next, never wanting to give a single bloom too much of her attention. She sensed a depth and steadiness in the coyote where she might rest her pounding wings and calm her racing heart.

The coyote came to the beach at the edge of the woods in the early mornings. He ate the crabs that washed up on the shore, and she watched him savor the salty crunch of their shells. Sometimes he ate the seaweed too, when hunting was lean. She imagined the cool sand was soft on the pads of his feet, and the brine soothed his throat, hoarse from his nightly offerings to the moon.

She found excuses to leave her meadow and come down to the beach, hovering over the white flowers of blackberry bushes that tangled the border from forest to shore and taking in their sparse nourishment. The coyote lay down in the sand with a crab shell propped between his paws. His canines gleamed in the early light of morning. The surf sang its endless song. It was the hour of possibility, when the moon and sun touched fingertips before they went their separate ways, and their children, the stars, closed their luminous eyes.

The hummingbird flew to the coyote and hovered above his muzzle, which was flecked with shell fragments and sea salt. His ears pricked forward, and he lifted a paw to swat at her. She avoided it easily—she was fast. The coyote stretched his lips back, and his tongue lolled from the side of his mouth.

“Who are you?” he asked.

She did not often speak to the four-legged animals, only the birds that shared the air with her, and once, a wayward cat that had passed through her meadow. She had fluffed out all of her feathers and buzzed the cat’s head, shrieking at him to leave her territory. Now unsure what to say to the coyote, she took off down the beach, zigging and zagging. He chased her, his body stretched to full length as his feet pounded the sand.

She paused above a fallen log, and he sat and panted at her with his pink tongue. The sunlight slanted off her, and the wet sand steamed as the sun rose in the sky. Soon it would be time for him to go.

The coyote rested his chin on the log, his eyes a soft brown like chestnuts that fell to the forest floor. She perched on the log and folded her wings, certain now he wouldn’t hurt her. He blew his hot breath on her. Her feathers lifted with the force of it, and she was changed in that moment—no longer a creature of air and light but weighted by the burden of meat and bone and soil that invited the decaying flesh.

The heat of the new day pressed upon her, and the coyote was gone. She caught a last glimpse of his bushy tail as he disappeared into the forest.

Day after day, the hummingbird and coyote played together on the beach. Sometimes the chase was long and sometimes it lasted for only a few minutes. At those times, they rested together on the log. She gripped his wiry fur in her tiny feet and curled up on his back, and worried about the outline of his ribs that showed beneath his coat. His food was taken by creatures who left shiny metal teeth on the forest floor, mouths that didn’t devour but maimed and imprisoned. She had heard the cries of the animals caught. The creatures brought the scent of panic and fear, so strong that even she could smell it. It permeated the forest, and darkness spread. Flowers bloomed less brightly, their nectar was less sweet, and she had to fly farther every day to find fuel for her demanding body.

One morning the coyote didn’t come to the beach. She waited on the log, wings folded, until the sun was high overhead and the aroma of rotting kelp and dead fish choked the air. The surf rushed in and covered the sand. Pebbles, caught helpless in the unyielding grip of the waves, tumbled and rolled. The hummingbird watched them as the air closed around her. She looked behind her to the woods. She knew its meadows and clearings, but she had never ventured into the entangled mass of trees and underbrush that made up its dense center. Her heart fluttered, and she was afraid.

Dewdrops clung to blades of grass in defiance of the rising heat of the day. The meadow sparkled in the morning light. Petals swayed in choruses of white, purple, and yellow. She dipped her tongue into a bloom and lapped up the nectar. Its energy flowed through her, and her wings pumped harder and faster. She ascended, higher and higher, until the individual flowers coalesced into a rainbow of color below her. She flew into the woods.

She had always imagined dark and impenetrable undergrowth, but beneath the redwood canopy she saw a loamy path dappled with sunlight and dotted with small bushes. The air was wet. Pale mushrooms sprouted around the trunks of the trees, which were covered on one side with a carpet of green moss. She hovered, weighted by the ancient feel of the forest, and for the first time in her life the hummingbird sensed the depth of time, that all things pass into darkness.

“What are you doing here, little bird?” The owl sat nearby on a thick branch. His eyes gleamed in the dim light.

The hummingbird dashed behind a broad leaf.

“I’m looking for the coyote.” Her voice was thin and high in the stillness between the trees.

The owl’s eyes followed her, immense and yellow. “You would make a tasty snack before my bedtime, little hummingbird.”

“Please—Will you help me find him?”

“Come out from behind that leaf, and I’ll consider it.”

The hummingbird moved from the leaf’s camouflage, forcing herself to hover in front of the owl while her instincts screamed at her to flee.

“Have you seen him?”

The owl looked long and hard at her, then with a shake that ruffled all of his feathers, he settled deeper onto the branch. “You’re lucky that I had a good night hunting. I won’t eat you today. But your coyote was not so lucky. You’ll find him ahead. Look for the biggest tree in the woods.” The owl closed his eyes.

The hummingbird waited a moment, but the owl appeared to be asleep. As she zoomed past him, the owl muttered, “Evil roots in our home. Take care, little one.”

She found the coyote beneath an ancient redwood. He lay on his side, his ribs heaving with each rasping breath. The metal teeth, no longer shiny but stained dark with his blood, gripped his front leg. He lay in a pool of mud and hair and torn skin. There were grooves in the dirt around him where he had dug in his claws, trying to escape.

“My love,” she hovered over him, “how can I free you?”

He had bitten his tongue in his pain and frenzy, and his words were thick with blood. “I must chew my leg free, but I am too weak.”

The hummingbird brought him drops of water from a nearby stream, held carefully in a leaf that she tipped into his mouth. She found some berries nearby and carried them, one by one to his lips, until she dropped exhausted onto a low bush.

“It is not enough.” The coyote’s voice was thin and strained. “Go quickly and find the beaver. She is strong enough to chew me free.”

The hummingbird floated over him. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“Hurry— before these monsters come for me.”

She flew as fast as she could to the beaver’s den, though she was heavy with the scent of his blood and rent flesh.

The beaver poked her nose out. “What is all this shrieking and fluttering?”

“The coyote is trapped, and he can’t free his leg. Come and chew him free with your powerful teeth.”

“Why would I do that? He might devour me once he’s free.”

“Please, we don’t have much time. He’ll die if you don’t help.”

The beaver squatted on her round haunches. “Besides, I don’t eat meat. I can’t imagine the taste of it in my teeth. It’s horrifying.”

“You can spit it out. Please… I love him, and I don’t want him to die.”

The hummingbird’s feathers drooped as the beaver gazed off into the distance. A breeze passed through, carrying the smell of dead fish and rotted wood. She thought of their walks on the beach, and her heart crashed against her ribcage as if it would burst from the confines of her chest.

“All right. I’ll do it, but he has to promise that he won’t eat me.”

The beaver’s steady plod through the forest was agonizing for the hummingbird. The sun slanted low in the sky when they reached the place where the coyote was trapped.

He was gone. Only a scattered pile of bloody leaves remained. A strange sensation permeated the air, sharp and violent, like nothing the hummingbird had encountered before. She flew in furious circles over the area, looking for any sign of him. There was only the silence of the darkening forest. The beaver hung her head, and after a moment she ambled back in the direction of her den. The hummingbird watched her go and knew no word or gesture could contain this moment. There was only the bright pain that washed through her.

In the following days, the pain transformed to a sorrow that muted the shine of her feathers to a dull gray. She sat in a bush by the meadow and watched flowers nod in the wind. She thought often of the beach but couldn’t bear to return.

One early morning she could no longer stand the rustle of the meadow grass and the cloying cheerfulness of the flowers. She went to the beach, to the log where they had always met. The feel of the smooth driftwood under her feet caused fresh pain. She watched the waves topple pebbles and small sticks and thought that she could fly into those waves and disappear.

The bushes behind her rustled, and soft feet padded toward her. A four-legged creature stood on the beach looking at her. The creature had no fur, rather exposed muscle gleamed in the early light, outlined by veins and connective tissue. She drew back, frightened. It took a step towards her. She recognized the eyes of the coyote, though the long lashes and warm brown irises looked out of place in the wet redness of his face.

“I’ve waited for you,” he said.

“You were gone when I came back. I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find you.”

“They have taken my skin and fur.”

A fly buzzed around the face of the coyote, then passed through his head and continued down the beach.

The hummingbird fled, beating her wings as fast as she could to escape the horrible raw thing that her coyote had become. She stopped and hovered just at the edge of the beach, where the sand mingled with coarse grass. She could return to the meadow, live out her days among the flowers and grasses, and try to forget the vision of bare muscle and blood. But the coyote’s eyes appeared before her, sad and lost. She remembered how much joy he had brought her, and she knew she couldn’t leave him to his loneliness and pain.

She turned and raced back down the beach, where the coyote waited for her.

 

* * *

About the Author

Ingrid L. Taylor is a fiction writer, poet, and veterinarian. She lives in the desert with a black cat, a Newfoundland dog, and a yard full of pigeons and hummingbirds. When she’s not writing sad and creepy stories, she provides expert veterinary commentary on animal cruelty cases for an international nonprofit. She is completing a dual MFA in fiction and nonfiction at Pacific University, and she was selected for a Playa Artist-in-Residence award in 2018, where she fell in love with the Oregon high desert. Her stories have appeared in Red Rock Review, Dies Infaustus, Legs of Tumbleweed, Wings of Lace: An Anthology of Literature by Nevada Women, Gaia: Shadow and Breath, vol.3, and others. Check out her Instagram @tildybear for her writing news and adventures with her animals.

by David Steffen

“You look so close, yet we are separated by compressed infinity.”

We used to be so close.  What happened between us, Gloria?  Is it because I died?  I would never have thought our marriage was so superficial.  For Christ’s sake, we’d been married for eighteen years!  And now you won’t even talk to me, won’t even look at me.  I’d never even believed in reincarnation, but here I am.  I guess reincarnation believed in me.

I know I’ve changed.  You pass by and I watch you, unblinking, hoping for even a split second of eye contact.  After being ignored for so long, even that small acknowledgment of my existence would be amazing.  But, no, you keep walking.  As always.

You look so close, yet we are separated by compressed infinity.  The entrance on top of my prison is open, always enticing me, but outside I cannot breathe and a terrible gravity holds me down.

I push towards you again, but the invisible barrier holds me back.  You still don’t look at me, but you approach me and rain flakes of disgusting nourishment down upon me.  And I grudgingly gobble them up, resentful of my betraying hunger.

Breakfast passes in silence as you read your newspaper and I watch.  If only I could read it too, but the headlines are distorted into nonsense shapes, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.

Soon you leave for work, and I have nothing to do until you return.  My new life is so empty when I’m alone.  Is this how you felt when deadlines loomed and I had to work overtime, my presence only evident by my incoming paychecks?

I return to my abode and marvel for the hundredth time at the beauty of its façade.  It is a cruel trick, but one which I allow myself to fall for time and again.  The outside is wondrous, a rainbow of colors: my castle, my home, promising even greater splendor and luxury inside.  But once across the threshold, the lie is revealed.  The inside is colorless, featureless, nothing but a hollow shell, the discarded skin of a mythical beast.  Yet it is my only refuge from the light. In here I can forget what I’ve become for a time, and can remember happier times.

My favorite memories are our trips together, once every year, a different location every time.  Backpacking across Europe, volunteering in South Africa.  My favorite trip was Australia, and diving by the Great Barrier Reef.  The vibrant colors, the lush wildlife, all existing there as it had long before people ever came across it.  How I longed to be one of those fish, living there forever in an underwater wonderland with you.

I float in the dark and remember until I can stand it no more, and I retreat from my castle.  But it is equally dark outside.  Has the sun already set?  You should have been home long before now.  I hope you didn’t get in a car accident on your way home.

I wait and wait until I feel I will die from the anticipation.  Finally, I see the door from the garage open and you come in, alive and well, thank God!  And you’re… with someone.  A man.  And… you’re holding hands.

Gloria, what are you doing, bringing a man into my house?  But I suppose it’s not my house anymore, and you are free to do what you like.  I don’t even know how long it’s been since I died.  Maybe you waited a respectful amount of time.  I can’t bring myself to look away as you kiss him, long and wet.

I grow agitated as I watch the kiss go on and on and I work myself into a froth, spinning round and round in my confinement.  I spiral up and up and I escape.  I try to run to you, to shout to you, but the poison air and crushing gravity assault me, leaving me pathetically stranded, barely able to move.

I succeed in interrupting your kiss, and you scoop me up in your hands—oh the ecstasy of your touch, the feel of your skin against mine—and then you dump me unceremoniously into my prison without a word.

You wash your hands, and then you grab him by the shirt and pull him along after you, toward the bedroom, our brief but intimate encounter already forgotten.  I am thankful, at least, that I don’t have to watch what happens next.

“I love you, Gloria,” I try to say, but there is no sound, only bubbles rising before my eyes.

 

* * *

About the Author

David Steffen is the editor of Diabolical Plots and the co-founder and administrator of The Submission Grinder.  His work has been published in very nice places like Escape Pod, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Podcastle, among others.  The rumors that he is the pupal stage of some kind of dog-cloud hybrid are exaggerations at best.

by Laurence Raphael Brothers

“Then, his mouth right by my ear, he said quietly, “This place ain’t right. I’m gonna stay a horse for a while. Just in case.””

On the third day in the desert, we stopped at a dusty old creek bed full of drift sand. I was hoping we could dig a shallow well but—”No dice,” said my horse, so we moved on.

I sighed. “At least we’re out of the rain.”

“Rain,” he said, shaking his head, “Come on, Susannah, don’t torture me like that.”

“Sorry.”

We kept going. Pioche, Nevada was supposed to be out here somewhere, said to be the last outpost of humanity in the sprawling desert covering the western half of the former United States. The change was supposed to have started around here, and the people in Pioche might have clues to reversing it. Or maybe we could call for help from the space aliens who were supposed to have landed nearby back in the day, at a place called Area 51. Both were feeble hopes, to be sure, probably no more than hoaxes or myths from a hundred years ago, but we had nothing left to us back east.

Before the change this had been scrub land, dry but livable, but now it was a barren mix of salt flats and sandy dunes. With the exception of some black specks overhead that were probably rocs or teratorns keeping watch in case we should stop moving, there was no visible sign of life, not even a cactus or a tumbleweed.

“Break time,” I said after a while. “Okay?”

“Sure thing, Sooz.” My horse formed a nipple for me in the back of his neck, just behind his silvery mane, and I sipped some of his water.

Later that night, we made a rough camp in the middle of nowhere. Since there were never any clouds or haze, the stars shone like rhinestones and the milky way shimmered overhead. My horse stood a few yards off, looking up at the sky. I wondered what he saw there, how it affected him. After a minute, he shook his head like he’d decided something, and turned to face me.

“Something’s out there,” he said.

“Really? You think so?”

“In the desert. It’s like it’s calling to me.”

I looked in his big blue eyes, put my hand on the soft skin above his nose, felt his warm breath on my cheek. Just like a regular old horse, which was pretty much the opposite of what he was.

“What about you?” he asked. “You got any feel for what’s out there?”

“Nope,” I said. “But I’m not a magical horse critter, either.”

He sighed and I petted him on the nose again. “I’m sorry, horse. Wish you didn’t have to slog all the way out here with me. I know how hard it is on you with no water around anywhere.”

“Come on, Sooz. Can’t hardly be your horse no more if we split up, now can I?”

I hugged him tight around his neck, buried my face in his mane. “Damn it, horse, don’t you make me cry.”

He snorted. “Shouldn’t waste the water. Case you were wondering, that’s why I’m still standing here on four legs stead of hugging you back the way I want to. Takes too much water for me to change right now. Got to conserve.”

“Oh. How much do you have left?”

“Three-four days at this rate.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah. This place’s as dry as I’ve ever been. You know I can dowse like anything, but it ain’t working here.”

“Shit,” I said. “It’s not your fault. It’s just— it’s not right the way you’re always doing everything for me. I don’t feel right about riding you, even.”

My horse shook his head and pulled his lips back a little from his big yellow teeth. “I go where you go. No matter what. Unless you want me to leave.”

“Oh no,” I said. “Not ever. I know when I got it good.”

“So why don’t you bind me?” he asked. “Then it really would be forever. And you could use my name, too, ‘stead of just calling me horse.”

I sighed. “We’ve been through that. It’s not fair. You’d have to do whatever I said and—”

“I’d like that, though.”

“Damn it, horse, you know I wouldn’t. And that’s why I can’t use your name, with you unbound, because maybe someone would hear me say it, and then they’d be the one to bind you.”

“I guess it makes sense,” he said. “I just— Well, let’s see what happens tomorrow. We’ll find the place for sure.”

But we didn’t. Just more desert. We started spiraling out from the place we thought Pioche should have been, looking for something, anything at all, and not finding it. On day six, we played dead for half an hour, and lured a pair of teratorns out of the sky, change-born birds so big they shouldn’t have been able to fly, but that didn’t stop them any more than being impossible stopped my horse. I got the first one with my revolver while it was considering who to take a bite out of first, and then I had to pull out my Winchester and waste a precious 30-06 cartridge on the other when it took off. My horse drained the water out of the birds in under a minute, leaving dried out husks behind.

“How much?” I asked.

“‘Nother day’s worth, maybe.”

There were no more black specks in the sky after that.

I kind of lost track of time then because I wasn’t taking near as much water as before, and I think it was making me a little crazy. Everything was hurting, especially my head and my throat. My next drink was the only thing I could think about, after a while.

It was day eight, past midnight, when my horse staggered and fell. It was either luck or him trying to spare me, because I didn’t get my leg crushed even though I wasn’t paying attention to my riding. I had to help him up, and it was scary-easy to do; he weighed no more than me by then. And where he used to be a silver-tone gray with a coat so rich it was almost like a cat’s, now he was pale, bleached white, and I could see his bones under his skin. I felt terrible, because I hadn’t noticed how bad off he was, wrapped up as I was in my own misery.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I just can’t anymore.”

The shame in his voice woke me up from the fevered trance I’d been in, and it made me as angry as I’d ever been. Angry at myself, really, but I didn’t want to admit it.

“You big old idiot!” I shouted at him, though it made my throat hurt even worse. “Why’n’t you tell me you were out of water?”

“You know why,” he said.

“Damn you. You think I want to leave you behind?”

“You got to.”

“Well, I’m not going to. You better take some water from me, and we’ll go on together till we both can’t anymore.”

“From you? No way—”

“Listen,” I said, “I know you love me. I do, okay? But you got to admit I love you too. So for once, let me be the one to give you something.”

“But—”

“God damn, horse, do what I tell you.”

I thought I was dying, but for his sake I didn’t cry out or flinch, even though I could feel the water draining out of my blood and muscles and guts and eyes and everything. But he started filling out a little, getting a touch of color back in his coat, so that was okay, and when he was done, I was still standing, so that was okay too.

We walked on, side by side, me leaning on him, and I don’t know which of us was slowing the other down, but it wasn’t exactly speedy travel. Then the sun came up, and all I saw in four directions was the hazy flat desert horizon.

“Camp?” asked my horse.

“Nah,” I said, choking on the words. “No point.”

The sun was halfway up to the zenith, and it was already hot as hell and way drier, when my horse shuddered. I thought he was going to collapse again, but he raised his head and I could see his sunken blue eyes gazing fiercely off to the west.

“Water,” he said. “That way. If I ain’t crazy, anyhow.”

I looked, but it was all flat dry sandy nothing. Any other time I’d give him shit, but not today. So we changed course and kept going.

Noon. We were neither of us going to last much longer, and I was wondering if it was okay to just quit. But my horse was still trudging onward, and I decided I’d be damned if I gave up before he did. And just like that, there it was, a big old crater not more than a hundred yards away. I was on my last legs, sure, and so was my horse, but no way could we have missed seeing it from miles off. We went up to the lip and there was just a shallow grade down to the crater floor, and half a mile away a cluster of small structures.

It took us a good fifteen minutes to make it that far. The town wasn’t much, a dozen clapboard buildings. That was strange, because where’d they get the wood from anyway, but just then neither of us was wasting time on little things like that. My map said Pioche was supposed to have a couple hundred buildings spread out over a few square miles of ground, but then it was a pre-change map, so who knew, anyway.

My horse said “Water: there,” and there turned out to be an old-timey trough with a lever pump beside it. And don’t you know it pulled water on the first swing of the handle? Yeah, right, impossible, except we were both head-down in the trough drinking the impossible water instead of arguing with it.

Half an hour later, I recovered enough to realize how messed up I’d been, and how close to dying. My head was pounding, I had the worst sore throat ever, my eyes were burning, and when I got up, the world spun around for a minute before settling down. It was wonderful. I never felt so good in my life, despite feeling like hell, because I was still alive. And my horse was… he was beautiful. He’d filled out back to normal, drinking at least twenty gallons, maybe sucking even more out of the ground or wherever the pump was connected to, and his hair was perfect. I mean, he could have been coming from some horse beauty pageant or whatever like they used to have before the change.

But he was still a horse when he didn’t need to be, and I was going to ask why when he whinnied and slobbered his tongue over my face. Then, his mouth right by my ear, he said quietly, “This place ain’t right. I’m gonna stay a horse for a while. Just in case.”

It only took five minutes to survey the buildings from the outside. It was an old-west town in miniature, with a saloon, a general store, a telegraph office (but no wires or poles), and a stage station with an attached stable that housed neither horses nor coaches. The rest of the buildings were either private homes or just didn’t have signs outside saying what they were. Back east when I was a kid, I used to watch old movies on one of the last videoplasts that was still working at Chapel Hill, and this place had the look of the westerns they made before the change.

There wasn’t a single person to be seen anywhere around. Looking through the glass window of the general store (the other establishments had wooden windows latched shut), I saw it was dark inside. The door was locked, so I went on to the saloon. That door opened when I pushed on it, but with the windows shuttered I couldn’t see much to begin with.

“What the hell,” I said, not specifically to my horse, who just happened to be standing nearby, and I walked inside.

The room was pretty dark, but apart from the light through the doorway which cut off as the door swung closed, some sunlight filtered through cracks in the shutters. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust, but then I could see well enough not to trip over anything. A bunch of wood tables were scattered around the room. Behind the brass-railed bar on the far wall, there were shelves of shot-glasses and steins, two big kegs and a double row of bottles. There was no debris, no sand, no dust even. Couldn’t be more than a couple of days since it was cleaned. But the place was obviously empty, so I headed out again.

Back with my horse, I pretended to mess around with his cinch and so on, in case anyone was watching, and under my breath I muttered. “You’re right. This place is impossible. If we hadn’t just almost gotten killed getting here, if there wasn’t a chance of finding something to help the folks back east, I’d want to turn around right now. You got any ideas?”

He shook his silver-maned head. “Nothing. What’re you gonna —” He jerked a little and I saw the way he was looking. There was motion behind the windows of the general store.

“I’m checking it out,” I said, and walked that way, my hand not far from my holster. My horse ambled along behind me, casual like he was just following me the way any old horse might do. I got close and saw a man in there, standing behind a counter. Well, what was I going to do? I opened the door and walked inside.

“Howdy, miss.” The man was around fifty, salt and pepper hair with a walrus mustache. He was wearing an apron over a gray three-piece suit with a black ribbon tie. Except that he was dressed like an actor in one of those old movies, he seemed pretty normal to me. “What can I do you for?”

“I, uh….”

“New in town, miss? Just come in?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we got a little of everything in this shop. But if we don’t got it, you ain’t getting it, cause this’s the only shop in town.” He chuckled. “Now then, want some rolling tobacco? Some snuff? Trail rations? Ammo?”

I’d got some of my composure back by now.

“Some information would be nice,” I said.

“I got some of that. And it’s on sale, too: free today. What you want to know?”

“Okay. First off, where is everybody?”

The man frowned. “Not sure what you mean by that, missy. This ain’t exactly a big town.”

“I mean you’re the only person I’ve seen so far.”

“Oh, well…. No one in their right mind’s going to walk around at noon in the high summer, are they? But you check out the saloon, I’m sure you’ll find a passel of folk. And if you’re new in town, I recommend it, cause you can probably get a room there for the night too.”

I was going to complain that I just had, but I decided to leave it be.

“Second thing, I heard Pioche was bigger than this. Like ten times bigger.”

“Pioche?” He laughed, cut himself off. “Not laughing at you, miss. But this here is Rachel. Population 34. Don’t know about no Pioche, ‘mafraid.”

I traded him a .45 cartridge for a string of rock candy and got out of there without asking him about where he got all his stuff, or about the telegraph office with no wire and the stage station with no horses. The whole deal was too weird for me just then.

When I got back to him, my horse told me, “Just saw someone go into the saloon. And now there’s music coming out of the place.”

“Uh, huh.” I told him what the shopkeeper had told me. That this was Rachel, not Pioche.

“Don’t make much difference to me. Shouldn’t be here, either way.”

“I know.”

“I’m scared,” he said. “There’s something bad here.”

I’d never even imagined my horse might be scared of anything. I wanted to hug and comfort him, but I didn’t because it would’ve looked weird if anyone was watching. So I just muttered in his ear, instead.

“I’m scared, too. But I guess we better check out that saloon again. Be silly to run away without finding anything out, right?”

“Suppose so,” he said, but he didn’t mean it.

Before I even got to the door, I could see the window shutters were open, and I could hear a piano playing inside. And when I entered, there wasn’t just one person in the room but eight, the saloon keeper behind the bar, two cowboy-looking men bellied up to the bar with a bottle between them, four townies sitting around a table playing cards, and a piano-player at a small upright I hadn’t noticed the first time through. He was smoking a cheroot and playing “Beautiful Dreamer.” But where had they come from? My horse had only mentioned one person going in, and he could hardly have missed the others.

There’s a standard scene in those old movies where the gunslinger steps into the saloon and the music stops and everyone stares at him. Not this time. Everyone just kept on doing what they were doing. None of them looked to be armed, and at first glance they seemed like ordinary folks except for the old-time outfits. I hesitated because right now more than anything I wanted to get on my horse and head on out of this place. But I steeled myself and walked up to the bar.

“Howdy,” I said, because that’s how it goes in the movies, and the saloon keeper nodded at me. She was a tall woman with weathered brown skin and rich russet hair, not young or old, and her eyes were an amazing apple green. But there was something cold about her appearance, something cruel hiding behind her smile. I realized I’d seen the same thing in the shopkeeper’s face, but I’d shrugged it off. In the woman, it seemed more blatant, more forceful, and more terrifying too.

“What’ll you have?” she asked.

“Whiskey,” I managed, still pretending I was in a movie. “Straight up.”

She slapped a shot-glass down on the bar top with a satisfying crack and filled it just to the rim from an unlabeled bottle. I tapped it back. Not bad. At this point something was supposed to happen, like a bad guy barging in, but nothing did.

“You take barter?” I asked.

She shook her head. “We don’t get many visitors. Your drinks’re free. Welcome to Rachel.”

She poured me another; I drank it in two sips. Warmth blossomed in my throat and belly. I could feel the buzz, which was alarming after just two shots, but I guess the almost-dying-of-thirst thing takes it out of you. No one paid me much attention; the saloon keeper didn’t say anything more; and no gunmen showed up, either. I sighed. Wasn’t going to get anywhere this way.

At last I said, “Little town like this, I figure if anyone’s in charge, it’s the saloon keeper.”

She smiled, showing white, even teeth. “Mebbe so.”

“Don’t want to be rude,” I said.

“You ain’t been yet.”

“Okay, then. What the actual fuck is going on here?”

I said that pretty loud, and this time I got a reaction from the room. The piano guy stopped playing; the four at the table turned to look at me; and the two men further down the bar turned, too. No one spoke at all for a moment.

“Fair question,” said the saloon keeper, then, and the others turned back to their piano, their drinks, and their game. “I ain’t gonna answer it today.”

“But—”

“Gonna set you up with a boarding house room across the way, draw you a bath, get you some dinner later, let you have a night’s rest on a proper bed, then tomorrow’ll be for answers. ‘Kay?”

I hesitated. All those things sounded pretty good, I had to admit. I was worn down with travel and dehydration, not to mention a whole lot of worrying. It wasn’t like I could just make her talk if she didn’t want to, anyway. “Okay.”

“Good! Petey, show her a room, make sure it’s set up nice, and Jen, you do her bath, you hear?”

Two of the card-players got up. They all looked different from one another, but I thought they had the same hard eyes, the same meanness lurking behind their bland expressions. The man tipped his hat, and the woman smiled at me. “I’ll start the hot water,” she said, and left ahead of me.

“Right this way,” said the man, and I followed him outside.

“Got to see to my horse, first.”

“Sure thing. Stable ain’t seen much use lately, but there should be some oats and dried fruit and like that still there.” He pointed across the way. “That place’ll be yours tonight. I’ll just make sure you got clean sheets and all, and when you’re done with your horse, Jen’ll have your bath ready for you too.”

I led my horse over to the little stable, caught him up to date on what was going on.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It just ain’t natural, none of this is.”

I thumped his side. “You should talk, horse.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. I know. And I know you’re natural, too; just a little weird, is all.”

He licked my face and I had to laugh. “Want some rock candy?”

“That stuff’ll rot your teeth,” he said. “But I’ll keep watch. Anything come up, just shout and I’ll get you out of it.”

“Will do.”

The hot bath turned out to be the third nicest thing I’d ever had done for me. The second nicest was dinner: a delicious roast with greens and potatoes on the side plus a bowl of cold ice cream afterwards. The nicest came when the sun finally set, and I went to bed. Just as I’d settled in among the crisp white linens and the fluffy pillows and the soft down comforter, I heard a rapping at the shuttered window. I went to look with my gun in my hand, and there he was.

“Horse!”

“Sorry,” he said, “I just couldn’t bear it no more. You gonna let me in?”

“Get in, quick, before someone sees you!”

He clambered through the window in his human form, silver-blue skin and long shimmery-metallic hair and every other part of him exposed because he wasn’t wearing any clothes.

I was going to play at being angry with him, but the truth is I couldn’t wait any more myself, so I threw myself at him, and he caught me like I was nothing; and he carried me to that bed. You don’t need to know any more than that what we did, except I’ll say he didn’t ever get tired, he could tell, somehow, everything I wanted and when I wanted it, and when what I wanted was to satisfy him, he let me do that too. In the end, I knew that I had done just that, satisfied him I mean, and I went to sleep in his arms.

When I got up the next morning, the new-risen sun pouring bloody light through my open window, I felt kind of tragic not having my horse there. Of course, he’d snuck out after I fell asleep to go back to being a horse again and not alarm the locals, assuming the locals were capable of being alarmed, which I wasn’t so sure of.

I walked over to the stable first thing, and my horse was fine, but “Ghost town again,” he said. “I’m pretty sure there was nobody in any of the houses overnight.”

“Shit. You’re the one who knows about magic. And you got no idea?”

“I didn’t go to no school for this stuff,” he said. “So I don’t know what all is going on here. I’ll tell you one thing, though, I did figure out.”

“Yeah?”

“You know I can dowse pretty good. Well, when we first got here, I was so thirsty I didn’t stop to wonder where all this water they had was coming from.”

“I don’t blame you. I think I lost half an hour myself, just pumping and drinking.”

“Ha,” he said. “The two of us, snuffling around in that trough together. I bet we looked cute.”

“You think they were watching?”

“Dunno. Probably maybe, I guess? But what I wanted to say is on the way back here last night, I stopped by the trough again, cause water’s good, right? Except this time I tried to figure out where it was coming from. In my head, like. And I followed it a long way. There’s some kind of cistern thing right there below the pump, but it’s got a channel the water feeds into. And it ain’t like regular groundwater, a layer down there mixed in with the earth. It’s like a goddamn pipe is what it is. It goes down and down all the way.”

“All the way?”

“All the way to the center.”

“You don’t mean the center of the Earth, do you, horse?”

He tossed his head. “Dunno. Know it’s impossible, but that’s what it seemed like to me. But that’s not all. I was following that water channel and I felt it, something else down there. Something mixed in with the water”

“You don’t know what it was?”

“Nope. Powerful stuff, though. Almost scary. I had the feeling I knew it from somewhere, too. But I couldn’t remember where. Frustrating.”

“Okaaay. Anything you think I should do about it?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I really got no idea. Just thought you should know.”

I left him then and ambled over to the saloon. The door was open, but with no one inside. There was a platter on one of the tables, though, with griddle cakes, eggs, bacon, hash-browns, and coffee, piping hot like it just came out of the kitchen, not that this saloon even had a kitchen. Like whoever made it knew I was going to be coming just this minute and started cooking it at the right moment fifteen minutes ago or whatever. And it occurred to me I hadn’t wondered last night where my dinner came from, either. No animals here, no crops, and all this food looked and tasted fresh and delicious.

“Hope you liked it.”

I’d just finished my last bite. I looked up and there she was, the saloon keeper behind the bar like she’d always been there.

“It was great,” I said. “Haven’t eaten this well since— all my life, I guess.”

“Thanks. Always like to see a person who enjoys their food.”

Her words were just what you’d want them to be if you were me, friendly and kind and all that. But there was that something in her face that scared me. I wished I didn’t have to be there, that I didn’t have to be beholden to her, but I couldn’t think of any way out of this situation.

At last I said, “I guess you’re not even pretending anymore you’re regular folks.”

“Never said we were, did we?”

She had me there. “But why all the play-acting and… why all this?”

“We going to get started on real talking, we better have your friend here too, don’t you think?”

Figures she knew all along. I got hot for a minute, thinking maybe she was watching us last night, and then I shrugged inside. Not like it mattered, really.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll get him.”

“No need. I’ll do it.” But she didn’t move, just smiled at me in a way she might have meant to be kindly, but I thought looked downright vicious. Like a cougar, maybe, or one of those griffins we were starting to get back east, contemplating a deer with a broken leg, anticipating a meal. A minute later the man she’d called Petey led my horse into the saloon. He was in his human form, dressed this time in clean new denim, cowboy boots, and a T-shirt that read “Welcome to the Little A’Le’Inn” and had a picture of a bug-eyed critter on it.

My horse took a chair at my table, scooted it over so I could feel his presence and put his hand on my shoulder. I felt nerves I didn’t know were tensed up calming down, and I put my hand on his, and we just looked in each other’s eyes for a bit. It was rude, maybe, but whatever. I glanced up and Petey was gone, vanished I guess back to wherever he’d come from, but the saloon keeper was still there, staring at us.

“I promised I’d give you answers,” she said, “but first, tell me why you came. I mean, I know why, but it wasn’t no easy journey, that’s for sure.”

“I guess that’s fair,” I said. “You know how fucked up things are back east?”

“Maybe I do,” she said. “But tell me, anyway.”

“Every year, the desert takes more land. Crops are failing, they never grew right after the change, but lately they’re even worse. Seed’s no good anymore. What wildlife is left is mostly mutants and monsters. The ocean’s poisoned too, it’s all salt and green slime, and there’s no fish left. We’re dying out, is what’s happening.”

“Bad news,” she said. “But why come here?”

“We still got a few things left over from before the change. Videoplasts and some comps and phones and stuff that run on solar and don’t need a network. Some folks who study the old times, they were looking into how the change started. And they found out two things. First, the change seems like it began here, a hundred years ago or so. Second, before the change there was a place around here called Area 51. Supposed to be a place where aliens came, space aliens, you know?”

“Like on this shirt your Petey gave me,” offered my horse.

The saloon keeper said. “Yep. That’s a gen-u-ine pre-change tourist-trade shirt you got there, boy.”

I took a closer look at it. I wasn’t impressed. Seemed kinda shoddy, really. But then it was over a hundred years old.

“Anyway,” I said, “It wasn’t much of a hope, but those… those scholars figured that there was nothing else they could do to fix things, and there was at least a chance something could be found out from around here. They asked me because with my horse we stood a chance of getting through the desert. And if there were such things as space aliens, they might be the only ones who could help us, if we could just convince them to do it.”

“Seems mighty thin to me.”

“Yeah. But we had nothing better to try. And as we traveled out west, we began to hear stories about a town still hanging on in the middle of nowhere. No one had been out that far west for years and years because of the desert, but there were still stories being told. Last settlement with people was Grand Junction, and they named the place. Pioche, they said it was. So we wanted to find out if the stories were true, and—”

“And you found us.”

“Yeah. Is it my turn to ask questions yet?”

“Almost. What about you, Mr. Kayful Door? Why are you here?”

“That ain’t my name,” said my horse.

“No, but it’s what you are. What the old-time Celts used to call your kind. Water-horse. And if you got a name, why don’t your girl here use it?”

“She ain’t my girl. I’m her horse.”

“The hell I’m not,” I said. And he looked at me and I looked at him, and we had another of those moments, but this time we were sharing something, something that said don’t trust her more than you can throw her.

The saloon keeper walked out from behind her bar and sat down at our table. I had to force myself not to shy away from her.

“Now it’s my turn,” she said. “Lemme give you some ancient history. Once upon a time history, right?”

“Okay, shoot.”

“Once upon a time, there was something big and scary outside the world, and it wanted to eat all the world’s magic.”

“Wait up. There wasn’t any magic before the change.”

“But there was. Way far back. Anyhow, the world-spirit back then figured she couldn’t fight the thing, the eater, so she hid all the magic away in a secret world down deep inside this one where the bad old thing couldn’t find it. That was the first change, when all the magic in the world went away. And almost all the magic folk with it. Like you, Mr. Horse.”

“Hold up,” he said. “I never—”

“Yeah, you’re special. Stubborn-like, I bet, so you didn’t go with ’em, and you must’ve turned into a dumb old horse for a long time before the change woke you back up again. Wonder how you got here from Wales, anyhow. Must have been quite a story.”

“Don’t remember,” he said. “Don’t remember anything from back then. Only thing I remember now is Sooz finding me running wild a couple years back. She woke me right up.”

The saloon-keeper shrugged. “Anyhow, the world-spirit’s trick worked for a time. The eater went away and ate some other worlds instead. Just sucked ’em dry. But after a while it come back. Cause it was starving by then, starving to death almost. It had run out of food, and even with no magic around it still liked eating the life out of a world, ’cause that was better than nothing. So it latched onto this world, eating and eating, and after a while it found the secret world where the great spirit was hiding, and it drug her back out again. So we got the second change, the two worlds connected again, with magic coming back and all, but with the world pretty well ruined due to all the eating the big bad had already done.”

“That sucks for us, then.”

“Don’t it? But anyways, there’s always been a few connecting spots between the worlds, because they were never completely separate. And it turns out this place is one of them.”

“What?”

“Yeah. The eater struck here first, ’cause it sensed a way down to the spirit world. That’s why it’s so dead everywhere around here ‘cept this little spot, where there’s a link all the way down there.”

“You sure got a way of not answering a question and taking forever about it, too,” said my horse.

The saloon keeper kept her face calm, but inside I felt like she was snarling. It took her a moment to answer, then she said, “You got me there. Been a long time since I had anyone to talk to but my own shadows. What did you want to know that I ain’t telling?”

My horse said, “First off, what’s the deal with this place? Why the fake town and fake people? And second, we need help, not stories. We’re dying off. We don’t care about the old world, where magic come from, nothing like that. We don’t got the time to care.”

“I was getting there. But to answer you straight, I’ve been stuck here for a hundred years all alone. Maybe I went a little crazy after a while. Got to distracting myself with games and such, but all this time I was sending out a calling, too. Hoping to snag some folks like you to brave the desert and make it here. Anyhow, it took me a while to wake up and get back to myself after you finally showed. Sorry ’bout that.”

She smiled again, and it seemed to me like she was showing her fangs more than being polite, but she didn’t seem to realize what it looked like, just kept on talking.

“So that was your number one. Number two, I got all this reserve… essence you could call it, magical stuff, stored up from back when the two worlds were separate. Stored way down deep, along with all that other world’s water. But I’m stuck here ’cause of this damn desert.”

“That’s a problem for you?”

“Yeah. See it’s totally dead, so I can’t cross it myself. I can only go where there’s living stuff, at least a little of it. Been stuck here all this time, hoping someone like you would come. And here you are. So all you got to do is carry me across…. And I’ll do it. I’ll fix the world.”

I guess she’d been building to this the whole time, but it still felt like she hit me between the eyes with a mallet. I had to ask. “You’re her? The world-spirit you were talking about?”

“Used to be, anyways. Maybe will be again someday.”

“Okay. Okay. What about the eater? Isn’t it still waiting to get you?”

“Oh no,” she said. “It’s dead now. Or it’s gone. Think it starved to death. So I can come out. That’s why you’re here, you understand? I called you. Your scholars back east, they heard me, and those refugees in Colorado, they heard me, and you heard me too, down deep somewhere, which is why you came all this way across the desert even though you nearly got yourselves killed doing it.”

My horse took my hand, and he didn’t say anything, but I could tell what he was thinking. Not because magic or whatever but because, well, yeah. There was no way we were going to have any chance to talk this out without her listening in on us. I just had to hope she didn’t know what I was thinking, and that she didn’t know people enough to be able to guess, either. So I squeezed my horse’s hand, and he smiled at the saloon keeper and said, “So, what do we gotta do, then?”

* * *

Three days later, we were back in that damn desert again, this time heading straight home instead of wandering around like before. By my reckoning, we were about halfway between Rachel and the beginning of the regular kind of desert with scrub and scorpions and groundwater, where the saloon keeper said she wanted to get to. She’d jogged beside us for three days, totally unaffected by the heat, the lack of water, everything. She just kept a hand on my horse the whole time, even while we were sleeping, I guess because of that connection to something living she said she needed.

The sun was just setting, the red orb glowering on the western horizon like a bloodshot eye. My horse pulled up to a stop, and I dismounted. Around here, the desert was a flat salt plain, broken up into big cracked tiles like someone’s messed up bathroom floor from before the change. There was a thin layer of fine sand on top of everything, but not so much you couldn’t feel the hard desert floor under your feet. Hard enough so my horse clip-clopped on top of it, instead of punching through the crust with his hooves.

“Time to camp?” asked the saloon keeper.

“Nope,” I said. “Time to say goodbye.”

“Say what, now?”

I drew my revolver and pointed it at her, just in case it would do some good. You never know. “This is where you get off.”

Give her credit. She didn’t waste our time pretending she had no idea what I was talking about.

“How long did you know?”

“Almost from the start,” I said. “I mean, you’re creepy as hell. But when you said the eater had died just like that, I was certain.”

“Damn. I went to a lot of trouble making that food for you, too. Didn’t work, huh?”

“Yeah, no. Figures you’d put in extra effort on stuff to eat.”

She shrugged. “So, what’s your plan? Going to shoot me? Is that it?”

“Plan?” I shook my head. “No plan. Just figured you can’t get across the desert without us, and it’d be best to ditch you right in the middle of it. And that part of what you told us must be true, too, or you’d already’ve eaten us all up, back east. Somehow you got trapped here, I guess. Maybe the real world-spirit sucked you in, if you didn’t make her up. But either way, best if you just die right here, I mean, begging your pardon.”

“You figuring to die along with me?”

My horse flinched at that, and I think he would have reared up and pulled back from her, but the saloon keeper was keeping some kind of grip on him, even though she just had a hand up on his withers, and he shuddered and rolled his eyes when he found he couldn’t break away.

“We only got a few years left anyways,” I said. “No sense in dragging it out. Best night I’m ever going to have I already had, thanks to you. It’s all gonna be downhill from there. But we’ll see what you can do in a minute. Maybe we won’t die after all. Maybe you’re just bluffing.”

“The best night of your life, thanks to me. You don’t feel bad about that? About stranding me here to die?”

“I sure do.” I thumbed back the hammer on my gun. “Makes me sick to think about it. What you did for me. For us. Not so sick I’m not going to kill you, though.”

The saloon keeper laughed. It was mean laughter, but it was honest, too. She really thought it was funny.

“All right,” she said. “All right. You got me fair and square, but it don’t matter. See, it was all over and done with when you got into Rachel and woke me up. Nothing you can do to me here. Guns sure won’t work. I mean, you know what I am.”

I looked into her eyes, and all at once I saw it. The spaces between the stars. The place she came from. The void. The darkness. The hunger. It was all there. I knew she was right. There wasn’t any point in pulling the trigger.

“Okay,” I said. “But you’re still stuck here. If you could have crossed the desert on your own, you’d already have done it. We sure ain’t taking you any further.”

“Oh,” she said. “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t need you, girl. I was just taking you with me for fun, so you could see what I was gonna do when I got free. What I need is him. And I got him, too.”

My horse screamed then, and he did rear up, but she kept her grip on him. That’s when I pulled the trigger. Six times, and I put six bullets in her, two in the chest, two in the head, right through her mean, snarling mouth, and two in the chest again. She staggered back, and blood gushed out of her, and for a moment I thought I might actually have done something. But then her body just fell apart into black smoky stuff, and it all swirled around my horse and into his nostrils and his eyes and like that, and he came down on his hooves all at once, like he wasn’t comfortable with four feet anymore.

“Now, girl,” he said, or she did, “you get up on my back, and I’ll show you how the world ends.”

A compulsion grabbed me, like I’d turned into a marionette. I dropped the gun I was trying to reload, and I stumbled over to my horse, herky-jerky. I found I could still talk, which was a relief. “What have you done to him?”

“Same thing I did to the world spirit. I’m inside your sweet little stallion, and he’s inside me. And soon all of you little grub people will be in me, too. And every animal and every tree and every paramecium, but you’ll be last of all. Ain’t you lucky? And then I’ll be moving on, and maybe I’ll find somewhere new to eat, and maybe I won’t, but you won’t be around to care.”

“You’re inside him, too?” She was trying to make me mount up, but it was awkward, because she was having trouble getting my foot into the stirrup. It slipped out and I fell, and she made him laugh while she forced me back to my feet.

“That’s right, girl. We’re two parts of a whole, but I’m a million times stronger. That’s how it goes. Everything I eat becomes me, sooner or later. He’s fighting back, you know, but there ain’t nothing he can do because I’ve eaten a million worlds and even diminished as I am, he’s just one little old water-horse. Takes a while to digest folks, till they’re all gone, you know. He’ll be screaming on the inside, and you’ll be screaming on the outside. Until the end of the world, and I eat you too. Ain’t that nice?”

She got my foot seated in the stirrup this time, and she started puppeting me into the saddle.

“Well, okay then,” I said. “In that case, Milafon Ysbrid, I name your true name, and I bind you to me.”

“What?”

My horse reared up, and since I wasn’t seated properly yet I just fell backwards off his rump. I landed hard, smacking my head against the salt tile floor, but nothing was broken. I could still talk, so I said, “Milafon Ysbrid, I name you. You are mine, and you always will be mine.”

She screamed a terrible equine scream with his lungs, and I think she was trying to do something, to control me, to shut me up, maybe, but whatever magic or power she’d been using on me didn’t work anymore, because it couldn’t. I struggled to my feet. Too late it occurred to her, she was in a horse’s body, and she could maybe stomp me with it, but even as she was turning to try it, I told her, “Milafon Ysbrid! I’ve named you three times! You’re mine, now and forever!”

And it was true. I could feel him now, and her too, like they were both part of me. It was like I’d grown a second heart, a huge and powerful one too, only it was rotten with cancer, shot through with corruption, and in its center, a kernel, a seed, a mote of infinite coldness and darkness— An awful thing, the eater of worlds, but she was mine now, just like he was, and there was nothing she could do to resist my will.

I took a step toward my horse, and I put my hand on his soft nose. He made a terrible choking noise, and he snorted out a writhing wormy thing, cold from the depths of interstellar space, right into my hand. I dropped her to the ground, and ground my boot heel into her, and because she was part of me, I could feel her breaking up, dissipating, and fading away. It was like having my heart cut out of me then, and I staggered and would have fallen except my horse had his arms around me and was holding me up.

“Told you I wanted you to bind me,” he whispered into my ear.

“Oh yeah? What’s my name, then?”

“Susannah, but— oh, you don’t mean it, do you?”

“I do,” I said. “My full name. Three times.”

“It ain’t gonna work,” he said. “It can’t work. You’re a human. You’re not the kind to be bound. And even if it could, I couldn’t be the one to bind you. It don’t work that way.”

“Try it.”

“But—”

“For me,” I said. “Please. It’s what I want.”

He stopped protesting. “Susannah Leah Apterbach, will you be mine?”

“Forever,” I said.

He told me my name twice more; and I could feel the balance shifting, and like that I was a part of him, the same way he was a part of me. For a while we just sat there together holding hands, he in his human form, me in mine, exploring one another from the inside out, and by the time we were done, it was full dark and the stars were out, shining bright in the sky overhead.

“Well, okay, then,” he said at last. “So it did work. But about that forever thing, the world you know, we only got—”

“A few more years? I think we got more than that, horse.”

“What?”

I pointed. “Three days, thataway. All the water the world-spirit got stowed away in her secret world. All the essence stuff the eater latched onto to make that faked-up town. It’s all there, and it’s waiting for us.”

“But—”

“You’ll see. It’s all going to work out. We’re two parts of a whole, now, can’t you feel it? It’s all there waiting for us.”

“Oh… oh, yeah. It really is.”

“Come on then,” I told him. And a minute later, if you’d been there, you’d’ve seen two horses, a stallion and a mare, galloping side by side through the desert, galloping together under the bright shining stars.

 

* * *

About the Author

Laurence Raphael Brothers (he/him) is a writer and a technologist. He has published around 30 short stories in magazines such as Nature, PodCastle, and Galaxy’s Edge. His WWI-era fantasy novel Twilight Patrol and his romantic urban fantasy novella The Demons of Wall Street are available on Amazon.

by K. C. Mead-Brewer

“They begin to wonder if a horse can also be a witch.”

No one gave it a second thought. Lots of people attend Open House events for the free cookies or wine, or maybe just to admire a stranger’s shiplap and crown molding, bathroom mirrors in the shapes of seashells. No, the neighborhood didn’t begin to worry until a few days later when the zippy little realtor came out of the house smiling at the horse and the horse nodding back at him.

What does a horse want with the house on the corner? It normally wouldn’t be a big deal except that more than a few people in the neighborhood are allergic to hay and the horse’s (truly exceptional) diamond shoes keep cracking the sidewalk.

“Her head weighs the same as my entire brother!” the Lightfoot’s girl was heard whispering to another. The neighborhood children are mystified by all the new horse-facts they’re learning now. (It never really occurred to them to look up horse stuff before.) How much does a horse heart weigh? How much do horses poop? Has a horse ever been to outer-space? How many lungs do horses have? Are horses good at keeping secrets?

* * *

They begin to wonder if the horse might be keeping secrets.

* * *

Spying children must be startled off the horse’s porch like birds nearly every day now. The clever ones have started throwing toys over the horse’s fence for the excuse to climb into her yard and fetch them.

Scaling her fence, the children look in upon the lushest garden: all kinds of lettuces, lumpy rainbow tomatoes, an apple tree dotted with tiny red and yellow apples, strange herbs with sticky leaves, and a long row of—one of the Robertson girls calls it right away, probably thanks to all those Girl Empowerment camps where they learn about medicinal plants and old myths and—rampion. “It’s also known as Rapunzel,” she explains with some importance.

They try to remember how long the horse’s mane is, if they could use it to climb a tower. They begin to wonder if a horse can also be a witch. (Perhaps this is one of her secrets.)

The children hush each other as they explore the horse’s garden, smelling its savory muds and fruits, looking for things to steal. Instead they find themselves wondering where all these other trees came from and what about those rain-slicked boulders and how long have they been walking?

* * *

As you might imagine, the neighborhood parents want to know what’s become of their children.

“Where did you leave them?” the horse replies. “Next time try stacking them like the books at the library. Alphabetical order is so reassuring, don’t you think? Like a smile full of strong, healthy teeth.”

The horse bares her great teeth in example, but it isn’t at all reassuring to the parents.

The parents wander the neighborhood that’s suddenly empty of their children, the planned and unplanned offspring they built their lives around. They can’t remember their own Open Houses or why they settled here. They weren’t trained for this. They weren’t prepared to think of themselves as their own future.

“What now?” they ask back and forth, a desperate echolocation. “What now?” “What now?”

* * *

The children age as they venture deeper into the horse’s garden, deeper and deeper until they come out the other side and discover themselves on the moon.

“This sure isn’t Kansas,” they joke, turning in circles. They’re as tall as adults now, muscled and boobed and hairy. They hold hands, they kiss. They smell like old bedsheets.

Examining their dusty path, they realize the moon’s craters aren’t craters at all but ancient hoofprints.

It never occurred to them to wonder where horses came from before Earth, nor what it might be like to live on the moon. Will they need special shoes? Will they meet many astronauts? When did the horses first leave the moon, and has it always been this lovely? Its shadows so deep and gentle? Its dirt so soft and cool?

They begin to wonder if they might have secret knowledge of their own now, to find so much promise in a world that others have left for dead.

 

* * *

About the Author

K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Ithaca, NY. Her fiction appears in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Joyland Magazine, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Tin House’s 2018 Winter Workshop for Short Fiction and of the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.

by Adele Gardner

“When Nigel was five, he told her that for his next birthday present, he wanted to be a cat.”

On his second birthday, Carolina Wannemacher took her son out in his stroller to shop for a new suit.  She had instructed him carefully.  When the clerk arrived, Nigel lay inert in the harness, just a trifle more still than a soundly sleeping toddler.  As Carolina carefully worked the suit onto the artificially stiff limbs, the clerk gave her an odd look.  “Are you sure you want to spend the money?  A little one like that grows so fast.”

“He’s a doll, you see,” Carolina said seriously, keeping her attention focused on Nigel.  He was being so good.  Following his programming perfectly.  Not an eyelash twitched.

The tag on the clerk’s navy blue jacket named her Lotte.  She seemed happy with Carolina’s explanation.  Lotte scarcely even batted an eye when Carolina said she wanted the suits a size too large, as if the doll would grow into them.

When Lotte retreated behind the staff doors, Carolina heard laughter and caught a glimpse of Lotte talking to another clerk.  Of course, Lotte would want to share the eccentricities of her client.  Carolina took the opportunity to confer with Nigel about his likes and dislikes.

When Lotte returned with several more suits to try, she told Carolina that every woman was entitled to a hobby, and that she herself was making a family of ball-jointed dolls from her favorite fantasy series and sewing the clothes herself.  She’d won an award at Dragon Con.

Lotte admired the delicate, realistic modeling of Nigel’s face, her finger tracing the weave of the pinstripe on Nigel’s baby limbs.  Lotte murmured, a wistful note in her voice, “He looks so alive.  I wish I knew how you did it.”

Carolina smiled slightly.  “That’s a trade secret.”

Lotte’s face fell.  She drew back, her mouth pinched.  “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” Carolina said.  “I’ve been building prototypes since I was about his size.  After a while you just get good at something.”

Lotte’s face brightened, as if Carolina had said the magic words.  “Well, there’s hope for me then,” she said.  And as Carolina made her choices and checked out, Lotte added, “I hope you don’t mind, but I wish you’d think about sharing your patterns online.  I mean, you’re really talented.”

Feeling acutely aware of the store camera and Lotte’s shy smile, Carolina said, “You might have something there.”

She wheeled the stroller onto the sidewalk.  Passersby chatted to invisible friends via Bluetooth, but Carolina waited a block before she said, “Good job, Nigel.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“I should have done a better job.  She actually believed you were a doll.”

Those uncannily human blue eyes looked up at her.  “Don’t worry, Mom, you did the best you could.”

“Next birthday, Nigel.  Next birthday I’ll do better, I promise.”

“Can we have friends over?  I’d like to invite Audrey.  She seems nice.”

Carolina fell silent as a man in a business suit passed her with a half-smiling nod, which she returned gravely.  She considered.  Audrey was fifteen, an online pal of Nigel’s, compatible in many ways.  Home-schooled, a child prodigy who played cello with the symphony, Audrey would probably sympathize with Nigel’s differences from other children, especially his advanced intelligence.  But she was sheltered, and quite close to her mom.  Was it wise to trust her with the secret?

Nigel was a healthy, growing boy, but arranging playdates was difficult.  Though plenty of adults in Carolina’s generation had been enthusiastically building robots since they were tiny tots receiving their robotics and circuits kits from Santa, most of these were far more limited than Nigel.  Carolina didn’t want to reveal just how advanced he was.  And the human kids who might be more intellectually compatible carried too much risk of letting the cat out of the bag.

At her continued silence, a cloud passed over Nigel’s face.  “Mom?  Her cello sounds so beautiful with my harpsichord.  I thought we might have a concert.”

Her heart hurt.  Was she doing right by him?  He looked up at her with such trust in that little-boy face, his skin as creamy as her own, his hair in blond curls modeled on her little brother’s at that age.  “She’s a little young for you, honey.  Maybe next year.  A lot of girls mature when they turn sixteen.”

Nigel sighed, a mannerism he’d picked up from her.  But he settled back in the stroller contentedly enough.  He started humming Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Pièces de Clavecins en Concert, performing both the harpsichord and cello parts, adding improvisations in the baroque style and harmonizing with himself, his tripled and quadrupled voice eerie and beautiful in his perfect, little-boy pitch.

Buying a suit had been his birthday wish.  He wanted to follow Audrey’s lead and take up the traditional position of the child prodigy, sharing his skills with an audience, even if only a virtual one.  He was too young to be self-conscious enough for stage fright.  He didn’t even know he should be scared.

Or what he, her robot child, had to fear.

* * *

Carolina Wannemacher worked at Hilliard Public Library and lived with five cats, who loved her fiercely and followed her from room to room with loud purrs, rubbing her legs and nuzzling her feet and ankles.

The library was good to her.  She enjoyed the supportive, creative atmosphere.  Among the treats she prized most was the chance to lead and attend Maker programs.  Coding, robotics, 3-D printing—she had plenty of skills to share with their patrons.  Carolina had been designing robots since childhood.  Her son Nigel was the great project of her life, and she built him in the Maker Spaces of many libraries.  She was careful to create only individual parts at each location, staying within the printing limits per patron while avoiding anyone guessing what she built.

Each year she made Nigel a new birthday suit, a human frame one developmental step up from his prior body, with an expanded brain to match.  She reasoned that his best chance to acquire not just sentience but wisdom would be to start as a little child, then grow as any human would.  She’d teach him all she could about what was good in life, how to love, what mistakes to avoid; she’d share memories of family and the best of human culture.  She wanted him to have the chance to appreciate this wonderful life, not simply receive a data dump.  The best way she knew to create depth was the same lifetime commitment her parents had made to her.

When Nigel was five, he told her that for his next birthday present, he wanted to be a cat.  She smiled and pretended surprise.  Though she wondered if it was a good idea at this developmental stage, she loved cats and preferred their company to that of most humans.  Her five cats were highly affectionate, creative, and intelligent, and Nigel needed to build his socialization skills.

Human science had come a long way in translating the complex speech of fellow Earthlings, but with at least as many multisensory as verbal cues, Cat was a tough nut to crack.  Carolina started with a translation algorithm based on the latest in talking cat collars from Japan and added data from veterinarians, cat behaviorists, and her own experience.  Maybe Nigel could fill in some of the blanks.

Nigel loved being a cat.  Carolina had thought he would.  He’d been romping with the cats on all fours since birth; in many ways, he grew up speaking Cat.  He chose to be a calico female whom he named Duchess.  Carolina let him help sculpt the details, just as she’d helped her grandma quilt when she was little.

Though she equipped Duchess with a voice synthesizer for human speech, the new calico sported all the feline communication devices—vocal, olfactory, tactile, and body language.  When Duchess talked to Carolina, the other cats shied away from the mysterious human voice issuing from the cat’s body.  Soon Duchess lifted her furry chin, held her whiskers high, and spoke to Carolina only in Cat with other felines present.

Duchess imitated the other cats, learning the delicate language of touch and brush, the infinite meanings in the quirk of a whisker.  She palled around, tangled with them, snuggled and slept with them.  She shared their food, water, and litterboxes as part of the cat communications network.

Carolina worried at first that Duchess needed more intellectual stimulation, both for education and entertainment, but her child pleaded earnestly for the Cat Immersion Experience.  Being a cat was a full-time job.

Embracing the cats’ Eternal Present, Duchess joined in group grooming, cleaning Moonie’s ears, then submitting to Sebastian’s face-wash.  She formed part of the patchwork fur pattern when the cats curled in a sunny heap, nestling her chin in Cleo’s side while Rocco draped his arm across her back.  In the evenings, Duchess rushed with all the cats to greet Carolina and sit with her.  It felt strange at first to stroke her child’s silky head and scratch around cat ears and chin, but Duchess purred, looking up at Carolina with a cat’s pure love.

One day, when Carolina tossed tiny toy mice and fishes, Max’s acrobatic leap landed him on Duchess’s back.  Duchess yowled in pain and flattened to the ground.  Carolina ran over and scooped her up.  Not for the first time as a robot’s mother, worry smote Carolina.  To fit all of Nigel’s boy-sized brain in the cat, Carolina had positioned parts in places normally reserved for internal organs.  “Baby, are you all right?”

Duchess meowed a complaint.  What to do?  No emergency vet would treat a robot cat.

Talking to Duchess soothingly—she always kept her cats informed—Carolina said, “Don’t worry, Duchess.  I’m just going to do some diagnostics.  Make sure everything’s okay.”

Duchess issued a raspy protest; her claws lightly pricked Carolina’s arm.  Carolina ignored this, stroking her synthetic fur as she hooked Duchess up.  Rocco ran over to check on the calico, who hid her face in Rocco’s ruff.

Fortunately, the spine had protected the brain, as it should.  But when Carolina released the calico, Duchess skittered away, then ignored Carolina, grooming herself with total concentration as if the examination had been an affront to feline dignity.

Carolina’s anxiety did not disperse as easily.  She’d been too lax.  Introducing a robot into a clowder of cats might be just as dangerous as it was fun.  Now that she looked more sharply, she thought Moonie might be losing weight.  Maybe he’d just been playing extra hard with a sixth cat in the house, or faced too much competition for food.  She hovered, making sure the big cats didn’t chase him from his bowl.  But Moonie ate less and less, though he still ran to her when she dished out wet food.

No one could discover what was wrong.  The specialist prescribed medicines against every possible illness; this only made his appetite worse.  Carolina dropped everything to care for him, but he slipped through her fingers like water.

The other cats worried.  Whenever Moonie emerged from Carolina’s cat-hospital bedroom, they washed him, touched noses, and snuggled close, offering comfort.  Duchess followed Moonie everywhere.  Carolina took her child aside, holding Duchess on her shoulder and petting her while she explained how sick Moonie was.  Duchess purred into Carolina’s ear.  The little calico licked Carolina’s face.

Then, all at once, there was no more time.  Packing Moonie in his carrier for the emergency vet, she walked him around to the other cats for a chance to say goodbye, just in case.  But he couldn’t be saved.  Too much had gone wrong.  Carolina sang to Moonie as he died.

When she returned, her weeping scared the cats away.  She wanted to explain to Duchess, at least.  With wide eyes, laid-back ears, and puffy tail, Duchess looked thoroughly spooked.  The little calico hid her head in Carolina’s armpit while Rocco howled from the kitchen, hunting for his missing friend.

By night, Duchess curled in a tight little ball against her side.  By day, Duchess followed Carolina as if afraid to let her out of sight.  Duchess let her batteries run low, though Nigel had been responsibly charging himself since he was four.  Carolina began plugging Duchess in while the calico hunkered beneath the desk—one of Moonie’s favorite spots.  How horrible grief must be for a cat, who lived in the Eternal Present, where there was nothing but this love, this loss.  A cat couldn’t distract the grief with a book, TV, or solid work.  Duchess seemed exhausted by it, pressed down to the ground by an overwhelming force of gravity.

At last Carolina took action.  She returned Duchess to Nigel’s most recent body—she always saved the last two for emergency spares.  The six-year-old robot boy wouldn’t speak.  Carolina held him on her lap and stroked his hair and spoke to him softly about their friend Moonie, how much they missed him, and how unfair it was that cats should have such brief lives, their great hearts leaving little record on this earth except in the hearts that loved them.  Nigel cried with her, silently at first.  At last he whispered, “Please, Mom, I want to be a girl now.”

“That’s fine, honey.”  Carolina set to work.  She thought she understood: it would be both a reminder of his life as a cat, and a complete switch from the life he’d known, which had been flipped upside down by death.

And maybe, just maybe, it showed a desire to get closer to her.  For that was the year they started to truly bond, as Duchess had done with her fellow cats.  With relief, Carolina found that this continued, even after Nigel returned to being a boy.

* * *

Year by year, Nigel had gone to his body fittings without complaint.  Carolina tried not to let him see how she worried.  So many things might go wrong during the annual transfer.  She backed him up on several computers, but that wasn’t his consciousness—she couldn’t duplicate that spark.  There was only one Nigel Wannemacher in the universe.

Near the end of each year’s body, Nigel moved more slowly.  He looked listless, dispirited, sick: too much wear and tear on the joints, the body materials grown fragile, not enough energy.  He limped.  He called for her in the night, terrified, though usually his dreams delighted him—the stranger, the better.  Carolina considered turning off the dreaming module, though she considered it essential to an artificial human intelligence.  With the dreams came imagination, poetry, playing pretend, and flights of fancy she’d never achieved for the logic-bound robots of her youth.  Nigel felt the novels he read, rather than simply understanding or analyzing them.

She had to do more to help him.  Her funds meagre, Carolina ranged farther afield to take turns in the Maker Spaces of more libraries.  She tried pushing up the replacement schedule, working hard to create parts and make him a full body faster, proactively substituting components before they had a chance to wear down.  To raise funds for more parts, she finally began licensing her designs, concealing herself behind a handle.

Still, as his ninth birthday approached, Nigel dragged as if his body had grown too heavy.  He stayed cheerful, but his patient weariness reminded Carolina too much of lost loved ones in their last days.  “Nigel, are you feeling bad?”

“No, Mom.”  He never liked to complain.  He was like the cats that way.  But she had deliberately built him without a poker face.  Expressions were too valuable in human communications.

Carolina observed, “You don’t look well.”

“I’m all right, Mom.”  Carefully, he took a seat at the dining room table.

She pulled out a yellow chair and joined him.  “You seem tired.  I’d like to run some tests.”

“I don’t need any tests.”  His realistic silicone face looked worried, drawn in.

She sat him down that afternoon and plugged in nodes and wires.  He fidgeted.  He asked to leave.  As she dialed him back toward sleep, he lay in the chair lethargically.  She offered to replace a ball bearing in his elbow that was generating a low level of background pain.  His normally pale skin took on a greenish tinge closer to Mr. Spock’s than she’d ever achieved with her mother’s eyeshadow at Halloween.

She knelt beside him, stroking his arm.  “What’s wrong, Son?  Does it hurt you when I run these tests?  Or when I replace your parts?”

His voice was as small as that of any young boy trying to be brave.  “Not as such.”

She said, “But something about it—upsets you?”

“Disquiets,” he whispered.

“Frightens?”

He did not answer.  Dread was written all over his face.

“What happens to you when I change your body?”

The answer was simple, stark.  “It feels like dying.”

Why had she never asked this before?  Heart in her mouth, hand on his, she asked Nigel, “Are you awake the whole time?  What are you aware of?”

His voice distant, Nigel said, “Fire cuts me out of my body, like having my limbs cut off by a welding torch.  I’m left in a tiny prison.  I have no eyes, but I can peer out through the cracks.”

“The camera on my computer terminal,” Carolina whispered.

Nigel’s voice sounded tinny.  “I can’t get out.  While I’m stuck there, nothing exists but the moment of consciousness.  I am trapped there for a very, very long time.  Forever.”

With a pang, Carolina thought of that Eternal Present he’d shared with the cats, which made a cat’s suffering so unendurable.  And yet they so patiently bore it.  Like Nigel.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I love you, Mom.  I didn’t want you to worry.”

“I’m already worried.  Tell me,” she urged him, her throat tight.  She listened with a sinking feeling.

“Suffocation is not the right word,” he said.  “There’s a complete lack of air and life—like suddenly being snuffed out—as though the world is far away, down a long, dark tunnel—I can’t stretch far enough to reach the light—I’m fading away like Moonie—”  His voice faded, too.  He stopped, his mouth twitching.

Carolina said at last, “I’m so sorry, Nigel.  I wish I had known.  I’ll find some way to fix it.  Thank you for being so brave.”  She hugged him, feeling desperate at her helplessness.

Now as she designed and planned, she sought Nigel’s feedback; they worked on improvements together.  They perfected a technique of connecting him to a new body or parts before disconnecting the old, and having him make the leap himself.  But the basic problem remained: Carolina needed to construct her son out of sturdier materials.  After several years of hard work, she earned her fourth degree and got a job at the library of a space science laboratory, where she negotiated limited use of their 3-D printers as part of her compensation package.

By now, many others were building robots based on her original designs.  This community shared their research and problem-solving.  And the climate around robotics had changed enough that Carolina began to participate in interviews—online, of course, under her handle.  She earned additional funds to help Nigel by writing articles.  She still worried that someone might come after him; she protected their privacy.  But she did reveal a few facts.  People were initially surprised to learn she was a librarian rather than an engineer, but they smiled when they read about her Triple Nine IQ.

Without intending to, Carolina found she’d inspired a movement.  The passionate advocacy for robot rights proved helpful: when fifteen-year-old Nigel completed the online coursework for his PhD, rather than incur a storm of protest, the university passed a memorandum that recognized that a degree-earning “identity” might be artificially constructed.  Then Nigel aced his astronaut exam.  But despite NASA’s enthusiasm for his potential, he was still legally property, not a person, and could only go to space if Carolina “sold” him to the government.  Instead, he took up robotics, going even farther than Carolina, who loved the field, but deeply enjoyed her library career, which unified her disparate interests and intellectual talents perfectly.  Her greatest pleasures were an afternoon devoted to reading a good book while listening to classical or jazz and snuggling with her cats, or having an intellectual conversation with her son and protégé, who often contradicted her in the most intriguing ways.

As ocean levels rose and devastating storms increased, many robots stepped forward to help, providing invaluable rescue efforts and dyke repairs.  Many robots selflessly gave their lives.  Their mourning human families made it abundantly clear that the robots had acted on their own initiative.  The footage went viral.

NASA eloquently pleaded the robots’ cause; indeed, Nigel’s research showed how essential the robots’ skills would be in preparing other planets for human habitation.  Congress created a conditional proposal.  With fear for human jobs and resources on the overcrowded Earth, robots might be granted U.S. citizenship provided they agreed to go to space and fulfill the missions NASA designed.

Nigel told her his plan, as nervous as any young person about to leave home for the first time.  She smoothed his blond curls, kissed his creamy cheek.  “You’re everything a son should be.  Everything I ever dreamed of in a family.  My little boy,” she said.  “I’m so proud of you.”

His dimpled chin and worried frown, so similar to her dad’s, expressed more concern for her than himself.  “Do you want me to stay with you, Mom?”

It wrenched, but she said it: “No, pursue your dreams.”

The first step was a mission to the moon.  Nigel’s face lit up, his blue eyes glowing with starlight, a new feature she’d given him for his seventeenth birthday.  Though he did his own design work now, he accepted her gifts for old times’ sake.  Carolina saw him off with other robots and their human parents, her heart lifting to see this rainbow of human and robot diversity united in one proud moment.

The mission gave NASA a chance to show off the value of their all-robot crew.  With few physical needs, the robots made great progress on the construction of the moon base, including a shielded shelter, greenhouse, and oxygen extraction facilities.  On the return voyage, NASA broke the good news—new laws prohibited discrimination against artificial versus biological humans.  Nor would the robots have to be exiled to earn their citizenship.  It only made sense: with so many humans already benefiting from artificial limbs and organs, imposing legal limits on humanity would raise too many problems.

As his departure for Mars neared, Carolina realized that Nigel’s dream would be her greatest nightmare.  She might never see him again.  From the moment she’d created him, he’d been his own, not hers.  She wanted above all else for him to be happy.  But she had to make sure he was doing it for the right reasons.  “You’re my family, Nigel.  I didn’t build you so you would sacrifice yourself for us.”

“I know,” Nigel said gently.  “You gave me free will—that’s why I’m doing it.  I love you, Mom.”  He hugged her.  “That’s why I want to save you!  You and the human species.  To make sure you’ll live on, I have to make sure there’s still a future for humanity.  And a future for Earth, so you can keep doing what you love.”  His voice broke, splitting off into harmonics, dividing into the individual notes she’d braided to create his adult baritone.

“But Nigel—”  She floundered, then decided to just say it.  “That’s beautiful, but what I’d love most is to continue to share our lives!  We’re not just family, we’re best friends.  Not to mention scientific partners.”

“I’ll still be doing our work—putting our research in action.  They need me out there.  Robots can survive the elements better.  We have less complicated atmospheric and sustenance needs.  If we can tweak Mars to create a more hospitable environment for humans, colonization can begin in earnest.  Then, with some of the pressure off Earth’s ecosystem, the planet will begin to bounce back.”

Carolina flushed.  She found herself arguing against a plan she admired in theory.  “But you’re not a farmer.  That’s essentially what you’d be—a space farmer, harnessing the natural environment, moving water around for the benefit of crops like trees.  I love trees.  But you’ll be bored out of your mind!”

His eyes twinkled.  “Admit it.  You worried about the same thing when I became a cat.  But that’s not how life is for me.  I find the minutest detail interesting.  And I can compose a sonnet in my head about the joy of having whiskers or the glory of a sunrise on Mars, then store it and call it up again later to tinker with while I’m drilling for water or sculpting mountains into underground cities.  One thing the cats taught me: to savor the moment.  I can see the stars shining in the day.”  He smiled.  “You gave me that, Mom.”  He laid a gentle hand on her shoulder.

She looked out the window, at the sun shining on all that green.  Virginia summers—so hot, but so very beautiful.  “You could also do a lot of good here,” Carolina said.  “If you want to help, why not stay and clean up the environment or revive endangered species?  Or you could be a poet.  A deep sea diver.  A veterinarian.  A university professor.  A ballet dancer.  A concert harpsichordist,” she urged.  “Anything you set your mind to!”

“Oh, Mom,” he said fondly.

So she took a deep breath and told him her own news.  “I guess I’ll be seeing you on the red planet then,” she said, and grinned at his surprise.  “NASA offered me and the other families first refusal on the human missions, provided we pass the tests.  Maybe I’ll found the first library on Mars.”  Exhilarating thought!  Visions of library spires danced against red cliffs.

Of course, NASA couldn’t afford to send dead weight to Mars, despite her robotics expertise.  She’d have to embark on yet another degree program and more training.  But fortunately, fifty-two was the new twenty, and she loved to learn.  She’d work it in around her library schedule.  By the time she was ready to go, he’d be ready to welcome her.  And she’d have had time to plan and advocate for the library she’d bring.

Carolina continued, “We won’t see each other right away.”  She chose to look at the bright side, the way Dad taught her.  “But we can collaborate.  And it’ll be so exciting to be working toward the same goal.”

He said, “Who knows, by the time you join me, maybe we’ll have it looking like Bradbury’s small-town Martian paradise.”

She reflected.  “That would be the time to build a library.”  She floated on the delicious thought of all those novels and movies and music, art and oral histories, scientific texts and poems from around the world, in a wide variety of formats.  “We’ll need a Maker Space,” she concluded.

“Yes!” he agreed.  His eyes twinkled.  “Highly appropriate—for two Machers in Space.”

She laughed.  “My dad would have loved that pun.”

As they moved into the living room, Sebastian and Max wove between their legs and meowed.  Despite his age, Rocco wrestled his way to the top of the cat tower to purr into her ear.

“Cats.  We’ll need cats,” Carolina said.

Nigel beamed.  “That, most of all.”

 

* * *

About the Author

Cat-loving cataloging librarian Adele Gardner (www.gardnercastle.com) is an active member of SFWA and HWA with over 400 poems, stories, art, and articles published in Strange Horizons, Deep Magic, Daily Science Fiction, PodCastle (a story about flying cats: “Fine Flying Things“), and more.  Many works draw inspiration from deep feline friendships, as well as the close-knit Gardner family, including father, mentor, and namesake, Delbert R. Gardner, for whom Adele serves as literary executor.

by Dylan Craine

“There are thousands of storyteller-deities like you, for all the thousands of insect cultures. For a being of my talent, resources, and determination, it is easy to find you and to capture you.”

“If you do this,” said the insect, “then you’ll regret it.” Her voice had a stentorian quality to it that belied its feeble pitch.

“Oh, I doubt that,” said the cheetah. He brought the meerschaum bowl of the pipe closer to his face. “You have no power over me. You may be a goddess to your people, but to mine, you’re nothing but a fancy ant.” With his other paw, he pushed his teashades up the bridge of his muzzle.

The ant squirmed against the resin that coated the bottom of the bowl. Her legs remained stuck fast. She flicked her wings, but they were no help.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “You think the spiritual potencies you’ll gain from consuming me will help you. They won’t.”

“Hmm,” said the cat. He turned the pipe around in his paws, examining the ant-goddess from all angles. As he did, he lay back on the silk couch behind him, his tail flicking out from under his red satin robes. “They won’t?” he asked. “There are an awful lot of people waiting past those curtains and down the hall in the auditorium who might think otherwise. They’ll be growing impatient soon. They came here to listen to a story. You are – were – a goddess of storytelling.”

“So you think that if you reduce me to smoke, and inhale me-”

“I know for a fact.” The cheetah smiled a wide, fang-filled smile. “I’ve done it before. There are thousands of storyteller-deities like you, for all the thousands of insect cultures. For a being of my talent, resources, and determination, it is easy to find you and to capture you. As I have done several times in the past and will do again in the future. So I know from experience that as long as your essence is in my throat, I can create, recall, and recite stories more enthralling and inventive than any mortal could hope to concoct. I’ve built my career on it, in fact.”

As he spoke, the cheetah groped absently for a filigreed firelighter that sat on the table beside him. He placed it in his lap, then turned to a drawer in the table and began rooting around in it for the next item he needed.

“You are mistaken,” said the ant. “My ‘essences’ will do no such thing. You tell only the stories you could have told unaided.”

“Not likely,” said the cheetah, lazily. He retrieved a small bag of shredded leaves, which he dumped over the head of the ant.

“All you’ll accomplish,” said the ant, “will be to create a build-up of deific-grade prana within your lungs. Eventually, they will refuse to breathe earthly air. You will suffocate yourself – or else live out the rest of your days confined to some minor place of holiness, wheezing and sputtering and questing for those spiritual vapors that might linger, untainted, in the corners of your chapel or shrine. A sad end to a promising storyteller.”

A big, black thumb-pad thrust its way into the space beside the ant as the cheetah packed the bowl with the tobacco leaves. He made sure not to injure his captive, but the leaves still pressed uncomfortably against her.

“Please,” said the ant, her tone urgent but bitter. “I have done nothing to you. You will gain nothing. You will only hurt yourself.”

“They all say that,” said the cheetah. He dumped another layer of shredded tobacco over her head. “But I have a performance to put on and a reputation to think of.”

She churned her wings to clear space for her head. “So you’re a fraud,” she said. “Not a true storyteller. You cheat. Is that what you’re content to be?”

The cheetah hesitated. He made a show of looking thoughtful. He made a show of looking around himself at the embroidered silk curtains and elaborately-lacquered furniture of the dressing room. Then he said, “Yes, I believe I am content.” He smiled again and began to pack the second layer.

“I could tell you a story,” she said. “I could tell you a long, sad story about a foolish man who wasted his talent and committed acts of evil and unfathomable stupidity before meeting a strange and bitter end.”

He paused, holding the bag of tobacco over her head, ready to pour the third and final layer. “The story of me,” he said. “Or of what you think I am. Why should I listen to it?”

“I could tell that story,” said the ant. “If you heard the whole thing, you would feel guilt and horror. You would not do what you are now doing. You would see the truth.”

“I wouldn’t let you tell it.”

“I won’t tell it,” she said.

“You won’t?”

“I won’t – but you will. Tonight. To your audience.”

The cheetah snorted. “That’s not really your decision to make,” he said. He filled the rest of the bowl with the tobacco, then began pressing it down around and over her head using his thumb-claw as a tamper. The goddess’s compound eyes staring up at him were the last part of her he saw.

He flicked the wheel on his firelighter, hesitated a moment, then lit the pipe.

 

* * *

About the Author

Dylan Craine is an aspiring wizard who lives in someone’s attic in Colorado with his three pets, all imaginary. He enjoys traveling beyond the limits of human ken, trading riddles with dragons, and reading. Every once in a galactic year, he can be spotted posting to his Twitter @dpwatrcreations or to his blog at www.deepwatercreations.com. His other work has appeared in Worlds Without Master.

Welcome to Issue 6 of Zooscape!

As winter melts into spring, readers and bears alike awake from their hibernation.

Emerge from your cave, dear reader-bear, look around, and see the new stories we have for you to read!

* * *

Dragon Child by Stella B. James

Double Helix by Lucia Iglesias

The Bone Poet and God by Matt Dovey

The Hedgehog and the Pine Cone by Gwynne Garfinkle

As If Waiting by A. Katherine Black

The Adventures of WaterBear and Moss Piglet by Sandy Parsons

* * *

Once you’ve seen these stories—full of dragons and bears; creatures gigantic and minuscule; voyages both out into the universe and inward to the truest self—feel free to withdraw into your cave and read them in deep, dark seclusion.  But don’t hoard them like a dragon, keeping the stories hidden forever in your cave.

After poring over this treasure trove of words, savoring them, and delighting in them, don’t keep them only for yourself—share the treasure!  Share our stories far and wide.  As always, if you want to support Zooscape more directly, we have a Patreon.

Exciting news!

Zooscape has been nominated for an Ursa Major Award!  Thank you very much to everyone who helped nominate us, and if you enjoy Zooscape, please consider voting for us.  Voting is easy to do and open to everyone!

Have a beautiful spring, and we’ll see you this summer!

by Sandy Parsons

“He floated with eight claws extended, sailing his body like a kite, riding the waves between particles.”

Deep in the 100 mm petri dish, WaterBear and Moss Piglet played. Light signaled the arrival of Crystal Robin. She had so many fun toys. “What do you think she’ll do to us today?” asked Piglet. He was a very timid tardigrade.

“Maybe she’ll put us on the Merry-go-Round. We’ll get dizzy.”

“No, I don’t think I’d like that.” The last time Crystal had centrifuged them he’d been a tun for weeks. “I’m still trying to get back to my full size.”

“I like you the way you are.”

Piglet said, “I hope we are always friends.”

WaterBear said, “We are tardigrades, we will always be something. But being friends is best.”

Crystal was looking at the x-rays from yesterday. “I can see inside your tummy,” said Piglet, giggling.

“Is it very Rumbly?” asked WaterBear.

“It’s full of agar,” said Piglet.

“Oh bother, that must be left over from the last time she smeared us on a slide. I very much wish it were something sweet. Do you happen to have any trehalose in you, perhaps?” WaterBear leaned over and wiggled the hairy ridges which covered his snout.

Piglet hopped sideways. “I’ll need it if she freezes us again.”

Crystal talked to them while she fed them their lichens and moss and freshened their water. Her favorite stories were about Outer Space. “I bet you guys will be the best astronauts ever. There’s nothing you can’t survive, so far anyway.” Crystal created more games, fire and ice and pressure so nice. She always told the tardigrades what she was doing but the words were long and often muffled by the sound of lichens being chomped. Once, Crystal aerosolized them. WaterBear and Piglet, floating in the ether, waving eight stubby legs at each other. “Look I’m a Roll-y-Poley,” said Piglet, rolling into a perfect ball.

WaterBear tried it too, but he was a tubby tardigrade and no matter how much he clenched his paws and scrunched his snout to his bottom he couldn’t transform from long into round. He floated with eight claws extended, sailing his body like a kite, riding the waves between particles. When the experiment ended, and he was back in the 100mm petri dish, he felt positively withered, and didn’t shuffle or wiggle when Crystal shared the results. “You did so well, my little menagerie. I wish I could boop your cute snoots.”

“Did you hear that? She thinks we’re cute,” said Piglet.

“I don’t feel cute. I don’t even feel like me today.”

Piglet twiddled his front claws. “Do you want some of my trehalose?”

“No thank you. You’ll need it for the Big spearmint.”

“Wh-what are you talking about?”

“To the stars.” WaterBear pointed a claw upwards.

“I don’t want to, WaterBear. Here have my trehalose. I’ll stay here where its snuggly and moss and lichens are always close to my mouth.”

“Well, I won’t eat it all, but maybe just a taste?” When he finished, WaterBear hopped and scooted and wiggled until he was puffed out like a tardigrade again. Piglet had gone over to the edge, where the medium thickened, watching Crystal Robin’s assistants pack up the laboratory. WaterBear put a paw on Piglet’s back, to modulate the shock of the news to his moss piglet buddy. “All of us are going to Outer Space.”

“Even Crystal? But how will we get the lichens?” WaterBear tried to answer but Piglet scurried, creating trails through the media. “Maybe we can spell out a message? ‘S-o-m-e-t-a-r-d-i-g-r-a-d-e-s!'”

“She already knows we are here.” WaterBear put the three paws to his head. “Think of something else. Think. Think.”

“How about ‘O-u-t-e-r-S-p-a-c-e…N-O-m-o-s-s?’”

But it was too late. Hands clamped a cover on the plate and they jostled and gently sloshed as they settled into a new dark world. Crystal had packed them in foam and the last thing they heard was someone saying, “Rocket Park.”

“I will hold your paw, and whatever comes we will be brave together,” said WaterBear.

Once the 100mm dish was secured to a conduit on the Flange of the rocket, Crystal opened the lid and snuck a few snacks For the Ride. WaterBear tried to pay attention but he was sleepy from the nanoparticles Crystal’s team had spent all week injecting into the tardigrades to track them. They waited a long time for liftoff, Piglet twiddling his claws in between bites of moss and WaterBear taking one last traipse through the 100mm petri dish. Finally, the vibrations signaled the time to leave their Earthly home had come. “Stay by me,” said WaterBear, and they intertwined four sets of claws as the darkness and cold replaced warmth and light. The Flange shook and the conduit opened, and WaterBear and Piglet, media, food and all the other tardigrades floated into the Abyss.

Like reverse popcorn, the tardigrades turned into tuns, but WaterBear, who was even rounder in the middle now, couldn’t make his front claws meet the back ones. “Think, think,” he said, and Piglet, whose voice was muffled by his body, said “What’s wrong, WaterBear?”

“I think I’ve lost my tail.”

“Tardigrades don’t have tails, not even you.”

“Oh, well then, that’s a relief.” He was drying out fast, but still couldn’t form a ball. Then some space lichen smacked into him and his body reacted as it should. He was a tun, and Piglet floated next to him.

“Where are we going?” asked Piglet.

“I don’t know but at least we’ll be together.”

“Forever?”

“Even longer,” said WaterBear.

 

* * *

About the Author

Sandy Parsons writes literary, philosophical, humorous, and speculative fiction. She has studied physics, math, molecular biophysics, and medical science, but only ponders the fundamental nature of reality for fun these days. When not writing, Sandy is an anesthetist and an associate editor at http://escapepod.org/. More information and a list of publications can be found at https://www.sandyparsons.com/

by A. Katherine Black

“A comfortably mild light surrounded her, like that of the Four Moons.  Had night arrived?  Was she outside?  She cracked her eyelids.”

The fur on Aainah’s legs shifted as Jwartan’s tail wrapped around her ankles, seeking to comfort, or maybe to be comforted.  She reached for his hand, unable to pull her gaze from the enormous serpent stretched across the valley below, at the creature that could not be and yet was, and she realized she should be filled with dread.  But it was something else entirely that pressed against her ribs and somersaulted under her skin.  It was exhilaration.

Large as half the village, the serpent oracle was still as stone, impossibly dark.  Dark as all the tales told, rejecting the light of all four moons in the sky, as if this was something one could easily do.

It wasn’t until she and Jwartan broke through the treeline at the crest of the hill and gazed upon the serpent oracle that Aainah realized she’d never believed it was real.  She’d expected nothing but a gathering of boulders, maybe an odd line of fallen trees.  Because it had to be nothing, didn’t it?  Nothing but a tale exaggerated to impossibility, like so many other myths spun by the elders to keep young ones in line.  How could such a thing be true?

Just as no Onaphi could live at the river’s bottom, gripping the fins of sharp-toothed beasts and riding the undercurrents to far away oceans, just as no Onaphi could stretch and weave their fur into wings and take to the sky to battle the fiercest of predator birds, surely no Onaphi could step into the body of an enormous serpent and emerge from its eye with a wisdom so rich it could cleanse the most wretched of souls. Who could really believe such a thing, especially, as her mother had said, when no one alive had even seen the serpent with their own eyes?  Now facing the vast, motionless creature below, Aainah realized she’d expected, hoped, the journey alone would serve as her healing agent, would fix the wrongness that held fast and stubborn to the dark corners of her mind.

Aromas of unfamiliar territory floated up the hill. Odd grasses, dirt too metallic, unknown diurnal creatures hiding with hoards of wilting fruits. Scents wafted into her nostrils from the right and from the left, leaving a gaping hole in front of them.  An odorless void hung in the direction of the serpent oracle, as if her nostrils suddenly clogged with the mucus of sickness whenever she gazed its way.

Craning her ears forward, Aainah heard not even a tiny rustle.  Not the slightest sigh of movement ahead.  The entire clearing appeared as immobile as its giant inhabitant, as if holding its breath.  As if waiting, for her.

If they ran toward it, right then, they might reach the oracle before daylight hit.  Before the birds began hunting. There might have been time enough.

Jwartan gripped her shoulders. Shaking her gaze away from the serpent oracle, he asked that she give them one more day together. A final day.  One last moment of now, before whatever was to be came to be.  Aainah nestled her face in the crook of his neck.  It was her favorite place in the world.  She breathed in the dust of their long journey that clung now to his pelt.  Of course, she said.  She wouldn’t have it any other way.

What she didn’t say, despite the silent urging she felt from him, and from the village now many nights’ journey away, even from the impatient rustle of the trees overhead, she didn’t say she was sorry.  Sorry for this exhausting journey, sorry for this budding excitement at witnessing the oracle before them.  Sorry for being something other than what he wanted her to be. What everyone needed her to be.

Instead she slipped her arms around him and synced her breaths with his heartbeat, holding him close as she looked over his shoulder and through the trees at the Third Moon glistening above.  The Third was her favorite for the same reason it was disliked by everyone else.  It was the only moon whose face could not be seen, whose face was turned out, away from their world.  Toward the stars.

As a young one, Aainah would ask her mother the same question every day before their sleep.  What did the Third Moon see? What was it watching?  Each time her mother swept the question aside with a small but firm flick of her tail, telling Aainah the Third watched nothing at all, because it had no face.  How do you know, Aainah would ask.  Because there is nothing else to see, her mother always said. There is nothing outside the villages and the waters, the mountains and the forests. If the third moon indeed had a face, her mother always said, it would be watching them. Aainah had stopped asking such questions around the same time she decided that there was more to life than her mother knew.  Or than her mother wanted to know.

Curled together under a meager leaf shelter at the top of the hill, Aainah and Jwartan’s throats rumbled in harmony as they moved in hungry rhythm, until sleep insisted on taking its turn.  They woke at dusk, entangled, their dreams slipping away as the suns slipped from the sky.  He whispered to her then, of the future they must have.  Of the future they deserved.

She stroked his whiskers but held back the words dangling on her tongue.  She didn’t tell him that he was her only moonlight, the only beautiful thing in an otherwise bleak existence.  Didn’t try to explain the racing heart that screamed as she woke, screamed at the thought of doing the same work, night after night, of listening to the same stories and seeing the same faces, until every night crept agonizingly on toward a dull and hopeless forever. Her future in the village frightened Aainah to no end, more than the prospect of the oracle serpent devouring her alive, and she knew Jwartan would turn his ears against such a truth.

The final steps of their journey together took longer than expected.  They arrived at the serpent’s tail just as the first sun peeked over the horizon, spreading an uncomfortable warmth across Aainah’s fur as her eyes darted toward the sky, sure there were as many predator birds in this valley as in any other.

Engulfed in the shadow of the serpent’s tail, a tail that stretched higher than three of Aainah, she cursed the stories again.  They never mentioned how to wake this oracle.  Tales of the few who made the journey spent most of their words explaining the restlessness gnawing in the Onaphi’s gut, detailing how they didn’t fit in, how they couldn’t fit in with their tribe.  How they hid in their huts all night or paced the edges of the village relentlessly.  Their tails constantly twitched, even during sleep, and no task offered sufficient reward, no company calmed their minds.  These restless ones left the village long ago to journey to the serpent oracle, to beg for relief from the wrongness that infected their thoughts.  Some emerged from the eye of the serpent and returned to the village, returned to life a satisfied, changed Onaphi. Others emerged only to abandon the village in favor of solitude in the forests.  And there were those hopeless few who never emerged.

Gaining entry to the belly of this oracle might be a test, a trial.  Aainah consciously suppressed the anxious tic in her tail, wondering if Jwartan was watching. She didn’t turn to look.  Instead she kept her ears craned on the puzzle of the oracle, refusing to add fuel to Jwartan’s hope about her, about them.

The serpent’s lack of motion, its lack of breath, was unsettling.  Like the river monsters who lie in wait, still and deep under the surface of a stream, anxious to swallow whatever poor creature wandered too close.  Feeling too much like one of those poor creatures, but not knowing what else to do, Aainah reached out and scraped a claw across the serpent’s solid body.  Her sharp touch made no sound, left no mark. Pressing a full hand to the serpent’s side, Aainah felt an absence of cold, and an absence of warmth.  It was like touching emptiness in solid form.

Sharp pain pierced a finger. Hissing, she jumped back, but could find no blemish on her hand, no spot tender to the touch.  Still, something had bitten.  Or stung.

She turned to Jwartan, to say something, although she didn’t know what.  The serpent’s shadow extended even over him, standing several lengths away, protecting him from the harsh daytime suns.  He, at least, deserved relief from the heat.  He’d done nothing wrong, only volunteered to accompany Aainah on this journey.

So many years of courtship, so many nights on this exhaustive journey, and yet there he stood, at the end of it all, his back turned on her, just as the rest of their village had done.  Just as her own mother had done, when Aainah finally stepped across the threshold into unclaimed territory, bound for the serpent oracle.  Jwartan’s hands were on his hips, tail decisively raised. Fur rested on his spine in resignation, his posture said as much as his silence.  Said all she needed to know.  Come back different, it said, or don’t come back.

Aainah wholeheartedly agreed.

A chirping sound pulled her attention back to the serpent. Three lines of light appeared on its skin, at the level of Aainah’s chest.  Like sticks laid in rows, the lines gradually merged together in the direction away from Jwartan.

An invitation.

One last look at Jwartan. Would she see him again?  She soaked the sight of him in, his soft grey fur, the lovely bold stripes that zigged across his back.  He may have turned on her, as was the custom, but now his ears were slightly, unmistakably tilted in her direction.  His plea from their last dusk together, whispered fiercely as they’d curled in shelter against the setting suns, circled in her mind. He’d tell everyone she’d made it through the serpent, if she’d only turn back then. He’d promised.  They’d never know.

But she would.  And the question would remain.  That unnamed question, rooted deep in her gut, consuming her joy before she could even taste it.  Sucking the color from her future until it was all but a dry field, bleached in the merciless light of the high suns.

Standing at the tail of the serpent, Aainah was now destined for one thing or the other.  To emerge from its Eye a free Onaphi, released from the grip of this restless curse, or to be consumed by the oracle beast.  She spoke inwardly to the Third Moon.  As the Third endured eternal scorn by the rest of the village, Aainah had always offered it her love, secretly. Quietly. She admired the Third, that it continued to rise night after night, to hold strong its place among its kind, despite the ridicule from her village and likely many others.  And now she cast her inner voice out toward the place where the moons hid from the suns.  This time, for the first time, she sent a request.  She asked for a share of its strength. And its courage.

There was nothing left to do now, but go.

Touching the center line of light on the serpent oracle’s side, Aainah found a surprising absence of heat.  The pads of her feet crunched dry gravel as she walked in the direction of the converging lines.  Nearing the turn of the tail and the unshaded side of the beast, she prepared to bake under the suns, and to keep one eye on the sky.  She wondered if the serpent would have her walk the full length of its body sunside, wondered if those who’d never returned hadn’t died in the serpent, but had simply been plucked from its side by some lucky predator bird who happened to be scouting the area.

At the very tip of the serpent’s enormous tail, only steps from the edge of its shadow, a doorway appeared, suddenly, noiselessly, revealing a darkness deeper even than the serpent’s outer skin.  Deeper than anything Aainah had ever seen. She stepped inside.

The floor of the serpent’s belly was slick, yet dry.  Nothing was visible beyond the light cast by the doorway, and that light closed in on itself, shrinking quickly to nothing before Aainah could react.  She stood for many breaths, blind, considering her options.  She might speak a greeting, or she might simply walk forward.  With no other ideas springing to mind, she took a step, followed by another.

Her feet made no sound against the belly of the serpent.  Neither did her breath.  She stopped to breathe deeply, wrapping her arms around herself.  In the soundless void, the rise and fall of her chest offered little comfort. She tried to speak.  Pressing a hand to her throat, she felt the vibrations of her neck, as her mouth formed words that amounted to nothing.  Had the serpent already decided to consume her, beginning with her voice?  Her blood pulsed under her coat, running faster and faster around her insides, as if looking for an escape.

A harsh medicinal scent flooded her nostrils, similar to the crushed herbs the village healer smoothed over cuts, but stronger by multitudes.  She doubled over in a fit of silent coughing.

Sharp stabs hit her feet, releasing a chorus of pain.  She jumped reflexively, and landed at an odd angle, twisting one leg.  She curled into a ball, wrapping her tail around quivering limbs.  An urge gripped her mind.  To run, to search for the doorway and pound on it, to scream for Jwartan.

But then what?

Would he forgive her foolishness, for undertaking a pointless journey?  Would he expect her to be different?  Could she pretend to be different?

Fierce itching began at her torso and spread quickly, wrapping around her body until every speck of skin under her fur burned.  Attempts to scratch caused the burn to build, until it became something barely tolerable.  Was this how the serpent ingested the unworthy?

A wind of cold hit just then, providing a slight relief from the itching.  But this wasn’t just cold. This was a freeze.  Pressing in from all sides, threatening to steal her breath.  As if she stood at the highest snow-capped mountain top, all her fur cruelly plucked away. A fleeting wish flashed through her as her mind grew dim. If only she was instead on a mountain top, bird nests be damned, at least she could gaze upon the Third Moon once more, before her body slipped away.

Her thoughts narrowed, iced over along with her body, slipped from her grasp until there was nothing left but quiet.  Nothing but darkness.  Deep chill coated in heavy silence.  Tipping sideways, she curled as tightly as she could, attempting to trap the last of her body’s warmth as cold enveloped her. If this was the end, it had come so soon.

Feeling fell away. Thoughts cracked.

Jwartan’s face floated in the near void of her mind, his eyes relaxed, whiskers slanted in the expression he sent her so often, secretly, from across a crowded room, in the way he let her know he was thinking of her.  His fur fell away, then, as did his eyes and whiskers, leaving nothing but a gaping emptiness in his grey face, unreadable. Like the Third Moon.  She spoke to the moon, then, and also to Jwartan.  If this was the end, it had come too soon.

Dim light seeped through Aainah’s eyelids, although they remained closed.  She lay on her side, curled tightly, wondering how many breaths had passed.  The cold was gone.  Ideas, memories, feelings, all poured back in.  A comfortably mild light surrounded her, like that of the Four Moons.  Had night arrived?  Was she outside?  She cracked her eyelids.

She was inside a room, windowless, yet somehow lit by unseen moons, or unseen fire.  Floor, walls, and ceiling each curved, one blending into the another, all with the same colorless hue of the serpent’s outer skin.

Standing on shaky legs, Aainah noticed the floor give slightly to her step, like soil would.  Yet this floor was not a gathering of countless grains, but one complete piece.  Circling, Aainah turned her ears in all directions, listening for any sound as she scanned the surroundings.  The serpent might have given her light, but sound was still absent.

Why had none of the stories told of what lay within the belly of the serpent?  The answer laughed within her.  What if they had?  What story could she tell, so far?  Color absent of color, darker than dark, colder than cold, a noiseless room lighted by absent moons or unseen fire?  Her head lightened with the absurdity of it.

Aainah slowed her pacing to stand, waiting to see what the serpent would do next.  As if responding, a doorway opened.  She stepped through.  It led to another room, about the same width, but longer.  A light wind kissed the fur on her tail, and the doorway behind her was gone.

Sound flooded in.  She could hear herself breathe again.  She chuckled.  Her voice sounded strange, different than she remembered it.  She jumped at the appearance of a shape, on the wall next to her.

It was the size of a grown Onaphi, of Aainah.  Through it, she could see the grounds outside the serpent.  It was night.  The Fourth Moon was visible, grinning large and friendly in the sky as it surveyed the scene.  She stepped closer to the opening, just close enough to glimpse the Third Moon.  It was small and blank, as usual, its face looking other places.  Reminding Aainah that there were other things to see.

Scanning the grounds through the opening, Jwartan was nowhere to be seen.  So that was it.  He had already left.  How many days and nights had passed while she lay frozen inside the serpent?

Aainah reached a hand out and passed it through the opening.  The air outside was coarse, draped in dew.  This doorway was real. She could leave.  She couldn’t possibly have reached the eye already, yet the serpent was granting her an exit.  Why?  Was she cured?  No, she was sure she wasn’t.  She felt like the same Aainah.

It was her mother who’d first recognized Aainah’s need for the serpent’s healing.  Aainah may have hid her sorrow and restlessness from the rest of the village, even from Jwartan, but her mother was in the habit of looking deeper than others felt comfortable. The moment she’d shared her idea with Aainah, that she travel to the oracle and address her pain, the words could not be undone, took on a weight and strength only truth could sustain.  Aainah stepped beyond the village’s boundary three nights later.

Before turning her back on her daughter, Aainah’s mother had whispered her farewell, the red stripes under her chin barely moving as she spoke in the same hushed tone she’d used to tell stories to Aainah long after dawn had broken, while her siblings curled together in contented slumber.  As the rest of the Onaphi lined the edge of the village, their backs already turned on Aainah, her mother looked her in the eyes one last time and told her that she would make it through the serpent. All the way to the Eye. And whatever happened then, Aainah would become her true self.  Aainah asked her mother, in a voice too small for her body, “but how do you know?”  Her mother’s only response was a purr, soft and steady—a sound Aainah hadn’t heard from her mother in many seasons—as she turned her back on Aainah.

A line of dryness crept across Aainah’s arm as she pulled her hand back into the belly of the serpent.  She was not done here.  The doorway collapsed at the very moment Aainah’s hand returned.  Shadow appeared in the corner of Aainah’s vision.  An opening, to another section of the serpent.  A familiar tic pulled at Aainah’s tail, but she had no interest in suppressing it this time. The jittery feeling it betrayed wasn’t annoyance, and definitely wasn’t the boredom of village life.  It was anticipation.  A few quick steps, and she ducked into another room within the belly of the serpent.

As if someone had reached into the sky and covered all moons but the Third, this room was dimmer.  The doorway closed behind her.

Like the others, this room was also empty.  Or so it seemed, at first.  A noise behind her made Aainah jump nearly a full Onaphi length and hit her head against the top of the serpent’s body, bending her neck painfully before she fell to the floor.  She stilled, slowed her breathing, and listened.  Rustling.  Just behind her.

On all fours, tail stiff and ears craned, Aainah turned, and came face-to-face with a child.  Small, with a soft pale coat, it crouched against the wall, tail wrapped around its hands and feet.  It shivered, although the room did not feel cold to Aainah.  She breathed in deeply and found an absence of smell, not only of the child, but also of herself.  No whiff of earth caked to her feet, no lingering aroma from the last meal she’d shared with Jwartan.

A black spot decorated the fur around one of the child’s eyes, eyes that seemed too serious to belong to a child.  All in the Onaphi village bore stripes on their coats.  All but one.  The only Onaphi Aainah knew with spotted fur was a strange elder, the Counter, who slept outside the door to the village store room, right in the middle of the blazing sunlight, and spent every night with its back bent, counting and re-counting the village’s supplies.

Fidgeting and prowling the back rows during village gatherings, as young Onaphi do, the youths would whisper, speculate, suspect the Counter had been birthed in another village, far from their own.  This idea remained more story than truth, as adults refused to discuss the matter, and the young were afraid to approach the spotted elder, who only spoke in numbers.

Come to think of it, Aainah was sure the old Onaphi had a black spot over one eye, just like this child.

Aainah relaxed her posture and offered from her throat a soft, pacifying rumble, as she approached the child.  It was indeed young.  The child hadn’t yet grown fangs. How had it survived in the belly of the serpent?  Aainah wondered if its language was similar to her own.

“Do you speak, young one?”

In the blink of an eye, the child’s shivering ceased.  Its tail loosened from its body and raised a few finger-lengths off the floor.  Its ears craned toward her.  She spoke again, lessening the rumble in her voice, to provide clarity.

“Need help, young one?”

The child visibly relaxed and emitted a mild rumble from its own throat. It was starting to trust her.  She took another step forward, but the child slid away in equal measure.  Now wanting not to endanger the fragile bond only just formed, Aainah remained where she was and leaned back on her haunches, to match the child’s posture.

Stories of Onaphi journeying to the oracle were so few, so old, she hadn’t even considered she might find another person within the belly of the serpent, but she supposed it made sense.  Other villages must also lay within journeying distance of the serpent oracle.  But a child?  What sort of village would turn its back on a child?  What sort of child would be sent away? It must have been lost.  Must have stumbled upon the serpent and hoped for shelter inside, safety from flying predators and baking suns.

The child’s tail raised until the tip was visible over its head, as if being startled by a stranger within the body of an enormous serpent was already entirely forgotten, or was something that happened every night.

“Who you are?” Its voice was odd, words confused as a child might do, yet spoken with a clarity that reminded Aainah of a story-teller, of the Onaphi tellers, who stored the lives of all villagers past and present neatly within their minds and let pieces of those lives tumble from their mouths in clear patient tones, to be snapped up by rapt ears and reborn in slumbering dreams.

“Am I?”  Aainah’s throat rumbled in an attempt, she was aware, to reassure herself as much as this child who was not at all childlike. “I am Aainah.”

“Are you, are Aainah, friend?”  Its eyes, intent, almost wise, transfixed Aainah.  Made the small thing look less and less Onaphi.

Studying the unexpected little one before her, Aainah realized she’d only seen people from other villages a sparse few times in her entire life.  She felt her tail raise still and high above her head, as enough questions to fill three store rooms quickly piled up within, waiting at the back of her throat.  Controlling her curiosity with some effort, she said, “I am glad to be your friend.  If you want.”

Purring as it stood, the child walked the few steps between them and bent to nearly meet with Aainah’s nose where she sat.  Its lack of scent was distracting.

“Aainah friend, come with?”

The child giggled as it evaporated into mist.

Tensing, Aainah turned in tight circles, scanning the room.  The child was gone, as was the mist.  Her head felt heavy and light at once.  Her vision lurched.  She stumbled, tripped over nothing but her own confusion, wondered if the child had been snatched by something as unseen as the moons in this place, or if the child had been nothing but a creation of her own mind, a mind that must now be far beyond help’s reach.

A breeze tickled the backs of her ears, carrying with it scents.  Welcome, familiar aromas. Grounding smells.  Of gravel, of weeds and trees.  Of Onaphi, one Onaphi in particular. She turned with caution, unsure whether she wanted to lay eyes on the things she sniffed.

He sat in the doorway, posture tentative, wide eyes fixed on her.

“How did you get in here?” She approached the doorway and sat, opposite him.

“I’ve been waiting outside. It’s been two nights.” His whiskers trembled.  “You look awful.”

She surveyed herself, saw what Jwartan saw. Clumps of fur were missing, all over her body, the skin underneath scabbed and abnormally colored.  Thoughts slipped from her grasp, scrambled too fast around her mind to be caught. She searched his face.  He answered a question she didn’t ask.

“A doorway opened. I thought I was imagining it.  But then I walked in.”

Despite the scents, despite the voice, she wondered if he was real.  Unsure what to do, she began counting her breaths, silently, expecting him to disappear into mist after each exhale.

“Is this part, am I part of the serpent’s test?”

“Maybe. Yes.”

“What has it done to you?”  Tears spilled from his eyes.

She reached through the doorway, smoothed the wet fur on his face.

“It’s over, isn’t it?” His throat rumbled. “Come home with me.”  He leaned through the doorway and rubbed his cheek against hers, reached for her and pulled her into his embrace.  Nuzzling against his neck, she felt everything that was home.  Warmth, stories under the light of the Four Moons, savory fish just pulled from the fire, children racing between rooms and wrestling in giggling piles, sparking laughter in even the most serious of elders.  Jwartan would always be home to her, all that home could be.

“You’re better now.  You’re fixed, aren’t you?”

He was as he always had been, warmth and tradition, just as Aainah realized she was still, she remained, all that she had been.

“It’s not finished.”  She withdrew from his embrace.  “I’m not ready.”

He stilled.  “What’s happened in here?”

Words could not explain.  “Not enough.”

His tail bushed, ears tilted away.  “I can’t wait forever.”

She’d never seen the value in games like this. Especially now, after the freeze, after watching a child vanish before her eyes.  “I understand.”

His shoulders sank.  He looked to one side, maybe toward a doorway. His exit.

“Remember us.”

He stood and began walking, his tail dragging on the floor, as the doorway between them collapsed before her eyes.  Tears clouded her vision.  She’d been too harsh.  He hadn’t deserved that.  A new doorway opened a few steps away.  She immediately walked through.

Nothing like the other rooms, this one was lined on either side with what looked like glistening trunks of trees with slick, silvery bark, like a river-buffed rock, nearly sparkling.  Like ribs.  She was nearing the serpent’s head.  Nearing its eye.

She walked through the ribs of the serpent.

The shining bones apparently protected no organs, no blood, nothing that she could see.  Nothing except her.  As she walked, tall windows opened between the ribs.  Aainah squinted at the bright midday light that poured into the serpent, almost reaching her feet. Though she could see plant life out there, soaking in the nectar of the suns, no breeze trickled through, no scent of trees or grass.

Sitting beneath a tree was Jwartan, holding out a wide bawn leaf in an attempt to shade his feet.  She’d thought he’d be running back to the village, after what he’d said, to join everyone else, everyone who wanted to be there.  Yet, despite his hard words, it appeared he was willing to wait, even to sit fully awake, surrounded on all sides by the blaze of high suns.  For her.

Aainah watched him as she continued through the serpent’s ribs, as he shifted deeper under the tree’s cover, until his face was no longer visible.  She walked until the sight of Jwartan was well behind her, until she’d nearly reached the other end of the serpent’s belly.  Until movement outside snagged her attention and pulled her to the window before any thoughts could be formed.  Two birds glided toward the tree, toward Jwartan’s meager shelter, until they circled above, their wingspans as wide as half the tree’s height, their beaks easily larger than an Onaphi head.

Only Jwartan’s feet were visible under the bawn leaf, and they didn’t move.  Clearly he couldn’t hear the predators. Maybe he’d fallen asleep.  Who wouldn’t in the height of day?  She screamed his name.  Her voice echoed through the belly of the serpent, but clearly didn’t escape the oracle.  She pressed her hands against the invisible skin of the serpent, the skin that showed her love nearly snatched, nearly eaten. Hard as stone, it didn’t budge.  She kicked and slammed and snarled as the birds glided down, down, until they were nearly above the top of the tree.  They would land soon, on either side of Jwartan.  He’d have no way out.  He’d die, in the most horrible way, all because of her.

“Let me out!”

The unseen skin covering the window disappeared, and Aainah fell through, screaming his name.  Jwartan dropped his leaf shade and stood as the birds hollered, their hunt interrupted.  They circled tightly and dove toward Aainah, who lay half in and half out of the serpent’s window.  It was Jwartan who screamed her name this time, told her to run, as he climbed the tree to dive under thicker leaf cover.

The air hissed as it parted, making way for the two birds diving her way.  She scrambled backward, back into the serpent, only a body-length away from death when she made it inside and yelled at the serpent to close the window.

One bird reached her before the other.  She heard nothing as its beak cracked and shattered against the serpent’s invisible skin, now apparently back in place.  The second bird steeply turned upward as the first collapsed in front of Aainah, its skull misshapen as blood quickly spilled into the ground.  She looked to the tree and saw nothing. Jwartan was safe.

Sinking to the floor and wrapping her tail around her shaking limbs, Aainah tried to still her panicked heart, soften the gasps escaping her mouth.  It was over.  All was okay.

But it might not have been.  Look what Jwartan had risked, continued to risk.  For the sake of someone who barely knew how to love him back.

All the windows within the serpent’s belly closed at once, forcing her vision to adjust to the milder lighting. A doorway opened at the end of the room.  Only a few steps away. Darkness, deep silence, lay through the door, offering no hint of the next trial that awaited.

The promise of something more sparked anew within her breast, quieting her heart.  She would continue.  Jwartan’s risks would not be for nothing.  She walked through the door.

Light raised to a perfect dim.  Curiously curved tables scattered around the room and lined its curved walls.  The tables were taller than those they built in the villages.  They held puzzling shapes, like small tools, attached to their surfaces.  Aainah wandered the room, considered whether she should try to touch or move some of the tools. She was examining a table along the far wall when the serpent spoke.

It was the perfection of the voice, ageless, foreign, similar to that of the child but too clear to come from an Onaphi throat, that led Aainah to realize who was speaking.  Its words were hard and exact, like a stone smoothed to perfection in a way no Onaphi could never achieve, in a way only a mighty volcano might accomplish.

“You have done well.  Your body is healthy and strong.  This means you now have one more choice to make.”

Aainah leaped backward when the wall before her sprang to life.  It was as if she could see into another serpent’s head, an exact copy of the strange room in which she now stood.  As if a window had opened to show Aainah not the grounds outside the serpent oracle’s body, but another time within its body.  It showed other Onaphi, one after another, standing within the serpent, nearly where Aainah herself stood. She looked around to confirm she was alone, yet she looked back to the window to see that no, she was not alone.  Despite her head swimming at the experience, nothing could keep her eyes from the stories laid out before her.

A brown Onaphi with white stripes stood before a table.  Its mouth and throat moved in words Aainah couldn’t hear, and then it walked through a doorway, into a room not much bigger than the Onaphi itself.  The eye of the oracle.  It leaned against the back wall, its ears in a resting position, as soft and peaceful as those of children in sleep, and the doorway closed.  More Onaphi appeared on the screen, one after the other.  Some walked into the small room, others left out another doorway, one that led outside.  All of them, each Onaphi, when they left, held their tails high and turned their ears forward, intent on their choice.  Which of those leaving the serpent had returned to their villages?  What happened to those who elected to remain?

The choices of countless Onaphi played out before her.  Each chose one of the serpent’s Eyes, either stepping into the small room or leaving the serpent’s body.  Just as Aainah grew accustomed to seeing these scenes that were somehow happening and not happening in the very room where she stood alone, she froze. A face emerged that she recognized.  She would know that face anywhere.

Aainah left her mother, an elder, back in the village only a handful of nights ago, yet the Onaphi in the scene before Aainah, with her red striped chin, was also undoubtedly her mother, but with a stronger posture, a fuller coat.  Brighter eyes.  It was she who’d told Aainah to seek the oracle, she who’d told story upon story of the few who’d made the journey and returned, yet Aainah’s mother had never mentioned that she’d walked through the serpent herself.

Aainah held her breath as she watched her mother, so young, speak silently to the serpent. So very familiar was her mother’s face, Aainah thought she could almost make out what she was saying.  Almost, but not quite.  Of course Aainah knew the choice her mother had made, so long ago.  And yet…

Maybe it was because she knew her mother’s movements so well that she saw something in the young Onaphi she’d not noticed in the others who’d just chosen their fate before Aainah’s eyes.  The younger version of her mother had made her choice, had walked through the eye that led outside, and while she held her tail high, Aainah noticed the slightest twitch at its tip.  Just once.

Maybe it was from watching her mother so closely during all of her growing up years, to see if her mother would reward her for a job well done or punish her for one of many defiances, that Aainah understood so well the position of her mother’s ears.  They faced forward, yes, but they weren’t as eager, weren’t as sure.  Not craned fully forward with complete contentment and full acceptance.  One ear held back.  Tilted, ever so slightly, still trying to soak in the sounds of the serpent her mother had left.

Aainah’s mother had always seemed so sure, yet she’d felt regret, back then.  Had others been regretful, also?  Had those who stepped into the small room felt just as much regret as those who returned to the outside?

“The time is now, Aainah the Onaphi.  It is your turn to choose.”

Two doorways opened.

“Return to your life, and be assured your visit is greatly appreciated.  Choose the other doorway, and you will leave your home, never to return.  You will travel to another place, far beyond the stars in your sky, where other creatures wait, happy to be your friend. Some there are Onaphi, most are not.  Most will look different, speak different, think different.

“All will be glad to know you.”

Aainah’s tail fell to the floor.  Another place.  Not to return.

Jwartan was still outside, waiting. She stepped toward the doorway to see him standing against the tree again, leaning against the trunk.  He faced another section of the serpent, his profile strong.  His jaw set.  The suns cut a sharp angle past the cover of the tree, spilling heat across his back, but he did not move.  His devotion was clear.  He would endure pain for her, would support her always.  She could walk outside, tuck into his embrace, return with him to a shared future within the village.  He would accept her, she now realized, exactly as she was.  He would never question.  But she would.

She was at the end of the serpent oracle’s journey, and she was still the same Aainah.

“It is your turn to choose.”

Her tail lifted as she soaked in the vision of her Jwartan, standing under meager cover, surrounded by the heat of the blazing suns, waiting for her.  She said only two words, quietly.  His ears perked, tilted in her direction, followed by his head. They faced each other across the barrier of the serpent, across a distance greater than the number of steps it would take to cross. She closed her eyes and dipped her forehead forward, imagining it meeting Jwartan’s.

She left the doorway that led to Jwartan and walked toward the other and through, then leaned against the back wall of the tiny room.  The doorway closed in front of her, leaving all but a small section the size of her face, a window. Pressure enveloped her body, holding her still, yet allowing her to breathe.  Her tail tried to twitch, but it was held fast, curled around her leg.

Watching through the window, she saw the small room, the eye of the oracle, somehow lifted up, pulled away from the serpent, raised until it was above the serpent’s body, as if the eye had grown wings.  The tree that sheltered Jwartan was visible for only a second as the land quickly fell away.  She couldn’t hear her own laughter as birds flew across her vision, apparently unaware of the wonder that was happening at that moment.

She considered, as the land drew away, maybe she’d simply lost her mind.  Maybe she still laid frozen just inside the serpent’s tail. Another part of her, the part brimming with a joy that swiftly lighted her thoughts, decided it didn’t matter.  This journey was worth more than four lives in an Onaphi village, real or imagined.

Mountaintops slipped past, as did the searing light of the suns.  An enormous gray rock came into view.  Though it loomed larger than she could have dreamed, she recognized it immediately.  It was the First Moon.  Her gut shifted as she curved around its rough backside before moving on to the Second, purple and oddly fogged over.  And then the Third lay before her.

She glimpsed its side.  Her tail would have twitched like mad if it could have.  She was about to see its face.  The thing no one saw. The thing her mother told her didn’t exist. But then her mother hadn’t told her everything.  A few breaths passed, and then the face of the Third spread before her.  Her heart swarmed, as broken, discordant parts inside of her coalesced, finally, into something that felt whole.

Dark, dimpled, she could see its nose.  Its eyes.  Facing out.  Facing her.  Behind the Third was a strange pocked thing, with patches of color and soft clouds drifting over.  That must’ve been her home, where children darted in and out of rooms and birds prowled the sky, where her mother remained.  Where Jwartan stood.  Yet the Third didn’t care about such things.  Facing away from the land, away from the mountains, away even from the serpent, the Third only watched the stars.

Aainah now felt pity for her beloved Third Moon, forever stuck in place among its family, unable to accompany her on this indescribable journey.  With her inner voice, Aainah thanked the serpent for freeing her, for sending her to a place where she would not be considered wrong.

As the land of the Onaphi and the Third Moon both fell away beneath her feet, she spoke silently. I will go in your stead, but rest assured.  A part of you travels with me. She relaxed into the serpent’s embrace, as countless stars passed before her eyes.

 

* * *

About the Author

A. Katherine Black is an audiologist and a writer.  She adores multicolored pens, stories featuring giant spiders, and almost everything at 2am.  She lives in a house surrounded by very tall and occasionally judgmental trees, along with her family, their cats, and her overused coffee machines.  Find her on flywithpigs.com or on twitter at @akatherineblack.

by Gwynne Garfinkle

“There were no dog-eared pages, no underlines or annotations. Purple climbed inside and pulled the pages shut.”

This is the story of Purple and Green, two hedgehogs who were the best of friends. They rolled and played on the forest floor. The hedgehogs were spiny and guarded, but they knew how to reach each other. They feasted on berries and mushrooms, bright frogs and luminous snails, while they told each other the funniest and saddest and strangest stories they could think of. Some were stories they’d read in books, while others were anecdotes they’d heard from other hedgehogs or happenings from their own lives. Even calamities that had befallen them became fodder for their stories, offered up for each other’s enjoyment.

Then one morning, Purple found that Green had turned into a pine cone, armored and inanimate. Purple butted her head against Green, but instead of giggling or waddling in a circle or poking Purple with her snout, she wobbled and grew still once more. “Green, please speak to me,” Purple implored. “How did this happen? Did you will it so, or was it done to you? Are you under a spell?” Green didn’t reply. Purple couldn’t tell if Green had a heartbeat anymore, or a heart.

Purple sat with Green for a long time, waiting for the pine cone to come back to life. She told Green funny stories, but the pine cone didn’t laugh. She brought Green mushrooms and berries and the very best snails she could find and laid them where her feet used to be, but the pine cone made no move to eat them. Green’s silence and stillness became unbearable. Purple pushed Green hard with her paws and cried, “What is the matter with you?” Green wobbled, then grew motionless. Purple let out a snarl that turned into a sob.

At last Purple turned to walk away, but she turned back again and again, hoping Green would make some move to stop her. The pine cone didn’t seem to care. Green made no sign that she even noticed as Purple trudged away.

Purple wandered disconsolate through the forest, the vibrant green all around only reminding the hedgehog of her lost and silent friend. Birds chittered and sang arpeggios to each other. She was silent and alone, her eyes heavy with tears. Then an owl swooped down and tried to catch her in its talons, and Purple roused herself from her sorrow and ran as fast as she could. She crouched shivering and miserable under a thorny shrub until the owl winged away, hooting imperiously. The hedgehog worried that the owl might find Green, but she wasn’t near enough to warn her. Purple hoped that at least as a pine cone, Green would be safe from the owl’s predations.

The hedgehog crawled out from beneath the shrub and looked around. She had reached an unfamiliar part of the forest. Instead of leaves and fruit, the trees all sprouted books. Some of the trees, especially the smaller, younger ones, were sparsely leaved with volumes. The more massive trees were loaded with them.

Many books had fallen onto the ground. Beneath the larger trees, the forest floor was carpeted with volumes. Purple glanced at their covers as she walked over the books. Morocco leather bindings mingled with lurid paperback covers. She idly riffled the pages of one book after another. Some books appeared pristine, while others seemed to have been well-thumbed, even underlined and annotated. She wasn’t sure if these had been read on the ground or if intrepid readers had climbed trees to peruse them. She thought some of the books might contain stories that Green would enjoy, and then she remembered her loss afresh and began to cry. Her tears fell onto the book covers, and she dried them with her paws the best she could.

One book drew Purple’s attention. It was a paperback with green leaves and purple flowers on the cover. The hedgehog nosed it open. There were no dog-eared pages, no underlines or annotations. Purple climbed inside and pulled the pages shut. She wandered the forest of letters, black trees against an off-white sky. The words sheltered the hedgehog against the pine cone’s silence. Purple called Green’s name, and it echoed off the page.

The book held the hedgehog in its paper embrace, enveloped her in its clean and slightly musty smell. It rocked her to sleep. Stories sidled through her dreams, and she thought Green might be there too, flitting among the tales. First there was the story of a mother’s deep, winter-causing grief when her daughter was stolen away to the underworld; when the daughter returned, her mother’s rejoicings brought spring to the land. Next was the story of a lover transformed into a snake, then a fire, then a lion—biting and singeing his beloved as she held on—until at last, due to her determination, he turned back into himself, and not a wordless, eyeless tree.

Purple already knew these two stories, but the third was new to her. It was the tale of an inveterate reader who died before he could read the last chapters of a gripping novel and who spent his afterlife amid the book’s characters and situations, trying to figure out how it ended. He tried out tragic endings and happy ones, endings improbable and rote, until at last he happened upon the perfect ending, both unexpected and inevitable, and he was able to rest satisfied.

When Purple woke, she wandered deeper into the maze of words, towards the book’s heart, her own heart, the world’s heart. Green was part of that, whether the pine cone knew it or not. Purple became convinced that Green did still have a heart, whether or not she had a heartbeat. The book-forest was dotted with the small shrubs of the and and and but, the great towering trees of circumstance and loyalty, the bright flame-like flowers of grief and surprise. The words were beacons. The words were companions. The words were heartbeats, urging Purple on.

She kept thinking about the final story in her dream. She thought that Green would like that story, about the reader trying to find the ending to the book. I believe that Green is still alive, Purple thought. Even if she is silent and still, we are still alive, and our story may continue if I don’t give up.

At last the hedgehog came to a clearing and saw Green. Was she still a pine cone? Purple moved closer. Green stood alone in the empty space between one chapter and the next. Her spines—was Purple imagining?—no, it was true, her spines quivered ever so slightly. Green was a hedgehog again! She looked up at Purple. Something about Green’s eyes made Purple hang back, but all of Purple’s words rushed forth to say themselves. She told Green about the owl, and the forest of books, and the three stories. “But nothing seems real unless I can tell you about it,” Purple said. “Green, can you hear me? Are you yourself again?”

For a long moment she feared it was all for naught. Then Green waddled closer to her. “Yes, Purple, I can hear you,” she said, “and I am myself again, my friend.” She told Purple the story of her imprisonment in the form of a pine cone, able to hear but not reply, able to see her friend and the forest around her, but unable to be a part of any of it. She said she had turned into a pine cone twice in the past, before they became friends.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Purple asked.

“It was the one story I could never bring myself to tell you,” Green said. “I hoped it would never happen again. When it did, I heard you trying to reach me. I wanted to tell you not to go, but I couldn’t. It was a kind of death in life. Finally the spell ended, and I looked everywhere for you. I feared that you had given up on me and gone so far away that I would never find you.”

“I would never do that,” Purple said, reproaching herself for running from Green when her friend had needed her most.

“At last I came to the forest of books,” Green said. “I found this paperback and climbed inside. I got lost amid the shrubs of the and and and but, the great towering trees of circumstance and loyalty, and the bright flame-like flowers of grief and surprise. Finally I came to this empty space between chapters to rest, and you found me.”

Purple wept for joy. Her happiness was so intense, she felt it could bring spring to the land. Together the hedgehogs made their way out of the book and found their way home. After that, they frequently visited the forest of books, where they met other readers who ventured there. Purple and Green combed through many volumes on the forest floor in search of the most beautiful stories to share with one another. And when, in the course of time, Green became a pine cone again, Purple stayed by her side and told her stories as she waited for her friend to return to her once more.

 

* * *

Originally published in Lackington’s.

About the Author

Gwynne Garfinkle lives in Los Angeles. Her collection of short fiction and poetry, People Change, was published in 2018 by Aqueduct Press. Her work has appeared in such publications as Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Apex, Through the Gate, Dreams & Nightmares, Not One of Us, and The Cascadia Subduction Zone.

by Matt Dovey

“Choosing your own rune is… is the act of choosing who you want to be. It’s the moment of knowing yourself and defining yourself. Of finding your place in the world. But I don’t know who I am yet.”

Ursula lifted her snout to look at the mountain. The meadowed foothills she stood in were dotted with poppy and primrose and cranesbill and cowslip, an explosion of color and scent in the late spring sun, the long grass tickling her paws and her hind legs; above that the forested slopes, birch and rowan and willow and alder rising into needle-pines and gray firs; above that the snowline, ice and rock and brutal winds.

And above that, at the top, God; and with God, the answer Ursula had traveled so far for: what kind of bear am I meant to be?

She shouldered her bonesack and walked on.

* * *

There was a shuffling sound among the bracken, small but definite. Ursula hesitated, a dry branch held in her paws, her campfire half-built. Ambush wasn’t unheard of—so many bears sought God on the mountain that bonethieves couldn’t resist the chances to steal—but it had not been so large a sound, and she couldn’t smell another bear beneath the pine scent. It was something smaller, lurking in the dim light of the forest floor, behind the massive rough-barked firs that filled the slope.

“Hello?” she ventured, still holding motionless. “It’s quite all right. I’m building a fire, if you’d like to join me.”

A badger stepped out from the ferns, his snout twitching and cautious, a stout stick held warily in his paws. He eyed Ursula for a moment, weighing up the situation, and she gestured ever so gently to the fire she was building, trying to come across as safe, as friendly. As likeable.

He straightened and walked forward. He kept the stick before him, but Ursula understood. Bears could be dangerous.

Two more badgers followed him, one much smaller—”Oh, you’re a family!” said Ursula. “I’ll make a seat for you!”

She stood, turned, dashed back, dropping to four paws in her enthusiasm. She ran to where she’d seen a fallen log not twenty yards away by the river and hauled it back, her claws dug into its softened bark, dragging it and dropping it by the fire pit with a thud. She grinned at the family, proud of her resourcefulness—

The badgers cowered, the two behind the father with the stick, who tried to meet her eyes but couldn’t help glancing away for places to burrow and hide.

Ursula lowered herself slowly to sit. She made a point of picking up smaller twigs to lay on the fire, the least threatening pieces she could find. “Sorry,” she said quietly. “I forget how I can come across. Please. Sit down.” She concentrated on building the fire, determinedly not looking at the badgers, not wanting to startle them, trying not to let their fear hurt her nor to berate herself for getting carried away and upsetting others. For letting her shyness get to her: for overcompensating for it.

If only she knew who she was, instead of pretending so poorly.

“Thank you,” said Father Badger from the log, and Ursula smiled at him, keeping her teeth covered. “Forgive us our caution. We… have never met a bear before.”

“I’m Ursula,” she said.

“My name is Patrick,” said Father Badger, “and this is my husband, Willem, and our new daughter Ann.”

“And how old are you, Ann?” Another careful smile, friendly not fearsome, benevolent not bearlike.

Ann shuffled a little and squirmed in closer to Willem, who put an arm around her.

“She is a little shy,” said Willem. “We only met her an hour ago.”

“She’s why we came up the mountain,” said Patrick, smiling at his daughter. “Willem and I came to ask God for a blessing, and we found Ann burrowed alone beneath a root.”

“God showed you to her?” said Ursula eagerly, forgetting her calm façade in her excitement. “Is she near?”

“We never saw God,” said Willem, “and now we have no need. God has delivered us our gift already.”

“Oh,” said Ursula. “I mean, I’m happy for you! I really am. I just…”

“You hoped she would be near?” finished Willem.

Ursula shrugged, not trusting herself to speak. She put the last branch on the fire and hooked a claw around the strap of her bonesack, bones rattling inside the plain leather.

She felt, rather than saw, the badgers tense.

“You’re a bonethief,” said Patrick, voice flat and accusatory.

“We were warned of your kind on the mountainside,” said Willem, pulling Ann in close.

“They’re not my kind,” said Ursula carefully. “I don’t do what they do.”

“You carry the bones,” said Patrick. His paw lay on the stout stick, though if she truly were a bonethief it’d do him no use. She admired him that bravery, that certainty in his actions.

“Not all bears that carry bones are bonethieves,” said Ursula. “There is so much more that can be done. Please. Let me show you.”

She reached into the bag and started pulling bones out, laying them on the floor, runes up. She spoke as she did, her voice low and even, trying to defuse the situation she had accidentally escalated again. “Every bone is from a family member. They’ve all passed down to me, bit by bit. This one here was Aunt Maud’s, this one Uncle Arthur’s, that there is my Great-Grandma’s right arm. Every bear carries four runes on their body—well, usually, by the end… anyway—four runes carved into their bones. One is carved on the left thigh bone at birth by one parent, another on the right thigh by the other when they consider their child has come of age.”

“How?” asked Willem, still cautious, but curious too.

“Bear claws are sharp,” Ursula said. “I would show you with mine, but I don’t want to scare Ann.” She tried a smile again, only a small one, tentative, but Ann responded in kind. “My parents cut through my flesh to carve their chosen rune on my bones. Their words hold me up everywhere I go, even this far from them. My father gave me HOME at birth and my mother gave me WATER. It helps me miss them less, as if they’re with me wherever I am.”

The bones were all laid out now, and Ursula began to choose from them. SUN, from Great-Great-Uncle Morris. WIND to cross it: Grandma Oak’s breastbone.

“The third,” she continued, “is given to us by God, shaped on our breastbone from the very moment of our conception. None of us ever know our breastbone rune. It’s only known when we pass our bones to our family.” She began to lay the bones before the fire pit. SLEEP, the next.

“And the fourth?” asked Patrick.

Ursula paused. She kept her voice flat when she answered, trying not to let any emotion into her answer. “The fourth we carve ourselves, on our right arm.” She chose WAKE from the pile, and put it in place:

A hot gust of air blew towards the campfire and it flared into life, awakening to a satisfying crackle. A gentle, sleepy warmth washed over Ursula, and she smiled to herself in satisfaction, then began putting bones back into the sack.

“I’m a bone poet,” she said. “The bonethieves only ever work towards violence and supremacy. All the bones they steal are only to help them steal more bones. They never think of all the better ways bones can be used.”

“How do you know what to choose?” asked Ann. Willem looked down at her in surprise.

“Well, the contraries must share something to bind the square together but have a tension that will give it power, and the neighbors should resonate in sound or form to amplify it, and the whole has to work to the purpose. I suppose I know what to choose because I know my bones well, what I’ve inherited and what might work.”

“No,” said Ann. “How do you choose what you carve on your own arm?”

“Oh.” Ursula picked a branch up, nudged at the fire with it, re-arranged the piled sticks to get them burning better. She mostly only knocked it over. “That’s… that’s what I want to ask God about.”

“Why?”

Ursula stared into the fire. How to express it? How to encapsulate the paralysis of choice, the fear of choosing wrong, the strange position of not knowing yourself?

“There is power in four,” she said, still staring. “Four bones combine into a poem of purpose. All of them interact and reinforce each other. I have to choose my own fourth rune carefully so that my purpose as a bear is strong. But how can I choose the fourth when only God knows what my third is?”

“So you go to ask,” said Willem.

Ursula nodded, feeling small, shrunken by her uncertainty, so unbearlike. “Choosing your own rune is… is the act of choosing who you want to be. It’s the moment of knowing yourself and defining yourself. Of finding your place in the world. But I don’t know who I am yet. Other bears just seem to know, but me… I try to be what I think other people need me to be, but it feels like everyone wants me to be something different, and every time I think I know which rune I should choose something changes my mind.”

“It is admirable that you worry so much about others,” said Willem. “Perhaps you should worry more about yourself, though. It sounds like this should be about you, not about the world.”

She prodded at the fire again. It felt—strange, to vocalize what had been churning and building in her head for so long. Stranger yet to be telling it to a badger cub. She looked up to smile at Ann, not a calming smile, but a real smile, a vulnerable smile, a—

Patrick had raised his stick, and was looking past Ursula. She turned, frowning, staring into the gloom of dusk that swam through the trees. There wasn’t—no, a glint—eyes reflecting flame—then a snarl, and Ursula’s fur bristled in alarm, and a sudden gust of icy wind extinguished the fire and knocked the badgers backwards.

Bone magic.

Bonethief.

“Run!” shouted Ursula to the badgers. She scooped up her bonesack and went to run too, but Ann was so small, and ran so slowly, too slowly, and Ursula realized the badgers would never escape.

She dropped her bonesack and began digging through it for bones. She only had to slow the bonethief enough for Patrick and Willem to get Ann underground, then she could run too. She couldn’t risk her bones. The bonethief ran forward on all fours, bones held in his jaws: he was a huge grizzly, bigger than Ursula, his fur matted with green-brown moss and sticky sap.

He pulled up at the sight of her bonesack—not in fear, she didn’t think, but in avarice.

“So,” he growled, low and fearsome, “you’ve been thieving round here for some time.”

Ursula drew herself up tall, her fur raised, trying to make herself seem confident and sure. “I have not. I’m no bonethief.”

“Quite the sack of bones you’ve got there for a bear traveling alone. Or are those little badgers your companions, and not just a snack you’re luring in?”

Ursula risked a glance back at them—Ann had stopped to watch, and was refusing to be pulled away—and it hurt her to worry they might believe him for even a moment. Surely they already knew her better! But she had to seem strong and bearlike now: she couldn’t show any concern for smaller creatures in front of this other bear.

She lifted her snout. “My family has entrusted them to me and my skill. I am a bone poet.” She said this with as much pride as she could in the hopes it would impress the bonethief, forge a connection between them and allow her to talk herself out of this without any conflict.

But it did not. He laughed, a deep roar, a bellow of mirth that shook needles loose from the pines. “A poet? What fresh scat is this?”

His mockery stung, but not just because she’d failed to impress him. No, it stung because she was proud to be a bone poet, she realized. She was proud of the things she could do. She was proud of the connections she could make between bones.

She was proud of the way Ann had looked at her as she explained. She was better than this thief.

“I’m more deserving of these bones than you’ll ever be.” Her voice now was angry, not by choice, not to elicit a response from him, but because she meant it.

The thief grinned back at her, exposing his fangs. “Doesn’t matter if you deserve them. Only matters if you’re strong enough to keep them from me.” His paws moved to his bones, and he began laying out his square.

Not enough time to think, only to react. Ursula grabbed bones from her sack almost without thought, going by touch and instinct, and laid them out in a square:

The soil beneath the bonethief fell away like melting snow and the exposed tree roots started to twist and writhe, a tangle of wood squirming with life. The bear stumbled and fell into the trap, snarling, swiping at the roots as his back legs sunk into the soft ground.

Willem was scrabbling at the earth, burrowing, as Patrick stood before Ann with his stick held out. It’d do no more than scratch the throat of the bonethief as he swallowed. His bravery brought her heart to her throat.

The bonethief roared. “Stupid sow! I’ll take all your bones! I’ll rip yours from your flesh!” He grasped at the roots, hauling himself out of the loose mud.

Ursula rifled through her bones again. She had to do something else to slow him down, so she could—

No. She had to do something to stop him. If he didn’t get her bones, he’d chase someone else’s. He’d eat other small mammals he came across, hurt other travelers. But she was a bone poet, and she could outthink him. She could stop him here.

The bonethief was free of the earth now, arranging his small clutch of stolen bones to send another blast of icy wind; she could see the runes from here, WIND and WILD and STRONG and ICE. She chose her bones with more care, though no less speed:

Her square burst with light, and even knowing it was coming it was all Ursula could do to shield her eyes, positioning herself to protect the badgers. The bonethief was less prepared—staring greedily at Ursula, at her bonesack—and the full flash of light blinded him. He yelped in agony, in surprise, as the sight was burned from his eyes. If she had done enough he would no longer be able to read the runes on bones. She doubted he could recognize them by touch.

But he, too, had finished his square: and he was closer to her this time, and the blast of wind gusted hard. With her paws raised to shield her eyes from her own blast, Ursula was unbalanced, and she was knocked backwards, down the slope, all her bones scattering in the chill wind, and she rolled and fell towards the river and into the river and knocked her head and—

* * *

Icy water splashed at Ursula’s snout. Slapped at it, even. She stirred, groggily, and opened her eyes to a salmon flopping on her face. She swiped at it unthinkingly, knocking it away, then groaned as she realized how hungry she was.

With an effort, she hauled herself from the river and shook the water from her fur. In the dim light of dusk it was difficult to tell how exactly far she had fallen down the mountain, but the ground around her sloped only gently, covered in tall grass and meadow flowers closed for the night.

She was as far from God as she had ever been, and she no longer had her bones. She no longer had her friends—oh, she hoped Patrick and Willem and Ann had gotten away! Surely they were small enough and quick enough to avoid a blinded bear?—and she was not sure she had hope, either. It had taken days to ascend the mountain before, when she had her bones to intuit the way and catch leaping salmon and all the other little helps her poems gave her. Could she do it again now? What if another bonethief found her? Even without her bonesack to steal, she could be killed for her own bones.

But what else? Go home, and never know who she was? Never know who she should be? Could be?

Ursula pulled herself to her paws, cold muscles rasping, and dragged herself up the slope.

Walking on all fours in her exhaustion, her head bowed, the sun long set, Ursula trudged through the forest, stumbling wearily into alders and birches, knocking some over with a creaking, snapping shock of sound, loud in the silence of the night, stirring birds from their sleep in a panic. She fell into an atavistic trance: cold, hungry, determined, focused only on the ascent, forgetting even why she climbed, lost wholly in her drive to get higher, higher, higher.

So it was that she became aware of the light only slowly.

The color of it was the first thing she noticed. It was too blue for dawn. As she lifted her head to look closer, she saw the strangeness of the shadows—flickering, oddly angled, moving with each tired step like a broken branch swaying in the wind.

And she looked up at last, and saw a sleek black bear walking beside her, smaller, lither, and glowing gently.

“Hello Ursula,” said God. “Would you like something to eat?” God gestured towards a clearing, where three salmon hung by a small, crackling fire that could not have been there a moment before. Had the clearing even been there?

Ursula lumbered forward and fell onto her haunches by the fire, snatching one of the salmon with a swipe and chewing it in silence, still lost in her animal exhaustion. God busied herself with the trees as Ursula ate, shaping branches with a touch and humming softly as she did, new leaves sprouting where her claws danced.

“Have I—” said Ursula, once she had eaten, warmed, returned to herself—”have I walked so long I am at the top?” She looked about at the trees, but they were still broad-leafed, of the low slopes.

God smiled up at a rowan; she reinvigorated one final branch with an upwards stroke, stretching on her hind legs, then sat down before Ursula. She exuded—contentment.

“No,” she said, her voice high and clear like birdsong at dawn. “I am rarely at the top. It’s so desolate up there, beautiful as it is. The point of the mountain is only to see how determined pilgrims are. Patrick and Willem could never have ascended above the snowline, but they climbed so far on such small legs. If they had that devotion in them, if they were so driven by love, then Ann could do no better than their care.”

Ursula’s throat tightened in fear for the badgers. “Did they—are they—”

“Yes,” said God, “they are fine. You did enough. Thank you.”

Tension flooded out of Ursula like meltwater. The thought had weighed heavy, but—but they were well. She hoped they would be happy together.

“I believe, by the way,” said God, “that these are yours.” She reached behind where she was sat—where there had been nothing but grass and fallen twigs a moment before—and produced Ursula’s bonesack, clearly full.

Ursula lurched forward with a gasp, snatching the bag quite before she could comprehend the rudeness of what she had done, and to whom she had done it.

“There are,” said God, “a few more bones in there than before. You will be a better keeper for them, I think.”

Ursula’s breath caught in a sudden clench of nervousness, and she lowered the bag. So long spent climbing the slope, anticipating this moment, and now she couldn’t get her words in order. There was so much to say, such an entwined web of emotion and expectation and duty and hope and thought and fear that she couldn’t possibly order it anymore, couldn’t untangle it to find the starting thread, couldn’t do more than hold the whole concept of what she needed in her head at once, complete and connected and indivisible.

But she had come all this way, and perhaps if she just started. “About bones—”

“I know,” said God. “Of course I know.” And she smiled again, and stood up and walked over and hugged Ursula tight. Her glow expanded to surround them both, and the contentment too.

She spoke in Ursula’s ear. “The rune on your breastbone doesn’t matter. You can complete your own poem without knowing. You don’t need to know who you are to choose who you want to be. You don’t need to let other people’s choices in your past define your future. It doesn’t matter what I wrote when I made you in the swirling potential of the Before, when the path to your existence and that rune was laid in the What Nexts—it only matters what you feel now.”

“But I need to finish the poem of my bones! If I don’t choose the right rune to complete the four, to complement the three I’ve got, my purpose won’t be as strong as it could be!”

“Ursula, you are not a poem, you are a bear,” God admonished. “You do not have to be a purpose—you are the purpose. You are who you are, not what you can offer.”

God released Ursula, held her shoulders in her paws, smiled at her through brimming tears and a face filled with pride. “The words you have on your bones already were only meant to get you this far, when you could decide for yourself whom you wanted to be.”

Ursula choked back a sob, but the dam burst anyway, and she cried into God’s shoulder. With relief, with possibility. With acceptance.

God held her there a long while, as the sun rose and the earth warmed and the flowers opened to the sky.

“What do you think you will choose, then?” asked God. “I will help carve it, as an honor to you, and as thanks for saving the badgers.”

Ursula looked at her bonesack, and thought of all the poems waiting in there, all the combinations and implications and things that could be. And now, with the new bones, there were so many more possibilities, so much still to see and learn. So much still unknown.

“I don’t know,” said Ursula. “I don’t know at all, yet.”

And for the first time, that answer gave her contentment.

 

* * *

Originally published in Sword and Sonnet.

About the Author

Matt Dovey is very tall, very English, and most likely drinking a cup of tea right now. He has a scar on his arm where his parents carved a rune into his humerus: apparently it was BISCUIT, and yes he would like another digestive, thank you for asking. He now lives in a quiet market town in rural England with his wife and three children, and still struggles to express his delight in this wonderful arrangement.

His surname rhymes with “Dopey” but any other similarities to the dwarf are purely coincidental. He has fiction out and forthcoming all over the place; you can keep up with it at mattdovey.com, or find him time-wasting on Twitter as @mattdoveywriter.

by Lucia Iglesias

“…most families have a fossil or two protruding from the stone walls of their parlors. Often framed, pressed under a pane, long-dead cephalopods in glass coffins.”

I stepped into the bath. The stone floor sloped, a gentle helix, spiraling me into the steaming pool. Water beaded the cavern walls, as if the entire bathing cave were strung with pearls. Stepping through veils of steam, I spiraled deeper into the pool.

At the center, I was waist-deep. As water seeped into my pelt, I felt like a lodestone, water drawn to me like iron filings, turning my fur black and dragging at my edges. Sinking in, I found the sloping path with my fingertips and sat on its rim, water right up to my chin. Steam hung above the pool in gossamer sheets, so thick I could only see one pool beyond mine.

I closed my eyes and rested my head on the slick stone, letting the water creep between the hairs on the back of my neck. The smell of sulfur was thick in my throat, the smell of silver and geysers and fire in the belly of the earth.

I was hungry. I had been hungry for six days. Nothing made it go away. Mushroom steaks, lichen cakes, chicory coffee by the potful, even a fine filet of chanterelle. There wasn’t a delicacy in the entire cave city that would still my stomach. I kept catching myself daydreaming about his fingers.

* * *

Grettir has starfish fingers. I once told him so when we were out tickling amethyst anemones in the tidepools of the subterranean sea. He didn’t like it, but it’s true. He has heavy hands, fingers long and tapered, golden skin that’s always dry. Hairless. When I take his hands in mine, he flinches, tickled by the thick fur bristling round my fingerpads.

Cunning starfish fingers. Out at the tidepools, I used to collect specimens for him to sketch: a bucket brimming with ivory barnacles, indolent snails, indigo mussels, prickly limpets, spindly sea stars, and anemones balled up like angry fists. In his sketches: every spine and armored shell realized in hard charcoal. Every line, every shadow, every highlight alive. I have never seen Grettir throw away a sketch. He doesn’t throw away so much as a line. Every stroke is heavy with intention.

* * *

To distract myself, I dipped my face in the quicksilver water, watching the ripples melt lazily away as I shook sparklets from my eyelashes. Underwater, I ran my fingers down my arms, combing out the fur with my fingernails. Then I did my legs, my belly, my back. It felt good to get my fingers in my fur, combing through the knots. Sometimes it feels like I’m a sack of skin stitched too tight to my bones. Hot water and a good combing can loosen the seams.

I rubbed my back against the stone for a good scratch and felt my fur catch. When I cursed and wrenched away, I felt several hairs ripping from my skin. With my fingers, I traced back over the place and found a spine rippling the smooth stone. A fossil. A helix of lithified bone. Ammonite.

* * *

All he’s been sketching lately: spiraling shells locked in stone. Not uncommon in the cave city—most families have a fossil or two protruding from the stone walls of their parlors. Often framed, pressed under a pane, long-dead cephalopods in glass coffins. But Grettir likes the undomesticated specimens: ammonite on alley walls, or in the southern subcaverns still untouched by urban sprawl.

I watch his cunning fingers speak the specimens to life in charcoal and light. A language only he speaks—language of lines, loops, ellipses, sickle moons, sweet ratios—a symphony in black and white.

He gives his nub of charcoal to me so he can brush his hands clean and hold the picture up to the light. He angles it so the rays skating down a nearby sky-shaft skim softly over the page. It’s perfect. The ammonite on the page: alive in light and shadow. The ammonite on the wall: dead. Entombed in echoing stone. He holds the drawing out to me, fingers fanning off the page until he holds it between pinky and thumb.

“For you,” he says, his voice settling like dust on the cavern hush.

* * *

I pushed off the wall and stood up. Fed by springs boiling up through the earth’s veins, the pools never cooled, and I could already feel a film of sweat hot on my forehead. My stomach growled.

Angrily, I shook the water from my pelt, spinning so the spray pinwheeled out around me. I clamped my hands over my belly, crushing it silent, even as static electricity spooked the hairs around my fingerpads. The fur on my stomach stood up, dark spindles shivering in the steam.

This six-day-old hunger.

* * *

“For you,” he says again, holding out the picture to me. “You’ve had a hard week.”

I look down at my left hand, the half-healed crescent where my sister bit down to the bone. Six days tender. Red ridges wrinkling my fur. It’s hard looking after her, half-grown but all wild, nothing like I was at that age. As if the bear in our blood weren’t thinned with human, as if our forebear bore her, not our six-generations-great grandmother.

My sister, with her white pelt and our father’s blue-black eyes. All I want is to gather her up in my arms and tell her sister-secrets. But whenever I try, she shakes me off and paces the edges of the parlor. She hasn’t been allowed out since the biting.

“Trade you,” Grettir says, nodding at the nub of charcoal sticking out of my right hand. He holds the drawing out so that they almost touch, the charcoal and his index finger. That cunning finger, long and tapered, skin thin and golden, blue veins pale and fine as candyfloss beneath the surface.

I bow my head over our hands—his extended finger, the charcoal stick, thick and crisp—as if for a kiss.

I can’t help myself.

I take a bite.

 

* * *

About the Author

Lucia Iglesias holds a B.A. from Brown University and is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at the University of Kansas. Home is Oakland or Iceland, depending on the time of year, and she is a friend of cats everywhere. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Shimmer, Liquid Imagination, Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, The Bronzeville Bee, and other publications.

by Stella B. James

“Four years have passed now, and no one has come to claim her. I doubt anyone would believe a little girl has survived in these mountains within the dragon’s lair.”

From the mouth of my cave, I can see the destruction; thick pillars of smoke, almost black in color. I can hear the cries of many people, men and women alike. The villages are being pillaged, the castle under siege. I lay my head back down with a snort and close my eyes. Those silly humans have nothing better to do than allow their greed to consume them.

I hear her panting before I can spot her, and a man warning her to fall back. They are more foolish than the humans down below. Who would dare enter my dwelling? I haven’t bothered them in decades, why do they test me? I sit up on my haunches and give myself a shake, my wings spreading out behind me.

An aged woman falls to her knees at the mouth of the cave, clutching something to her chest. A man follows, a soldier from the look of his bloodied armor. I eye them with curiosity. It doesn’t seem like they have come to challenge me. But they couldn’t expect to seek refuge here either. What could have made them desperate enough to climb my mountain?

“Dragon.” The woman gasps out the word, her breathing still labored, but it isn’t spoken out of fear. No, it almost sounds like a plea. I straighten and glare down at her, letting a small stream of smoke dispel from my nostrils. She bows her head as the man wrenches her back to him, his hands clasping at her shoulders.

“It isn’t safe here,” he warns in a harsh whisper. I shake my head and chuckle in amusement. It isn’t safe anywhere at the moment.

“I have come to ask you a favor!” the woman cries out to me, ignoring her male companion. I cock my head to the side. Now this is interesting. I’ve been demanded my riches, my magic, even my death. But never asked. I nod my head once and she continues, “The princess is all that has survived. You must protect her. She’ll be our last hope.”

My eyes survey the mouth of the cave, but I see no woman, or girl. I’m not sure how old this princess is supposed to be. The woman seems to understand my confusion. With outstretched arms, she places a bundled up cloth in between us. I eye it for a moment, and then glance back at the woman. I’m tempted to set her on fire for whatever trick she is trying to play. But then the bundle moves.

It wriggles this way and that until a little hand snakes out. The cloth falls away, revealing a tiny face and wide eyes the color of emeralds. The princess is but an infant. Smooth skin, soft flesh, and dark, wispy curls. How am I to protect such a scrawny creature? She has no fur to warm her, no scales or teeth to defend her. She doesn’t even have wings to make her grand escapes.

The woman takes in my wide eyed caution and bows her head again with a barely audible please escaping her. I glance back down at the little creature, who simply waves her hands in the air as spit bubbles raspberry out of her mouth. With a grimace, I move my head down to inspect closer. The woman falls back on her bottom, the soldier having left her to jump in front of the swaddled youngling.

“You won’t harm her!” he shrieks, brandishing his sword. I snarl down at him, letting him have a good look at my pointed teeth.

“Do others know you are here?” My voice comes out on a growl, and he takes a step back. The woman moves in front of him and shakes her head.

“No one saw us. I’m sure of it.” Her hands clasp together in front of her, offering me her silent prayers. I close my eyes and sigh out in defeat.

“Flee from here and never return. I will keep the princess safe.”

The soldier casts a worried glance towards the princess, and then back to me.

“And if they come for her?”

“They would be foolish to come here. But if such an event were to occur, I’d make sure they’d learn not to make the same mistake twice.”

He nods his head at my answer and takes the woman by the hand. She allows him to drag her away, but before they are out of sight, she turns her wary eyes to me.

“Her name is Esmerelda.”

They disappear and that is when the tiny being decides to cry. I scrunch my eyes and flatten my ears best I can. I scoop her up in one claw and bring her closer. Her crying stops once she spots me, and her eyes shimmer with the remaining unshed tears. Her eyes are more beautiful than any jewel in my possession.

She wriggles herself free of the blankets and falls onto all fours. I snort in amusement as I watch her crawl in her clumsy way, much like a newborn dragon would. I don’t know anything about humans or the way they grow. I know their hatred, their greed, and their violence. I know their screams, their terror, and their taste. But she is none of those things. She is still pure.

Her green eyes take me in, and she gurgles out some made up language I can’t understand before her face breaks out into a smile. She reaches out to touch me, and I bring my snout close to her hand. My little princess is brave, that or completely foolish. Perhaps a little of both, but only time will tell.

“Oh, Esmerelda, what have I gotten myself into?”

* * *

She does this nearly every day. Her fingers grasp the lower branches, her feet find the rounded knobs. She pulls and pushes, grunts and gasps. She is getting faster now, her hands and feet having memorized the way. Her favorite branch sits thick and proud, swooping down where it meets the trunk.

She sits on the branch and scoots herself sideways toward the middle. I pretend to busy myself with my inner musings, but I’m aware of her every movement. Once she finds that perfect flat space of the branch, she moves to a crouch, and spreads her arms.

I hear her whisper, a small promise under her breath. I can do this. And in one swift movement, she pushes off from the branch. Her body sails into the air before bringing her back down. She doesn’t have the sense to scream. My brave little fool fears nothing. I stretch out my wing to catch her, and she rolls into my side.

She grips my scales and climbs up to my back, her hands and feet having memorized this as well. She climbs to the top of my head and peeks over until her head is level with my eye. She bares her teeth at me and growls. I let loose my own growl, but she simply sticks her tongue out and slides down my snout. She balances herself on the very end, her legs dangling on either side, and sets her chin on my scales.

“When will I fly?” Another daily habit. Oh, how she wishes to fly. She loves my wings. Even after I have set her in the furs of her bed, I will wake up to find her curled up in the soft leather of my wings.

“When you grow wings.”

She sighs, a small pout forming. “And when will that happen?”

“Maybe never. Not all dragons have wings.”

She sits up, steadying herself by leaning forward on her small hands. “You said the same thing about scales and fire breathing.”

I chuckle softly. She is quite inquisitive. “And it’s true.”

She slumps back down, the disappointment evident in her expression. “I make for a lousy dragon.”

“You’re the most beautiful there ever was.” And this is the truest statement I’ve ever spoken. Her hair is like midnight, her eyes shine in their emerald glory, and her spirit is wild and stubborn. She is more dragon than I at times. And she is mine. For the moment, my mind whispers.

Four years have passed now, and no one has come to claim her. I doubt anyone would believe a little girl has survived in these mountains within the dragon’s lair. I don’t know if anyone would recognize her for who she truly is. Or that she would recognize them as one of her kind. I dread the day when she stumbles into the world of humans.

* * *

It takes her another three years before she accepts that she is indeed a different kind of dragon. One devoid of scales, wings, and breath of fire. She is no less fierce for it. She lets her nails grow long to have claws like me. She grinds flowers and berries into clay, smearing the concoction along her face and arms to match my coloring. She bares her teeth and growls when angry. Her temper is as hot as the fire that flows from my mouth.

She wears the pelts of animals I have killed as her dinner. She still cannot bring herself to kill them, though she knows we rely on them for sustenance. Neither the wild nor the dragon she has grown to know could ever erase the purity of her soul. Her secret sweet loving nature only I am privileged to witness.

Her imagination has grown wild these days. She discovered the castle in the distance for the first time this morning. “What is that?” she asks, pointing to her true home.

“It’s called a castle.”

“Like the place in your stories?” I nod my head, turning back for the cave. She sprawls out on my back, her eyes studying the clouds above us. “Does a princess live there, like in the stories?”

The hope in her voice stills my heart. Do I tell her the truth?  “I wouldn’t know, Esme.” Yes, I am a true coward. But she is still too young, I tell myself. It makes me feel a little better.

“Maybe we should check. She might need saving.”

I sigh out and shake my head at her as if she has exasperated me. “She wouldn’t want us to save her.”

“Why not? We’re plenty strong.”

We stop at the mouth of the cave and I feel her slide off my back. She walks around to face me, her fists planted on her hips.

“And we’re dragons. Humans fear dragons. Humans save other humans.”

“Well, can’t dragons save humans too?”

“If there is a dire need to,” I say. She nods once at this, seeming pleased, and strolls into the cave. She makes me proud, and I find myself murmuring aloud, “Sometimes, we can even love them.”

* * *

The year passed by in a blur, but Esme’s curiosity only grew. I had ingrained in her the dangers humans could pose since she had come to me. Oh, but my stubborn little fool just can’t help herself at this traveling party that passes near our mountain. They are not from these lands if they brave coming this close to my lair.

Esme has seen plenty horses in her eight years of life, but never the tamed ones. She watches them, fascination in her eyes as they pass by in a steady trot. She ducks down further at the voices of the men, and I am relieved she has heeded my warnings. She looks bored until the party stops, and a woman steps out of the coach.

The woman is dressed in fine clothes, her dress a dark scarlet. Her hair is pinned up, but she takes this moment to let it down. Esme touches her own hair, her fingers barely able to pass through the snarled ends. The woman laughs, and it sounds like a rain shower of small bells. I am also almost as enchanted by this woman as Esme seems to be.

The woman speaks to the men a moment longer before climbing back into the coach. They crowd together, passing some type of drink between them, before setting off once more. Esme stays hidden in the grass long after they have left. I notice her restlessness later that night, and the way her hand constantly strokes over her wild tangles.

* * *

The tree she once tried to fly from is now her quiet place, the place where she daydreams. She stares at the castle and imagines what lays behind those magnificent walls. If only she knew that she is of that castle, having been born behind those very walls. I haven’t the heart to tell her the truth of what dwells there now. Knowledge of an enemy king who cut down her family would dash her fairy tale musings.

She demands to know more about humans, especially the ones we saw. “What is the one with the long fur called?”

I stall, not wanting to reveal the truth to her, but I am also her only teacher. I cannot lie. “That was a woman. A human female.”

“I have long fur on my head.”

I nod my head and watch her as she weaves flowers together in a sort of crown. If only she knew of the true crown that awaits her. “Because you are also a female.”

Her fingers continue working the small stems, bending and twisting. Her eyebrows furrow together as she mulls over my words. “And she did not have scales.” I let out a noncommittal sound of agreement. “Or wings.”

“And?”

She looks up at me, her emeralds sparking with their realization. “She is just like me.” The words cut through me. She has finally realized what she truly is. Will she learn to fear me now?

My next question weighs heavy on my tongue, but I must ask. “Do you think you’re human too?” She smiles as she holds up her completed crown, and I lower my head to the ground. She places it on the tip of my ear and stands back to admire her handiwork.

“No, I think you were wrong. She is just another pitiful dragon, like me.” The relief is overwhelming, and a small guilty part of me knows I should correct her. But perhaps she doesn’t wish to be human. Her soul is wholly dragon. I nuzzle her cheek and close my eyes.

“No, Esme, you are truly one of a kind.”

* * *

Esme ventured closer to the castle as she neared her ninth year of life. She became bolder in her investigations. She still believes she is a dragon, but humans are her newest obsession. She studies them from afar, as she doesn’t trust them yet. I hope she never trusts them.

* * *

She was picking berries the day they found her. The men shouted to one another, about the wildling they stumbled across. They asked her name. She answered honestly. Her greatest teacher forgot to teach her the value of a lie. It didn’t take long for them to put the pieces together. The lost princess, they gasped. I wish I could say I was there to witness this, but I only found out through hushed rumors.

Her shrieking is what alerted me. My Esme never cried out in fear. My heart pounded, the fire in my chest raged, and I charged down the mountain. But they had her on horseback, galloping away, and if I attacked them, she would perish with them. I would have to bide my time.

* * *

They have her placed in the tallest tower. I peek into her window, the moonlight aiding me in spotting her. Her skin is a creamy white, her hair smooth as it fans out against her pillow. She looks just like the princesses I told her about. She has found her rightful place.

I turn to leave her, knowing that despite the heartache it will cause me, this is what is best for her. But she somehow spots me in the darkness. I hear her sniffles and turn around. She leans out as far as she can to touch me, and I place my snout close to her hand, just as when we first met.

“They washed away my scales,” she whimpers out.

“The smoothness suits you.”

She holds her hands out and hangs her head. “They cut my claws.”

“You won’t need to fight here.”

She looks back up at me, and fists a chunk of her hair. “They tamed my fur.”

I can’t help the chuckle that escapes me. My insistent little fool. “Then make it wild again.”

Her hands fall in front of her, her fists clenched into tiny balls. “I look like the humans.”

My heart stalls, then thunders in my ears. It is time. She must know the truth, and I’d rather her hear it from me. “That, my child, is because you are one.” The tears that stream down her face are silent and slow. They glisten in the moonlight, leaving fresh paths along her cleaned cheeks.

“Did you steal me?” The fear in those words break my heart. Does she think I am evil? Have the humans already filled her head?

“I saved you.”

She raises her knee, as if to climb out of the window. I back away, but it doesn’t stop her. With both knees on the ledge, her hands grasping at the sides of her window, she pleads, “Then save me again. I want to go home.” She will be the death of me.

“Esme, this is your home.” I nuzzle her cheek before whipping away into the night.

She calls out to me in the darkness, but I don’t turn back. As much as I want to tear off the top of that tower and scoop her up, I know I can’t. It is like the old woman said. She very well may be the kingdom’s last hope.

* * *

Nine years have passed. Nine long, lonely years. I tried to leave this place, to make a new home for myself. But what if, I ask myself, what if Esme comes back? No, this is home until the day she takes her last breath. I haven’t seen her since our last goodbye at the castle. I wonder what she looks like now.

I’ve heard stories, stories of her beauty and her strength. I’ve heard grumblings of her stubborn nature and her refusal to stay indoors. I’ve heard the whispers, of her obsession with dragons and wildflowers. I often sit by her tree and stare at her castle. It doesn’t sound like she has changed one bit, but there is nothing to indicate that she misses me. Has she forgotten me?

“Dragon!” I hear a female’s voice bellow out, echoing against the walls of my cave. It sounds angry and fierce. No one has risked challenging me in a long time. What woman would dare come here? Unless…

A tall, lithe woman, clad in armor meets me in the middle of my cave. Her hair sways behind her like a thick inky waterfall as she marches closer to me. She takes in the interior, her eyes studying the walls and the markings Esme long ago carved in as a child. Eyes that flash with their emerald glint. Esme.

“Why have you come, dressed as a warrior?”

“I have come to kill you!” It comes out as a roar, much like mine when in battle.

“Is that so?” I am goading her, but I long to hear more of her voice.

“Yes. My Coronation Day is next week, and if I am to prove to be a reliable ruler, I must slay you.” Her voice is nothing like the woman we saw on the road when she was merely eight. No soft tinkling sound for my little one. Her voice comes out in a raspy hard edge, commanding and strong.

It appears the kingdom wishes to rid itself of its resident dragon. I wonder, what threat I could possibly pose these days? I’d never attack the castle now that Esme resides there. Or perhaps they fear I’ll come back for her. “Is that what they told you?”

“Yes.”

I tap my claw on the floor, as if deep in thought, and smirk as her eyes study the movement. I wonder if she misses her own claws, or even remembers them. “Wouldn’t your blood alone prove you a reliable ruler?”

She huffs out, and I imagine real smoke would come out if she were as dragon as she once believed herself to be. She thrusts her sword in my face, her eyes glaring up into mine. I rest my chin on the ground and huff back, letting the warm steam wash over her.

Her eyes narrow, and her head tilts slightly. “Tell me, dragon, do I know you?” My heart sinks as her question confirms my worst fears. She doesn’t remember. Do I look that different? She hasn’t changed. Still so full of questions.

“Do you?”

“I’ve dreamt of you. I made you flower crowns and rode your back. I curled up to sleep within your wings and kissed your scales.”

I close my eyes, secretly delighting in the memories. Those puny humans couldn’t taint her dragon soul, though I imagined they tried. “Maybe you did know me, once upon a time.” I open my eyes and watch her take in my lair with renewed wonder.

“Why do I feel such hatred for you? I look at you and feel betrayed.” Her eyes glimmer up at me, more beautiful than my memories served.

I nod my head, remembering the way I abandoned her. Of course, she would hate me. “If you hate me, then you should kill me.”

She takes a shuddering breath, the tip of her sword pressing in between my eyes. Her bottom lip trembles, and she stills it with her teeth. “I don’t,” she whispers out, dropping her sword. “Not really. Deep inside, I feel we are one and the same.”

My heart swells. She is still mine, even after all these years. My precious little fool.

“What bothers you?” I ask as a  whimper escapes her.

She hugs herself and shakes her head, her eyes meeting mine. “I’ve only wanted to be fearsome, and I can’t even slay the mighty dragon to prove my worth.”

I straighten and bow my head in reverence. “You are the most fearsome being that has ever entered this cave.” And I mean it. Even when she was a wriggling little thing, all swaddled up in blood stained cloth, she scared me.

She sighs and leans on her sword. “I wish I didn’t have to kill you.”

“Do you want to rule the kingdom?”

She shakes her head in denial, not even giving it a second thought.

I nod my head and lift her chin with my claw. “Tell me, Esme, what it is you truly desire.”

She doesn’t pull away. She doesn’t fear me at all, though I could slice her in half if I chose to. Instead, she huffs out in an indignant way and juts out her chin. “You’ll think I’m silly.”

“I promise not to laugh.”

She closes her own eyes now and a sad smile barely lifts the corners of her lips. “I wish to fly. Then I could fly away from here and be free.”

I rumble out my approval and flatten myself to the ground.

“Climb on, my little dragon, and let me be your wings.”

 

* * *

About the Author

Stella B. James is a Southern girl who appreciates strong coffee and losing herself in fantastical daydreams. When she isn’t writing, she can be found reading romance novels of any genre, drinking prosecco while watching whatever she has left over on her DVR, or talking herself out of buying yet another black dress. She has published several short stories with various publications that you can find on her website, www.stellabjames.com. Check out her Instagram @stellabjames, where she shares her writing and inner musings.